The Twilight Wanderer

Forest Dwelling

Biography

The Twilight Wanderer exists, by her own account, in the spaces between things: between day and night, between speech and silence, between the inhabited and the abandoned. She came to her calling through a childhood spent on the western coast of Ireland, where the light does things at dusk that the light in other places does not, and where she developed the conviction that the most important events of the day happen in the thirty minutes after most people have gone inside. She has since spent twenty years ensuring that she is always outside during those thirty minutes, in whatever landscape requires her attention.

Her speciality is what she calls "liminal space holding" — the practice of being present at thresholds of all kinds, both literal and metaphorical. She appears, with a punctuality that estate managers find slightly unnerving, at dusk each evening, moving along whatever boundaries the estate presents: between woodland and clearing, between the formal garden and the wild ground beyond, between the torch-lit terrace and the dark beyond it. She carries a lantern of her own construction, lit with a flame she has maintained continuously for seven years. She will not explain what happens if it goes out.

Previous engagements include two seasons at a highland estate where she was employed specifically to walk the boundary fence at dusk, a task she undertook with such commitment that the owner's children became convinced the estate had a protective spirit. She has not corrected this impression. The Twilight Wanderer is available for woodland, highland, and riverside estates where the owners are willing to leave at least one door unlocked at dusk, for reasons she declines to specify but which she assures are entirely benign.