Peaches and lemons

'Peaches and Lemons' is an impressionistic piece that seeks to bestow poetic homage to two diverse writers of literary fiction. Authors whose works clasp my palm in a personal and accessible way, who take me gallivanting to poignant places. For this shimmering-eyed enthusiast, the nature of my admiration for Michael Ondaatje and Peter Temple influences how I write, why I write-about places, people... About kindliness and refinement and longing and despair and uncouthness and hope. About greed, innocence, madness, badness, dreadful, pretty, fragile, muscle... This piece showcases Divisadero (Ondaatje 2007) and Truth (Temple 2009) as cunning, superbly crafted. Ondaatje and Temple spotlight mood, reorient prose, court characterisation to such extent the reader is seduced, deluded. 'Peaches and Lemons' offers inklings of these writers' charms, maestros whose magnetism helps mislay my own questioning of deviant writing.