How to describe a text that tells the tale of a lifetime through short snapshots of moments; each moment meant to capture an eternity?
This book is a piece of creative writing that attempts to do exactly this; to convey the evolution of a lifetime via a collage of captured moments. And in each moment, we discover something about our own lives also.
About the Author
Zion Lights. Writer, poet, musician, singer, permaculture-gardener, climate activist, violinist, guitarist, camping-enthusiast, language-fanatic, visionary, literature-geek, with a passion for the arts and the environment. Since graduating from Reading University in 2005 Zion has thrown herself into the literary and performance arts world of the South West. She write an online weekly column "Literary Lights Writes", for the local online arts newspaper People's Republic of South Devon, which is funded by the arts council and aims to cover art-based and environmental-related news in the South West. She will also be filling in as 'guest editor' of PRSD for the month of August.
Zion's book, More Things Should Be Thought Out Thus, blends different styles of writing with different types of storytelling. To celebrate the publication of her book she organised a book launch in May 2010 which was an artists' arts event that brought together writers, poets, actors, musicians, traditional artists and photographers and featured an art exhibition and evening of performance at the independent bookshop, Book-Cycle.
Zion is a performance poet. Some of her work can be read here. The written medium is as important to her as the written word, so she performs at regular poetry events in Devon, including the monthly events Taking the Mic at The Phoenix Arts Centre in Exeter, Poetry Island at The Blue Walnut cafe in Torquay, Epicentre cafe's Word Central in Paignton, and the occasional charity fundraiser such as Oxfam's upcoming Bookfest for Haiti on July 14th in Totnes.
Zion sings in a band called The Planeteers, and with an experimental voice collective called Multi-Vox. Multi-Vox debuted at Knit Expo at The Exeter Phoenix Arts Centre in April 2010, video here.
Zion lives as 'greenly' as possible. She regularly envisions and organises community projects and events such as the annual Exeter Seed Swap, and POGOE (Permaculturists & Organic Growers of Exeter). She is an avid organic gardener and believes that rooted and positive communities can develop out of community gardening projects. Zion became vegan in 2003 after learning of the horrors of the meat and dairy industries, and started writing ethical column for the university newspaper, Spark. She believes that the environmental disasters that the world faces require creative, structured, solutions and a shift in the way we live as a collective culture.
Zion is regularly featured in news articles and radio interviews to promote her many ongoing projects. In the last year she has been interviewed by Phonic FM's New Exeter Show and Wellbeing and Transition Show, BBC Radio Devon, Dartington Soundart Radio and Riveria FM. She has also appeared in the Exeter Express and Echo several times promoting various projects, and recently featured in Devon Life magazine to promote knitting groups in Exeter (she helped found a local group). Zion's book also featured at Knit Expo at The Phoenix Arts Centre earlier this year.
Purchase a Copy of the Book
More Things Should Be Thought Out Thus is available to buy from Waterstones, Amazon, and WH Smith.
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Contact the Author
If you would like to contact Zion Lights, she can be written to at zio.lights@gmail.com
Reviews of More Things Should Be Thought Out Thus:
This first offering from Zion Lights is a vibrant journey into the minds and hearts of her characters, exploring them from the inside out. Reading it, I was often startled by descriptions of thoughts and feelings I didn’t fully realise I had, until I came across them in this poignant book. Lights draws out the subtle workings of the human psyche and captures them in new and surprising ways.
It’s clearly a very personal story, and one that Lights has gone deep inside herself to give us, yet there are many moments in it which anyone who’s ever lived and loved will be able to relate to, and which will even help you understand yourself and your relationships better.
More Things Should Be Thought Out Thus is a vivid collection of ‘snapshots’, as the author says- snapshots of a life, and specifically a relationship. Peppered with unnamed characters who we see with X-ray vision for a split second before they vanish from view, this book will open up to you a hidden world of secret thoughts and innermost lives. Be prepared to have your mind stretched and your preconceptions challenged!
- Helen Mitchell, Leamington Spa
They lov-ed/e/are loving.
More things should be thought out thus captures the life trajectory/intimate story of two people falling 'in love'. The moments shared are a representation of our own moments (I smiled and nodded in acknowledgement of similar safe familiar remembrances). This well crafted journey takes you on an exponential travelling experience; meandering around circles and purple flowers, guitar music, train and travel, soya milk, mathematics and cushions. This stream of constructed consciousness is a delightful abandoned collection of interjections, reminiscences, future desires, past discoveries, present longings and understandings (ditto to all our lives). The delicious Zion has captured the essence of the day-to-day falling in life/love/lust – all same, but all different.
Using her words: ‘behind the mania is a moment shared and understood’.
And Zion’s words are an important contribution to modern lyrical literature. Words come from the soil, where all sound/idea/life has its beginnings. The word can become a mosaic; trying to go back to the tribal; incoherent but sensical – is that an oxymoron? Language is a product of the sedimentation of languages of former eras.
I sat in bed today reading Zion’s words – the focus on me in my bed, little me sitting in the world of Zion’s mind. Me; small and infinitesimal but realising that life/the world is so much greater.
After reading Zion’s words today I thought…. I wanted to write, I was inspired.
I thought: I wonder how others will read Zion words? What will they gather? What will they gain? What insights will they stumble across? So, this offering will be read in a myriad of complex/simplistic ways. (We are faced with a dichotomy; some readings are true/some are false – but all are valid?). I am thinking things through because more things should be thought out... (smile) …thus.
Read this work… it is inspiring. I am waiting for the next chapter – what happens next? More of the same, or different?
I wait.
- Belinda Harris-Reid, Exeter, Devon
MORE THINGS SHOULD BE THOUGHT OUT THUS is an apt title for a very original book which attempts to capture the unfolding of a person (persons) through seemingly random fragments. Life not being straightforward and linear, neither is this book.
Individual and apparently separate events, comments, thoughts and descriptions interweave to form a human life. So much in this book resonates with the way we really do think, remember and experience. It captures life in the moment, and is therefore about as truthful as any writing can be, words themselves only being metaphors.
Much of Zion's work uses beautiful metaphor.....'You are deep black, and I am bright white...'. Her writing displays her love of colour and the sensuous.
One question I would like her to answer is how much of the book uses autobiography - perhaps diaries, and if her work is not autobiographical how is such a deeply personal style reached?
My own problem was due to my mindset, I tried too hard to make sense of the loose ends in the fabric of the book, I wanted to understand and make critical sense of every bit of her work.
I came to realise that I had to embrace a different sort of understanding - to see it as an evolving patchwork, to go with it's rhythm and flow.
Seeing it this way, I believe I have understood how this work was intended, as a mirror of life in all it's rich and interconnected variety. A beautiful piece of embroidery, full of colour and texture, made from individual strands forming a brilliant, lyrical, profound and sometimes amusing work by Zion Lights.
Wonderfully modern, challenging, yet so rewarding, I would encourage anyone with a mind and a soul to read this book.
- Susan Cleland, Hastings
William Saroyan said, “The most solid advice for a writer is this, I think: Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.”
It is advice that Zion Lights does not need telling, for “More Things Should Be Thought Out Thus” defies generic classification; the most appropriate label I can give is that it is an exploration of life itself. And, as I read it, I did feel very alive.
Although fragmentary in its approach, phrases continually leapt out that resonated so completely with my own experience that my own stories filled in narrative gaps. Lights’ writing ranges from the darkly philosophical to the wittily light-hearted within pages, but she always carries her reader with her. Clearly, it is not about the destination, it’s about the journey. And if there are, after all, only seven basic plots, then surely it is all in the telling.
It is Lights’ great skill to summon a scenario – complete with emotional entanglements, memories, smells and even hairstyles – in just a few words. What is more, it is precisely the absence of a firm Victorian narrative plot directing our thoughts that allows the reader such connection with the text – we are enabled to see something of ourselves in what we are reading, as we find ourselves thinking “hang on, that’s me!” – and another facet, from our own memories this time, is added to the story.
Although not a book for anyone craving simple answers or traditional plot lines, Lights truly elucidates the significance of the moment and the incidental, revealing the commonality of our experiences. She breaks down relationships so that we can see how much we can learn from the smallest gesture, that we should not take anyone for granted, because, “she could have been someone who taught him about life for the rest of his life.”
The philosophy expressed at the heart of the text, without explication, makes enlightening reading. The fragmented style lends weight to the idea that all moments are one moment, all facets of the same thing; all stories are one story, seen from different angles. This ability to recognise the universal inherent in the intensely personal is a gift that will lighten your worries as you read, and makes “More Things Should Be Thought Out Thus” a beautiful and inspiring book.
- Hannah Martin, Topsham, Devon
A thought-provoking account of the inner life we all lead, stripped of the social norms and unspoken commands of everyday life. Refreshingly free, this text floats through the rules of the written word and emerges sparkling.
- Flo Toch, Leeds
Take a deep breath. What you're about to read is not polished, orderly, or grammatically encaged - it is as wild, darting, cryptic and raw as our silent thoughts. It is a wave of moments that will break over, and swell around you, surrounding you with the half-heard conversations, the half-seen insights, into another's life as they pass you on the street in a Moment that remains hanging in the growing space between you.
- Daniel Oaks, Birmingham
This book is a real depart from the ordinary. The structured chronicling of events of most novels and stories is not there, instead is an absorbing trip into someone's memories and feelings. Reading this book the normal techniques of trying to second guess the author is impossible, because it is a true representation of the seemingly random pattern of memories, which though connected also jump from place to place, tense to tense, with varying levels of intensity. I struggled to take in the unfolding story at first because I kept trying to apply norms that I had been taught since primary school, but I quickly realised that this book was anything but normal and therefore required a unique response! More Things is unique because it pushes the boundaries of literary endeavour, and as a result of this, I have recommended it to all my family and friends.
- Aaron Stewart, Exeter