crispina kemp

Graphic Credit: Crispina Kemp

If you have visited my author page on Amazon or WordPress, you will find that in my early teens, I had a passion to boldly go…

But an unfit non-American prone to travel sickness, the space programme was closed to me.

Instead, I turned my vision to the inner space through Jung and, being a child of my times, Aldous Huxley with his Doors of Perception, and Lyall Watson with his Gifts of Unknown Things.

Coupled with this was a burgeoning interest in anthropology.

Unsurprisingly, this also gave rise to an interest in myths. James Frazer’s Golden Bough and Robert Grave’s White Goddess and his Greek Myths found a place amongst my books.

Graphic Credit: Crispina Kemp

Around this time, and building on an interest seeded in school-level biology, I developed what might be termed an obsession with evolution. It began with simple genetics but soon I’d lose myself for days in the intricacies of DNA which was currently considered at the forefront of the study.

There followed a deep dive into a rash of books mostly scribed by male evolutionists, being their speculative narratives that proposed to explain how our primate forebears became naked apes.

But while much attention was given to the club-wielding male running down the fast-fleeing savannah-dwelling prey, nothing was said of the female.

Enter Elaine Morgan with The Descent of Woman and Aquatic Ape Hypothesis.  I was so excited. It doesn’t matter that Elaine Morgan’s hypothesis has since been disproved. It was that she included women in her speculative narratives.

I realised now why I’d been reading so many books by anthropologists. Though it must be said, many of those were somewhat out-of-date, being accounts by Victorian travellers who, I was sure, were obsessed with sex.

Graphic Credit: Crispina Kemp

By marrying all the elements of my free-form studies, I launched into my then-latest obsession. Thought experiments, aka speculative narratives, which focused on our earliest human ancestors.

I was particularly interested in how early societies arose, how they arranged access to fertile females without violence while ensuring the security of offspring. For the one thing I’d found in all my reading was that we humans, in all times and places, have an exceedingly strong drive to reproduce, and to ensure our infants have the best chance in life. So many freedoms relinquished for the sake of ensuring we have children to feed, clothe, shelter and protect us in our old age. (Except when our population density exceeds the carrying capacity of the land, then we look to ways to not breed, which is very much in evidence today.)

Graphic Credit: Crispina Kemp

Now feed into this the ongoing interests sparked by the likes of Jung which had taken me down several deep rabbit holes to explore myths – for they too have origins and paths of evolution – and we arrive at why I write what I write. It is a perfect marriage of interests.

We might term it mythic fantasy, but for me I’m still writing speculative narratives – though now with an eye to plot structure and character arcs and a good old grammar and language polish.