Wandering the dim kingdom – art, essays, and storytelling by Amory Abbott.

FOOLS (a writing exercise in 3 parts)

At the inaugural Fire Season artist residency in Kyburz, CA this June, I led and took part in a writing exercise that involved three stages: first, reading and reflecting on an essay titled A Storm Blown From Paradise by Paul Kingsnorth. Second, a 15-minute timed stream-of-consciousness writing

So You Want to be a Contemporary Artist: A Membership Guide

Eleven years ago, I had just entered the Visual Studies MFA program at Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, Oregon. Having moved to the west coast from Indiana, my exposure to the broader context of Conceptual and Contemporary art in the modern age was a jarring, upsetting, and ultimately

Beef Stroganoff; a poem and zine about love and fear

A few years ago I wrote this poem about how my dad didn’t like mushrooms. It was perplexing and funny and a little bittersweet, and felt like a microcosm of many of our human idiosyncrasies– confronting, sometimes unexpectedly, the realization that a long-held belief, opinion, bias, or tradition

Dark Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Cascadian Black Metal

In 2024, I was invited to write something for Kohlhammer's upcoming publication Meta/Metal; Open Questions in Metal Studies, and this is the essay I sent them. Introduction It’s not a coincidence that I became a fan of black metal when I moved to the Pacific Northwest

Two poems about death

This week I'm tracing back over some poetry of mine, thinking of endings, loss, grief, and reckonings. Two works surfaced, both reflections on the deaths of two different and unrelated people– one I knew rather closely over my 30s and 40s, the other I'd never known

Fire Season: Collective Sense-making on the Topic of Wildfire in British Columbia

I'm the co-founder of Fire Season, a biennial art book publication that gathers visual art, photography, poetry, and prose on the topic of wildfires in BC. In 2023, The Dark Mountain Project reached out to me to write something for their website, and this is the essay

The Barnyard Resurrection of W.B. Yeats

A short story I wrote in 2020 after a research trip that led me to the grave of W.B. Yeats in Drumcliffe, Ireland, at the foot of the legendary mountain Ben Bulbin. It was a time in my life of chaotic growth and debilitating grief, and I was there

Old-Growth Gothic

Welcome to Old-Growth Gothic, a path into my written and visual creative practices. I'll be posting here regularly, focusing on writing about the darker side of things. I hope you have an enjoyable and unsettling time here.