Behind the scenes: Characters and Contributors

"Fore Shadowing II" Date : 2016. Medium : Aburidashi Fire Etching, Acid Fire and water on paper. Size: 18.5 x 26cm (C) Kaori Homma

A word about the Characters in Owl:believe, who are contributors to this website.

Strix is the pen name of Nic Ticorax, his name derives from the Latin ‘Nicticorax’ which means night bird, or night owl. As a baby, Nic would sleep during the day and was awake through the night. Jack and Shula changed their timetables to match Nic’s.

Strix’s father, Jack Stanza, was a writer and poet, who was known in the Press as the ‘toxic poet’, because of his anti-Statist political views.

a paparazzi event

Jack was an underground poet when he met the model, Shula, who worked for the Floran Fashion House in London (named after the two cities that its creators were from - Florence and Milan). Her relationship with Jack was a paparazzi event, that catapulted him into the public eye, which is not a good place for an underground poet to be.

It wasn’t long before the Press’ loathing of Jack spread to Shula, and the paparazzi contrived to make her a lesbian predator of the young models at Floran. The whole story was a setup, to remove Shula from her position with the House, who was a whistleblower to the real abuse going on at the fashion house, the victims of which were young models.  Shula provided them with the ultimate scapegoat.

exile

 After their very public court-case, they were exiled from London and sent to Bristol. It is here that they lived as a family and where Jack was arrested and convicted of political sedition and sent to the Political Correction Camp, at Lincoln Gaol.

 Seemingly abandoned by his father, his mother was then murdered by State Security Service agents and Nic was sent to the Greenfields Orphanage, near Bath, where he spent his days, until he was 15 years old. He was then taken to the Saint George’s Project in Bristol.

 But his father and mother’s spirit lives within him. He’s now a writer and part of a group of young political dissidents, working to subvert the State’s iron grip. The rest will be history...