Reade Saunders

About

Reade Saunders is a writer and visual artist whose work delves into silence, resilience, and inherited emotion. Through poetry, reflections, and original artwork, Reade explores the spaces between words and images to reveal unseen stories and truths.

Latest Essays

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  • Flatter the watcher
    Eyes tracking movement. Interest that tightens when someone begins to rise. People call this admiration because it flatters them to do so. It sounds clean. But it is not neutral.… Read more: Flatter the watcher
  • It was not a crash
    A crash implied violence, panic, an ending. This was an arrival, an unscheduled landing, an argument with physics that had concluded in a draw. The aircraft had stopped in a… Read more: It was not a crash
  • Sacrificial territory
    The true double bind is not merely a clash of obligations. It is a collision between incompatible moral worlds, each claiming total legitimacy. What makes it intolerable is not that… Read more: Sacrificial territory
  • Office doors
    There is a particular species of man one encounters in failing organisations. Not the usurper. Not the saboteur. Not the visionary who sees flames as an opportunity for rebirth. No.… Read more: Office doors
  • Ghost Mother (iv)
    I remember the birth because it was winter. I remember the smell of disinfectant, and Peter’s hands, warm and steady, holding mine. I remember feeling nothing and thinking that must… Read more: Ghost Mother (iv)
  • On Villains and Heroes
    The story written is not the only story that could be told. The same circumstances – the same childhood, the same betrayal, the same courtroom silence – can be narrated… Read more: On Villains and Heroes
  • Making the Man
    There was a time when the phrase “a good man” carried moral weight. It did not mean a harmless man, nor a man subdued by guilt or fashion, but a… Read more: Making the Man
  • Lethe’s daughter
    She was born beneath a silence, her first breath woven through with forgetting. They pressed a story into her skin, but the ink dissolved before it dried. She drank Lethe… Read more: Lethe’s daughter
  • Ghost Mother (iii)
    I call them the good years. I have always called them that. Beaming as though your brightness were my achievement. Perhaps it was. I left too many silences in my… Read more: Ghost Mother (iii)
  • The weight of years
    There are wounds that excuse folly. There are losses that explain frailty. But there are no wounds, no losses, no fractures that excuse betrayal disguised as virtue. The matriarch who… Read more: The weight of years
  • Ghost Mother (ii)
    I told myself I was trying. That was the word I clung to – trying. A good house, a lovely baby, and a man who worked because he loved us.… Read more: Ghost Mother (ii)
  • Thought and Memory
    Each morning, they rose from the Father’s shoulders, ink-borne shadows against a paling sky. One carried memory, the other, thought— but neither ever returned unchanged. They crossed forests of silence,… Read more: Thought and Memory
  • The Geometry of Boundaries
    A curious paradox runs through the modern obsession with “boundaries.” On the one hand, the word has entered the lexicon of therapy culture like a sacrament, invoked with the reverence… Read more: The Geometry of Boundaries
  • Dear Son,
    I find myself writing to you today, on the evening of my birthday, with your manuscript resting heavily beside me. It is not a gift in any ordinary sense, yet… Read more: Dear Son,
  • The Solomonic Test
    Every divorce spawns three stories: his, hers, and the child’s. Each is stitched together from fragments of memory, grievance, and hope. And each claims the mantle of truth. The father’s… Read more: The Solomonic Test
  • Karen
    Karen did not unravel. She was never tangled to begin with.Her life, like the lives of so many women raised in the shadow of grief, was tightly wound, controlled, cautious,… Read more: Karen
  • A parting gift
    I didn’t expect him to say thank you. But I thought he might see what I was trying to do. I arrived early. Always do. Old habit from court. Always… Read more: A parting gift
  • The Splitting
    There is a silence that precedes distortion…an eerie stillness, not unlike the hush before the hunter’s arrow finds its mark. In cases of psychological alienation, especially those born from maternal… Read more: The Splitting
  • The Sky behind the Storm
    I thought I understood love. At least, I had mimicked the posture of it. I’d held hands, spoken vows, walked the straight line of domestic duty. I had smiled in… Read more: The Sky behind the Storm
  • The Feminine Collective
    There is a phenomenon as old as myth itself: the fury of the wronged woman. The Greeks knew it well; the Erinyes, or Furies, primordial goddesses of vengeance, born not… Read more: The Feminine Collective
  • The Bright man who lost control
    ~ A mother’s perspective. “He was never very good with ordinary women. Too intense, too dazzling. Women like that – girls, really, don’t know what to do with men who… Read more: The Bright man who lost control
  • Reus Vitae – Guilty of Survival
    Survivor’s guilt is not some abstract post-traumatic affliction best quarantined in DSM footnotes. It is a structural response to a fundamental human experience: the proximity of death, coupled with the… Read more: Reus Vitae – Guilty of Survival
  • Icarus emblazoned
    Some boys disappear into obedience. He didn’t. He just burned. They said sit down. He stood. They said blend in. He wore fire. Applause was safer than affection. A spotlight… Read more: Icarus emblazoned
  • Borderlines
    He didn’t remember being sent away.He remembered the not-coming-back. The trunk shut. The room went quiet. A boy became a border. At age six, a child cannot conceptualise abandonment. Not… Read more: Borderlines
  • Ghost Mother (i)
    I thought your birth might fix me. You arrived with the smell of lemons still in my mouth, and something broken already in my chest. I told people you saved… Read more: Ghost Mother (i)
  • The modern Father
    He is no longer just a man. He is a diagram. An intersection of roles: Husband, Father, Stepfather, part-time Custodian, full-time Protector. (Son?) Keeper of calm, absorber of blame, receiver… Read more: The modern Father
  • Sunday.
    He does not cry when the door closes. He has trained himself not to. That training began when he was six, when he wasn’t allowed to bring his Easter egg… Read more: Sunday.
  • The Deepest Cut
    Betrayal in families rarely announces itself with drama. More often, it arrives quietly – through omission, reframed memories, strategic silences. It grows in the spaces between what was said and… Read more: The Deepest Cut
  • Redrawing Attachment Architecture
    The child is shaped first by absence. Not just of the father who left, but of the mother who remained – distant, distracted, or fractured. Absence wears many disguises: silence,… Read more: Redrawing Attachment Architecture
  • Granular rituals
    A child is not born with a personality. He is born with a temperament, yes, but personality? That’s a slow accretion. It comes in layers, like sediment, each compacted by… Read more: Granular rituals
  • A Gallery of Selves
    There are adults who do not walk through life as whole persons, but as a gallery of selves—each one trying to make sense of the others, or deny them altogether.… Read more: A Gallery of Selves

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