Lincoln in the Bardo: Metaphors for Moving Grievers Between

Metaphors are “pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system… is fundamentally metaphorical in nature” (Lakoff & Johnson, 2003, p. 3). Yet what part might fiction itself play toward healing a person bereaved? Even a constructivist psychological approach to loss might hesitate at outright ghost stories, […]

Candy Apples: Stand by Me and The Worm at the Core

Stand by Me, the classic Hollywood movie set in 1959 small-town Oregon and released in 1986, is characterised by director Rob Reiner in his DVD commentary as a personalised indulgence of his own youth: his favourite slang of the era, his favourite childhood TV shows, cartoons and comics, and indeed his favourite music from the […]