MinK #1

Back in 2018 MinK, a new literary zine for Milton Keynes, was launched at the MK Literary Festival.

I was delighted to have two pieces of flash fiction feature in the first issue. One piece, ‘The Poison Garden’, was inspired by a visit to a very specific place – The Poison Garden at Alnwick Gardens in Northumberland. Some places instantly suggest a story and this was one of them. Poison seems to me to be redolent of a certain kind of murder mystery story, one of the Golden Age where poison is as likely be found in garden sheds as in the blue bottles of the pharmacy. My story is a kind of daydream, it’s not entirely serious in tone but does explore the conflict between the beauty of plants and their potential to be deadly.

The poison garden is kept locked and can only be viewed as part of tour; the aesthetics – flame shaped beds, entry through an ivy covered tunnel – are designed to reinforce the idea of danger. The garden team worked with the Northumberland Drug Action Team to create a planting scheme with the potential for drug abuse education, plants present include the sources of heroin, cocaine, cannabis and tobacco. However, it wasn’t these that caught my imagination so much as the ordinary garden plants that we might all find in an average suburban garden – hellebores for instance. A fascinating guidebook takes the reader through all the plants in the garden exploring their history, past uses (in times when the line between kill and cure was very slim indeed), local customs, effects and so on. Along the way there are details about medicine and surgery from the medieval world of monastic hospitals through to the Victorian cure-alls and quack doctors.

The second piece, ‘The Bargain’ also explores the inner thoughts of a female protagonist but has a different tone, I wanted it to have more of a sense of foreboding. Owls are often bad omens (something explored in a fascinating blog post ‘owls in Shakespeare’) but here they, like the bargain, are more ambiguous.

Purchase the anthology.