Smoke House & Other Stories

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Additionally, Rees is a writer of theatre drama. Two plays by him have been performed professionally. He has a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Swansea, and currently lives in Wales. 

He suspects that the Marches - that distinctive and beautiful (but pressured) borderland between England and Wales, associated with such figures as Walter Map, William Langland, Thomas Traherne, Francis Kilvert, A.E. Housman, John Masefield, Bruce Chatwin and so many others - has, in particular, left its mark on him. He has come to think of it as a gateway not to the nations either side of it but to a hinterland that is hidden deeper and is more mysterious. He sees parallels with the partitions that Arthur Machen, who grew up in the southern Marches, spoke of as being the veils between the known and unknown worlds.

'It's a place where you constantly find yourself stumbling across strange stories, that aren't always myths,' says Rees. 'Arthur Conan Doyle, for example, who was very much "into" spiritualism,  has a number of connections with the Marches. He attended a seance in a house in the rural village where I once lived.'

Rees's family goes back centuries in Wales. His surname has roots in the still largely rural county of Carmarthenshire on the Welsh coast, once the seat of Lord Rhys, powerful Welsh prince (though Rees doesn't claim any direct lineage!). Capel Pen-rhiw, a Carmarthenshire chapel where his great-grandfather was a congregant, today stands preserved at the National Museum of History at St Fagans, Cardiff, having been moved there stone by stone, beam by beam.

In a migration typical of many Welsh people and others seeking work from across the British Isles, Rees's forebears moved to the populous and industrial valleys of South Wales in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

In an era of great social deprivation in which coal was king, a number of Rees's ancestors became involved in unionism and radical politics. His great-uncle Sydney James, a miner blacklisted by colliery bosses for his political convictions, volunteered for the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War, being fatally wounded at the Battle of the Ebro. Another great-uncle, Trevor Jones, a young South Wales schoolmaster, was killed in action serving as a junior infantry officer with the Welsh Regiment in France, shortly before the Armistice of 1918.

Meanwhile, Trevor's mother Margaret Jones, Rees's great-grandmother, ran for and held public office at a time when such things were rare among women.

Another branch of Rees's family kept the Coach and Horses inn, in the canal-side village of Llangynidr, in the Brecon Beacons, for more than a century.

In addition to his associations with Wales and the Marches, Rees believes that travel has influenced him significantly. Either as a journalist, teacher, 'traveller', or holiday-maker on his own or as a child with his parents, Rees has spent time in more than twenty countries.

He has also journeyed to some of the more remote islands of the British Isles, including the Scottish holy island of Iona, ancient Sark and beautiful Herm in the Channel Islands, Lundy - famous for its population of puffins - in the Bristol Channel (travelling there on the world's last sea-going paddle-steamer), the Isles of Scilly (off Cornwall in the English South-West) and the lonely islet of Bishop Rock, known for its lighthouse and seals.