Wesley Stace
The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries saw a renewed engagement with singer-songwriters working within English-language popular music, as artists increasingly crossed between recorded performance and literary writing. Wesley Stace, born on 22 October 1965 in Hastings, United Kingdom, has worked within that broader cultural setting as both a singer-songwriter and a writer.
Stace was educated at Jesus College and has pursued creative work across two related fields: music and writing. As a singer-songwriter and recording artist, he works in the English language, a medium that connects his musical and literary output. In cataloguing records maintained by the Library of Congress Name Authority File, his authorized label appears as Harding, John Wesley, indicating that his work circulates under more than one name in documented bibliographic systems.
As a writer, Stace contributes to a tradition of artists who move between musical composition and prose or other literary forms. His presence in major international authority files reflects the scope of his documented output across both fields. The Virtual International Authority File carries his identifier as 63198551, and his International Standard Name Identifier is 0000000055189462, records that attest to the reach of his work as both a recording artist and a writer using the English language.
Stace's inclusion in the Library of Congress Name Authority File, the Virtual International Authority File, and the International Standard Name Identifier system — under the authorized form Harding, John Wesley — places him among artists whose output has been formally documented by major bibliographic authorities. His dual standing as a singer-songwriter and a writer, combined with his registration across these international cataloguing systems, marks the breadth of his recorded and written contributions as a United Kingdom citizen working in the English language.
Quotes by Wesley Stace
Wesley Stace's insights on:
I was breathing life into the book through my hand, and the book was breathing back out through me into the world. And what was a book but leather? And what was leather but animal skin? And what was paper but a tree, and vellum but lamb? And what was I but an idea?
I had tried, as best I could, to forget the people who had said they loved me, and I had been able to do so only by replacing their memory with hatred for them and their crimes. Time is no healer. It scabs the wound until the injury is forgotten, but the infection festers, eating away, spreading.
From the third case, she took yet more books, but these were the traveling books that she had brought for her new ward: they were at once sterner and more reassuring that the others. She cared for for these, too- they were books after all, and she would sooner have her own spine broken than manhandle a book - but not with the same devotion, and they were placed in a neat pile on the floor.
I leaned back and glimpsed the stars, the same stories again but written in the sky.
When the two become the oneAnd the inside outside, the outside inSo that the male be not male nor the female femaleThen will you see me.
They're not doing much for themselves. I'm sure they'd rather slip away, relax their fingers and float, but they can't. They're not allowed. Effort is so painful; our knuckles are white, yet we keep clinging. The alternative is suicide- and we are too fearful for that.