War Without Footsteps
Well now, dear readers—today I bring you something a touch off the beaten path. I’d been deep in the bones of a forthcoming book of essays when a strange thing happened: a piece arrived, unbidden, that took even me by…
Marcin Malek
The Wounds That Never Heal
A meditation on hurt, ritual, and the intimate violence of archery “Then the English archers stept forth one pace and let fly their arrows so wholly [together] and so thick, that it seemed snow. When the Genoways felt the arrows…...
Between War and Wonder
“I do not fight because I seek glory. I fight because I must protect what is mine.”— Tigrevurmud Vorn, Lord Marksman and Vanadis There’s something curious about the quiet books that stick. They arrive without noise, sit down across from…...
The Reapers Are the Angels: What If?
“You walk and you walk and you carry what you can and you leave the rest behind.” It stays with you, that line, doesn’t it? Like the feel of a worn stone in your pocket, or the ache in your…...
The tyrany of Coaching
Well archers, readers, today we embark on a journey of what if… It’s a heretical endeavour, filled with blasphemy and a provocation calculated—yes, calculated—to infuriate you. This is not a careless insult nor a drunken rant penned between ends. No,…...
Rituals of the Unseen
There are mornings when the world feels like a screen that forgot to sleep—flickering, expectant, always asking. In such light, where every silence must be earned and every stillness risks interruption, the soul reaches for older shapes. Not solutions. Not…...
Where the Paper Cuts Deeper: A Return to Clonkeen Woods
Portlaoise carries its soul just beneath the hedgerows, where boots sink slightly and tree roots knot like old thoughts. And tucked within that pulse, in Clonkeen Woods – where the canopy breaks into mottled shadow and the light stammers across…
The Bow Remembers: On the Ethics of Recoil
The essay that follows—perhaps a touch long for an online piece—is, in truth, a chapter from The Arrow Knows No Master, a book I’ve been quietly shaping since February of last year. It’s composed of individual essays—mostly reflective, occasionally philosophical—on…
Lesser things and trivia… (Column)
The story I’m about to tell you is not one that fits neatly into the grand histories of kings and battles, nor does it appear in the sweeping narratives of medieval glory or tragedy. It is a whisper at the…...
Forever Drawn:A Day with the White Feather
There’s a kind of hush in the troughlands of Fiorbhia Farm when the dew clings still to the grass, before the sun decides if it’ll bake or bless the day. And there I stood, half a ghost, half a child…...
A Bow Drawn Between Two Worlds
There are films that do not begin with a title screen. They begin with a feeling. A quietness. A scent. A strange shift in the weight of the moment that tells you—you’re no longer here. You’ve crossed into somewhere else.…...
Aleksander Wat and Japanese Archery
Japanese Archery By Aleksander Wat (in Marcin Malek poetical interpretation) 1The hand to the bowstring speaks:Bend to me, yield.The bowstring to the hand replies:Strike bold, be steeled.The bowstring whispers to the shaft:O arrow, flee!The arrow to the bowstring calls:Unshackle me!The…
Curwood and May: The Worlds They Wrote
There’s a weight to words when they are written by those who have never touched the landscapes they paint, yet summon them with such clarity you’d swear they had walked the paths themselves. Karl May never set foot in the…...
Ishi The Last of The Yashi…
It’s a strange thing, to draw a bow and feel the pull of something older than time itself—a quiet understanding between hand, string, and arrow. I think about that often, about how archery is less about hitting a target than…
The Archer’s Guide to the Unspoken Essentials
The wind came from the west, carrying with it the ghost of winter—damp, cold, full of the smell of leaf rot and something older, something that lingers in the hedgerows before the blackthorn blooms. I stood at the edge of…...
Click, Stabilize, Obey: The Rise of the Machine-Archer
Smack My Controversy column Back in the day, the archer was alone with his bow (it was an intimate relationship) between the man and his tool, the same sheer connection bound him to his quiver of arrows and the importance…...
The Arrows That Sang Against Steel: The Spanish Conquest and the Vanishing Echo of Indigenous Archery
You never forget the first book that cuts you. The one that leaves a wound, not in flesh, but in the quiet, unguarded place where thoughts sleep before they wake to meaning. Mine was a battered volume on the The…...
A Bow Drawn Against the Wind – Akira Kurosawa and his vision of men
Stories are not told. They are loosed, like arrows from a drawn bow, their fletching kissed by breath, their paths uncertain yet inevitable. A storyteller does not own the tale—he only pulls the string, lets it fly, watches it carve…
The Fever That Dwells in Men
Have you heard of a madness that does not burn with fire but seeps like a disease, making bones feverish and bending the mind to its will? It does not speak, it does not sing, it does not threaten, but…
Erased by Fire and Time
The first thing they saw was the light. It came from the sea, from beyond the edges of the world they had known, a gleam upon the water like the sun’s fractured reflection. Then the ships, too vast to be…