The Blink That Killed The Eye wouldn’t have been at all possible if it wasn’t for the few hearts who played such an instrumental role in its creation. As often is the case with book acknowledgements one is unfortunately forced to whittle down the list of those who have either directly or indirectly influenced and spurred on the writing. In order to make that endeavour more exact and less laborious I thought to recall the names of those who’ve supported my writing throughout the various years, while simultaneously providing me with the courage and confidence to never let the ink dry up. To the distant reader these names may appear somewhat meaningless so I’ve attempted to add a sprinkling of detail to help show that behind everything there does exist someone who in some minuscule way helped with the writing of the stories in the book.
Many thanks to all the team at Jacaranda for wanting to publish the collection, it’s been a tenuous road at times but we’ve made it to the end so for that I’m grateful. Thank you to the poet, the playwright and educator Joelle Taylor. For your insurmountable dedication to poetry and for being the first person to ever tell me I could write, deep within the Poetry Cafe basement some thirteen years ago. Thank you to my mother Hellen and my aunty Martha for constantly keeping the creativity and support alive throughout my childhood and through into my adulthood. Thank you to my father Tony for being my indefatigable financial pillar of support and most trusted counsel. Thank you to my brother Matthew and sister Stella for always being close by, even when at times the world seemed forlorn and distant. Thank you to my good friends at Out-Spoken; namely Daniel Randall a.k.a The Ruby Kid for joining me in our attempt to establish a congealed platform for both the performance of poetry and live music. To Karim Kamar for documenting the journey either through his camera, his monolithic keyboard or with his ingenious sense of humour, and also to Sam Bromfield for adding yet another strong hand to the never-ending labour of trying to keep art alive in the face of such apparent adversity. Thank you to Raymond Antrobus; a wonderful poet and dear friend who I deeply admire, one whose incessant fervour for poetry and education will forever amaze and inspire me. Thank you also to my agent Claudia Young at Greene & Heaton for making the whole experience as painless and as straightforward as possible given all the circumstances. Thank you to First Story who I’ve worked with for nearly three years. They are by far one of the greatest and most important initiatives in the UK today. An organisation who masterfully support and promote creative writing within schools around Britain, and a huge all-encompassing wave of appreciation for everyone who has in some shape or form inspired me over the years, be that through poetry, prose, song, theatre or conversation.
Lastly, I would like to say a very special thank you to Sabrina Mahfouz, the person who I wrote this collection for, indeed she was my singular audience. I doubt that in my lifetime I will encounter again an individual with such prodigious critical acumen. Not only is Sabrina an inimitable intellectual and philosopher but a fierce, unforgiving artist whose work challenges and comments on everything wrong within such a patriarchal heterosexual stratified society. I have learnt more from listening to her musings on gender inequality than I have from any academic study written by some far-removed theorising professor. Through the ten month writing period for The Blink That Killed The Eye she would scrupulously read over the stories, adding her notes and suggestions while listening to me ramble on about the book’s philosophical intention coupled with my hopeless frustrations, my fears and pertinent anxieties. She was the reassuring voice when despair loomed and the motivational pick-up when fatigue brought me close to scrapping the whole damn thing. She was there from the inception of the title at a quaint port bar round the back of Oxford Circus, to the umpteenth reworking of the last sentence to the last story. Conclusively she is contained ubiquitously throughout these several narratives, and of course thank you to you dear reader, sincerely, for supporting these writings.