After Midnight:

A Trilogy of Turning Points

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Midnight at the Arcanum (2023), The Ancestral Sea (2024), and Touched by Fortune’s Shadow (2024) form a literary triptych built not upon spectacle, but upon witness—to experience,  intersubjective truth, and narrative as an evolving ethical act. What begins as meta-autobiography becomes, across its span, a pedagogy—a reader-inclusive praxis aimed not at exposition, but at shared emancipation.

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It opens with a manifesto: “Reclaiming the Narrative Pedagogy.” Here, Jackson reframes meta-autobiographical fiction as dialogic liberation. Rooted in Freirean thought, poststructuralist critique, and a deliberate refusal of hegemonic norms about whose stories matter and how they must be told, the manifesto positions the reader as co-creator. Identity is not fixed, but emergent. Meaning is not transmitted, but negotiated. Truth is not imposed, but constructed across a dialogic threshold. And so the reader steps into the trilogy not as observer but as participant.

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From the outset, it is clear: the text is not a confession but a contract.

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Each volume takes a different axis through the same experiential field. Midnight at the Arcanum opens as a recursive act of reckoning—memory filtered through form, trauma worked into narrative geometry. The Ancestral Sea explores historical and familial entanglement, shifting the focus toward inherited myths, systemic repetitions, and the transpersonal work of reframing. In Touched by Fortune’s Shadow, the arc settles into an ethics of emotional sobriety: loyalty without performance, intimacy without betrayal, presence without illusion.

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Excessive alcohol consumption appears in all three works—not thematically centered in the first two works, but atmospherically pervasive nonetheless. The language of the Twelve Steps is never directly spoken except in codings uttered by characters, such as “a-friend-of-Bill’s” when Brett Lloyd-Ronan asks his friend to speak with his father, who has fourteen years of recovery, yet its spiritual and structural influence is deeply embedded. In tone and trajectory, the trilogy models recovery not as salvation but as orientation: toward accountability, responsibility, clarity, and a future unencumbered by hazy self-mythology. It resists exceptionalism. Its power lies not in what it reveals, but in what it models.

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Editor Dania Sheldon, DPhil, in her foreword to Touched, gestures toward this ethos. She writes that the novel invites rather than insists, asking the reader to enter “in finely embroidered slippers,” not as spectator, but as guest. Her reflections—on authenticity, trauma, and the acceptance of “blunders past”—recognize the work not as catharsis, but as deliberate narrative conduct. This is recovery by way of relational ethics: the story as shared ground.

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In his post-trilogy follow-up paper, “After Midnight: A Meta-Proof & Open Reflective Practice Report in the King’s English (in the Spirit of Good Cricket),” Jackson extends the trilogy’s narrative ethics into formal demonstration. Where the three novels stage recovery and reconciliation through story, “After Midnight” translates those same movements—intention, execution, validation—into mathematical and linguistic form. It shows that meaning itself can be modeled as praxis: that the act of declaring one’s purpose, carrying it through, and inviting verification by others is structurally identical to both scientific proof and moral conduct. In this sense, the work is less a sequel than a mirror held up to the trilogy’s method. The equations are written in prose; the proofs are lived. Through its functorial and sheaf-theoretic mapping of author to reader, “After Midnight” demonstrates how transparency of method—what Jackson elsewhere calls “calling one’s English”—stabilizes understanding across difference, transforming aesthetic coherence into civic reciprocity.

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Knight Terra Press has released all three volumes of the trilogy, together with “After Midnight” and their pedagogic abstracts, to the international scholarly community via Zenodo under DOI registration, ensuring permanent open access and interoperability with global research archives. This gesture completes the circle of the work’s ethical intention: literature conceived as public scholarship, scholarship enacted as service, service embodied as sustenance.

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If the trilogy begins with a call to praxis, it ends with a benediction—a reaffirmation of the reader-writer contract in its most stripped and luminous form:

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The Epiphanies

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We are.
Audere, scire, tacere.
  To dare, to know, to be silent.
Carpe diem sed respice finem.
  Seize the day but consider the end.
Pendâr-e nik, goftâr-e nik, kerdâr-e nik.
  Good thoughts; good words; good deeds.
The past is gone. The future is not yet. There is only now.
Every morning is a new creation.
Be brave. Be kind.

تمام شد (It is finished.)

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The closing, offered with no signature, seals the pact begun at the outset. It completes the dialogic arc not with resolution, but with clarity. These final words echo not only a philosophical stance, but a lived ethic—one that is less about the writer’s past than the reader’s present. This is not a work to be decoded, but to be answered going forward.

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To read the Epiphanies Trilogy is to enter into a shared field of presence. It is no accident that the trilogy begins with a Rilke poem about turning points:

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[…]
Werk des Gesichts ist getan,
tue nun Herz-Werk
an den Bildern in dir, jenen gefangenen; denn du
überwältigtest sie: aber nun kennst du sie nicht. 
[…]

—Rainer Maria Rilke, from “Wendung”

 

    The eyes’ work is done;
    go now and do the heart’s work
    on the images held prisoner inside you; 
    for though you conquered them,
    you do not yet know them.

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“Wendung” as used by Rilke is often understood to mean a spiritual or existential turning point—a moment of transformation, awakening, or reorientation. By design, Jackson recedes and gently implores the reader to seek whatever they must to find that point within themselves. This invitation—to live more deliberately, to act from a place of kindness and loyalty, to engage one’s own past without ornament or erasure (erasure of oneself or of others)—is proposed for the reader to consider and harvest their own tranquility.

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Not all trilogies close by opening something in their readers. This one strives to by design.

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What is more, from the publication of the first book in the trilogy in 2023, all proceeds from the sale of any work in the trilogy are pledged for donation the Greater Vancouver Food Bank through Knight Terra Press's “One Good Turn” initiative.

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