Inside This Catacomb

Doubles, fractured narratives and haunted characters offer different ways of approaching fragmentation. Sometimes they reveal a tension between who a person is and who they are permitted to become. Sometimes they give presence to what has been lost, silenced or excluded.

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Here, grief is one thread through these questions: what happens to our sense of self when we lose a relationship, a role, a place or an imagined future? What remains of those former selves, and how do stories make room for them?

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We also attend to how a work is constructed. A fragmented narrative may invite competing perspectives or unsettle our expectations without representing a damaged self. Each reading asks what fragmentation means within that particular work.

 

​Questions We Explore

• What happens when belonging requires us to leave parts of ourselves unspoken?

• How do motherhood, care and social expectations shape the identities available to us?

• What do doubles and ghosts reveal about the relationship between our present and former selves?

• When does a story seek coherence, and when does it ask us to live with contradiction?

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