Trying to keep track of her publications is even harder. If only she had kept copies or made a list! Tracing poems, short stories or essays for possible inclusion in 'Medea’s Charms', an anthology of Colquhoun’s shorter writing that Peter Owen Publishers will release in September 2019 has been a nightmare.

When I started researching her written work I knew about the full-length books and about a dozen or so poems and prose pieces. By the time Mark Morrisson and I published what we thought was a complete bibliography in 2014, ('I Saw Water', Penn State University Press) the number had soared to over 125. Since then, more than a dozen more have come to light. Surely, everything has been found by now?

I have spent more time than is healthy under the artificial lights of library stacks and archive reading rooms. As you might expect, chance (or as Colquhoun would have described it, objective hazard) has played an important part in many discoveries.

From an internet bookseller I bought an issue of Athene magazine which I knew contained a major essay on automatic painting techniques. When it arrived, it was a completely different issue, but one which contained an essay whose existence I had not even suspected. I found a reference to an article in The Builder magazine. Knowing she had been a freemason, I searched fruitlessly through masonic journals of the period. The mystery was solved when I discovered that it was a trade journal of the building industry and she had written a series of five
highly technical articles on traditional fresco technique. But a bigger mystery remains: Colquhoun herself had no first-hand experience of painting into wet plaster and the articles were written at the time when her own practice was to use automatic techniques. With their reliance upon chance and spontaneity, these are the antithesis of the highly-structured processes of fresco.

In Medea’s Charms, the final selection includes published pieces and some that have not been seen before. The book is in three sections: poetry, imaginative prose and essays. The first section charts Colquhoun’s poetic development from the symbolist-influenced poems of her youth and early adulthood, surrealist experiments with collaborative poems, ‘found’ poems and ends with the magical incantations of her late maturity. Some of the short stories show the influence of surrealism and the short-lived New Apocalypse, but, in the main, they are on occult themes. They challenge some aspect of what is normally regarded as reality. In Colquhoun’s world, the laws or ordinary existence do not apply. The essays demonstrate the diversity of her thought and interests. They cover art, occultism, book reviews and some autobiographical pieces.