Jay Merill’s short story “At Ivinghoe Beacon” appeared on our blog in November 2018. Here Jay explains what inspired the story, and the wider fictional world she has built around it.

In 2012 a friend of mind was made homeless through no fault of his own and the anger I felt at the way he was treated motivated me to write a short piece about a homeless man, “Trev”. I had passed someone living in a niche in the outside wall of Waterloo Station where there was a hot air vent and a wafting smell of vanilla. This was the spot I picked for Trev. The Big Issue published my story, which went into the events which led up to Trev becoming homeless. And following this, The Journal of Compressed Creative Fiction in the US brought it out as a reprint in 2016.

But things did not end with this story. I pictured Trev, who spent many hours lying in the niche in the wall at Waterloo, gradually becoming engrossed with eschatological beliefs and in particular, with the Mayan prophecy which predicted that the world would come to an end on the 21st December 2012. After investigation of the convergence of ancient Stone Age routes at Ivinghoe Beacon, Trev increasingly felt that this particular site, in common with Bugarach, in the French Pyrenees, was destined to be the location where humans could survive the apocalypse.

Dan, a city worker who had experienced tragedy in his own life, got chatting to Trev at Waterloo one night and the two of them went on to become the founders of a cult known as the Ivinghoe Beaconiks. They formed the belief that aliens were set to perform the rescue operation of any humans who assembled at the designated site and by the summer and autumn of 2012 the group was forming steadily and began to meet regularly to plan their removal to Ivinghoe Beacon, scheduled for mid December.

So, Trev had his separate story and I then got to thinking that maybe I should do stories for the other members of the group, prior to their involvement with the cult. Some of these have been completed and have been published in such publications as Crannog, Flight Journal, The Galway Review, The Irish Literary Review, Platform for Prose and the Vignette Review. The latest story, “Gravity”, came out in Pithead Chapel in October 2018. I am now working on Dan’s story, which in itself is quite complex and involves several other characters, some of whom became part of the cult itself.

In addition to writing the individual histories of the characters I am also working on stories which focus on the momentous gathering of the group in December 2012.  “Julie’s World” which was appeared in Litro in 2017, falls into this category as does my latest story, “At Ivinghoe Beacon” which has now been published on the Liminal Residency blog.

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Jay Merill lives in London UK and is Writer in Residence at Women in Publishing. Jay is runner up in the 2018 Alpine Fellowship Prize, a Pushcart Prize nominee, is the recipient of an Award from Arts Council England and the winner of the Salt Short Story Prize. She is the author of two short story collections (both Salt): God of the Pigeons and Astral Bodies. Jay is currently working on a third short story collection. She has a story forthcoming in Occulum and some already published in such literary magazines as 3:AM Magazine, A-Minor, Bare Fiction Magazine, CHEAP POP Lit, Crannog, Entropy, Gravel, Heavy Feather Review, Hobart, Jellyfish Review, The Literateur, Litro, The Lonely Crowd, Lunch Ticket, The Manchester Review, Minor Literature[s], Pithead Chapel, Spelk, Storgy, Unthology 10, upstreet Literary Journal and Wigleaf.