A Cartography of Trespass – An audio essay

This sprawling audio essay explores ideas of space, trespass and queerness through field recordings, memories and an online map. An abridged version of this will appear in Queer Out Here Issue 04: https://www.queerouthere.com/listen/ Best listened to on headphones. Australian field recordings taken on Boonwurrung and Wurundjeri (Woiwurrung) and Krowathunkooloong (GunaiKurnai) country. Thank you to Queering the Map (https://www.queeringthemap.com/) for permission to include user-submitted pins from their map in this piece. Queering the Map pins read by Dan, Jess from Canada and Stephanie Lai. Additional field recordings by Emily, Jenny and S-J Smith. Content notes: swearing and non-explicit stories about sex.

By Jonathan Williams:

"I've been thinking a lot about trespass. About being, as queer people, in places we're not expected to be, places we're not welcome, places we're not allowed."

This meandering audio essay explores ideas about space, place, trespass and queerness. What kinds of connections might queer (LGBTQIA+) people have with the outdoor places and spaces we inhabit and move through when we know, or are told, or maybe just have a feeling that they’re not ‘for’ us? Can any of those experiences be considered collective? Are some of them more universal, or exclusively individual?

I created “A Cartography of Trespass” for the audio zine Queer Out Here. I wanted to make a piece inspired by aspects of queer cultural geography while not in itself being an academic work. This piece sprawls through different spaces: inside my head/the house/the internet; past the ‘keep out’ sign and into the woods near my home; back into my memories of queer encounters from childhood and beyond; and then to queer stories shared internationally and anonymously via an online map. It visits different ideas of queerness and trespass at each stage, then moves on in an open-ended way without necessarily providing conclusions.

This is a conversation starter rather than a definitive statement. My experiences and thoughts on this topic come from a position of white, able bodied and relative class privilege. Other queer people in other places will have very different relationships to space, place and trespass.

Acknowledgements: Australian field recordings taken on Boonwurrung and Wurundjeri (Woiwurrung) and Krowathunkooloong (GunaiKurnai) country. This always was and always will be Aboriginal land. We acknowledge Woiwurrung and GunaiKurnai elders past and present. Thank you to Queering the Map for permission to include user-submitted pins from their map in this piece. Additional readings by Dan, Jess and Stephanie Lai. Additional field recordings from Emily, Jenny and S-J Smith.

John Knox's Pulpit, Lomond Hills

By Fiona M Jones:

It was a long uphill walk to listen to a man talking, but maybe I would have gone there too. For this was centuries ago, long before information came to the fingertips and still before most of us could have read for ourselves, although the machine had been invented that would change all that by filling the world with books. 

More than one place on the map of Scotland bears the name John Knox’s Pulpit, for Knox preached often outdoors—subversive to received dogma, avoiding the authorities who welcomed no second channel of religious thought to unsettle their status quo. This Pulpit is a spectacular sandstone outcrop, eroded into Golgothic formations of caving strata high above a hillside stream and the amphitheatric curve of it opposite bank. 

In the age of microphones one wonders how a single voice could ever have addressed a crowd, outdoors in wind by water. Then one encounters a place like this, where the landscape itself conspires with the speaker, focusing and carrying his voice like the words of an epiphany. The world changed and changed again, picking up speed, momentum, noise. 

If you go there today, you take the long uphill path for quietness, to gain distance between yourself and the multiple channels of information that pursue your fragmented attention. If you stand below John Knox’s Pulpit, and watch and listen, silence answers. 

***

Fiona M Jones is a creative writer living in Scotland. Fiona is a regular contributor to Folded Word and Mum Life Stories, and an irregular contributor all over the Internet. Her published work is visible through @FiiJ20 on Facebook, Twitter and Thinkerbeat.