Selected excerpts

 
 

The Fool carries a white rose in his left hand. He is standing on a precipice with laurel leaves on his head, and the sleeves of the ugly tunic he is wearing appear to be on fire.”

From “Missing" (fiction by Erin Scudder) performed at Catastrophes Occasional Reading Series, December 2022.

 

Magna Carta: the keystone of democracy; formalised freedom’s platonic original. The stirruped cock that fathered a million legislative tots.”

From “Two Different Decembers" (fiction by Erin Scudder) shortlisted for the 2021 Desperate Literature international writing prize, published in Eleven Stories 2021 and The London Magazine.

 
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“Vol-au-vent. White /
dough-puffed star. You /
lonesome boom town. /
Côte d’ivoire

From "Hollywood Hills Woman" (poem by Erin Scudder) published in Truth or Beauty: Poetry and Biography (Seraph Press).

 
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“The dunes ululate in a solid way /
like the ruffled rock of oyster lips.”

From “Jewel Box” (poem by Erin Scudder) published in Sweet Mammalian.

 
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“Sometimes the pull of love has scared me, / as gravity would scare a glass perched on the lip of a bench.”

 

I write poetry and fiction in which the “treatment of motive and emotion … feels both personal and universal, specific yet interested in archetypes and the common truths underlying personal experience.” Landfall magazine has said that my poems “characteristically possess the insouciant knack of achieving a story’s arc in a short space of time, while remaining crisply well told.” New Zealand Poetry Shelf praised my writing’s “immensely satisfying measure of beat.” My creative work has appeared in a variety of literary journals and anthologies including Verge, JAAM, Trout, Truth or Beauty: Poetry and Biography, and Turbine | Kapohau. In 2021, my story “Two Different Decembers” was published in Eleven Stories 2021: The Desperate Literature Short Fiction Prize Shortlist Selection and The London Magazine. See my about page to get in touch.

 
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Critical Writing