The Karma Economy

The Karma Economy was published in May in Crack the Spine: The Year Anthology 2019.

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THE YEAR

A Crack the Spine Anthology

2019

In June 2019 I went to a free event at the Barbican run by The Orwel Foundation's Ministry of Plenty. This event and the 70th anniversary of George Orwell's book 1984 prompted this piece, as well as campaign's such as 'me too' and those related to mental health and inequality, in an increasingly capitalist society where much data is quantitative rather than qualitative and the 1% outweigh the other 99%.

The Karma Economy is looking at what it would be like to balance the books in a different way. To read this piece and some other fantastic stories find it to buy here or you can check out the first few pages for free and read my story there.

Harvest

Harvest is a microfiction in Crack the Spine's themed anthology Neighbors, launched in February 2020. 

This was a strange little one for me. The prompt originally came from a creative writing workshop called Write On - Creative Writing Workshop (September 2019) run by the author Z. Nia Reynolds at the Waterloo Action Centre. Such a lovely supportive workshop with a range of writing activities - some of which I begrudgingly engaged in but all of which paid dividends in learning.

Writing to prescription is not my strong point so if asked to choose an item from a bag and use it as a prompt to write there and then, I panic. I have a contrary nature - I like boundaries but if they feel too tight I push against them or try to flip them over.

On this occasion I got a glass jar from the bag and although it was more of a Crème brûlée type, thoughts of jam jars and recycling, conservation and preservation came to mind. So my first line starts with the narrator holding a jam jar to collect and preserve someone's last breath. 

Maybe something to do with pollution levels of where I live in Tower Hamlets? This article talks about how our children are 'growing up with reduced lung capacity' because of this pollution. 

Some neighbours are better than others.