Labyrinth
project details
Labyrinth is a photo documentary collaboration and textual chronicle of a walk to the center of a remote valley on the island of Kauai where in my experience, time forks. Across 2010-2012, I made this ritual walk daily while writing what would become The Book of Embers. A section of the book enacts this journey for the reader.
Photographer Jesse Recor accompanied me to this threshold during the pandemic when I was living a second chapter on Kauai, finishing the manuscript a decade later. The photography seen here is not present in The Book of Embers (forthcoming from Essay Press in 2025) and forms a stand-alone record that is a pathway of its own making.
Labyrinth was published by Tupelo Quarterly and can be best explored here.
excerpt
You open a door. Enter a stairwell with branching views of monkey pod tree to mark your descent. A screen door gives way to late morning, the kind where you are meant to leave your shoes behind.
You walk the length of gravel driveway bare feet unfazed. You cannot help but absorb what is piercing conditioned as you are to untrodden means and ways.
From driveway you merge with dirt road. Water trickles past on a circuit of irrigation ditch. In between flattened toads and a scatter of drift seeds, you form a parallel line with coursing stream. The direction you walk is ritual in nature following the water to body of origin.