Our souls aglow

Like many writers, I find the idea of re-reading my past work torturous. Once I’m done with a piece, I desperately try to usher it out of my memory. Unfortunately, a piece I wrote two years ago for this platform was thrust back into my consciousness when it was reshared on Instagram. Having my old essay resurrected on social media was hard enough; the irony that it interrogates whether social media is flattening culture and taste-making was almost too much to bear.

My tiny green teacher

In June 2025, I was one of the many people emotionally wounded by a viral video clip of a little puppet named Tiny Chef (affectionately known as Cheffy) receiving some bad news. I hadn’t heard of this character and his playful children’s show, but the clip had a profound effect on me. It depicts a more potent vulnerability than many human skits achieve.

Shadow selves

This edition of Griffith Review considers all kinds of loss (and a few notable instances of its inverse). Losing something, of course, doesn’t have to
connote pain or strife: some of the essays and stories in this collection view loss as a beginning rather than an end, a shucking off of old selves or a reappraisal of old habits and ideas.

Slapton Sands

You’ll also find a Sherman tank overlooking the water. Stay with me.
Slapton Sands is not that easy to get to if you don’t have a car – the nearest railway station is Totnes, a three-hour train ride from London, and from there it’s a bus to Kingsbridge and another to the Sands. When you arrive, you’ll find that the beach is actually made of pebbles, but that’s not important right now.

You’ll also find a Sherman tank overlooking the water. Stay with me.

Slapton Sands is not that easy to get to if you don’t have a car – the nearest railway station is Totnes, a three-hour train ride from London, and from there it’s a bus to Kingsbridge and another to the Sands. When you arrive, you’ll find that the beach is actually made of pebbles, but that’s not important right now.

You’ll also find a Sherman tank overlooking the water. Stay with me.ON THE SOUTH coast of the United Kingdom, in the county of Devon, there’s a triangular sprawl of land that juts out into the English Channel. At its southern tip lies the wealthy sailing town of Salcombe, where a latte costs as much as it does in Shoreditch, and in peak season you’ll queue down the cobbled street for half an hour to get it. Approximately thirty miles up the coastline, there is one of Devon’s most deprived conurbations, Torquay, which sits at the heart of an area known without irony as ‘the English Riviera’. Halfway between the two is Slapton Sands.

Slapton Sands is not that easy to get to if you don’t have a car – the nearest railway station is Totnes, a three-hour train ride from London, and from there it’s a bus to Kingsbridge and another to the Sands. When you arrive, you’ll find that the beach is actually made of pebbles, but that’s not important right now.

You’ll also find a Sherman tank overlooking the water. Stay with me.

Gut feeling

A little while later, the judge leans her head on her hand and says, Mr Brain, were you touching their breasts as part of your Christianity, or were you just touching their breasts? 

I sit up straighter, as though ready to stand for the first hymn. 

Mirror, mirror

I have lost my face. This is not a metaphor; I no longer recognise myself in mirrors. I know the facts: I’m wearing the face I’ve always worn, the same muscle, the same scaffolding of bone – but recognition is a different order of knowing. My sense of kinship is gone. I stare and a stranger stares back. 

Bad teeth

I have my own serious questions: what’s the truth about teeth? Teeth can be a vessel for so many things we want to believe in – whether those things are lies (imaginative or otherwise) or the truth is irrelevant. Teeth can go from magical to mundane in an instant. From beautiful to ugly, from correct to wrong and back again.

Herbert or Harry?

While living creatures also die, go extinct and at times evolve into something else entirely – just as the built environment eventually disappears – it seems a stretch to suggest that the significance of other creatures depends only on our relationship to them – on what they provide for us, whether as resources or a source of personal awe and emotional resilience.

Mourning in a time of planetary crisis

As species disappear and climate change accelerates, a small but growing group of activists, artists and writers across the world is embracing mourning as transformative ethical and political work. Their approaches are wide-ranging, from public funerals and vigils for departed species to acts of civil disobedience that take the form of mass ‘die-ins’ representing the extinction crisis.

Bucket of water

When clients were brought to Australia, they were held in hotels or detention centres. Detainees were allowed to see external psychologists in visiting rooms in the detention centres. The rooms were stark and grey with bright, white lighting. I filled out an online application form to visit one of my clients. It asked me to list the items I wanted to bring with me, and how I intended to use each of them.

Old feelings, new appetites

Suddenly, my body was allowed to be big, weary, bed-bound and gorged. It was to eat readily, rest gladly, leak chaotically and swell without objection. For close to ten months, it was to be spared anorexia’s vicious rules. As I approached the end of my body’s heavy sabbatical, I felt nervous.

The knitting

The spores that caught and coupled. The filaments that grew, the hyphae that became the sum of our parts. All of it powered by water, powered by oxygen, powered by sugars, nutrients, deaths, resulting in bodies rotting in the ground. We spread out, touching the soft new roots of trees, entering them. Connecting them. A knitting.