Tuesday, March the 2nd, 2004
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Chewism is the popular name for the fictional method pioneered by Marigold Chew (1955-1998). In her only book, Six Hundred And Six Stories, Chew demonstrated what she called “interstitial prose”: she would take an existing composition (from a bewildering variety of sources) and insert her own text in between each and every sentence of the original material. Sometimes the results were startling: the poet Gervase Beerpint, in one of his all too rare critical essays, said that Chew's story based upon a chapter from George Bernard Shaw's “nonage novel” The Irrational Knot was “as good as anything by Ayn Rand, and makes John Fowles read like a grumpy cod-mystic of limited talent”. (Inevitably, Beerpint received a grumpy letter from Fowles within days of the essay being published. Wisely, he cast it into a furnace.) As a special treat for Hooting Yard readers, we have gained permission to reprint one of Marigold Chew's uncollected stories, The Albatross, where her “interstices” appear within a short sketch of the same title by Augustus Earle which was included in The Book of Enterprise & Adventure; Being an Excitement to Reading for Young People (London, 1851).