Category Archives: Uncategorized

Thinking about the relationship between imagination, creativity and the impulse to document. Not sure what i think yet. It’s complex. But thinking about it. From Stuart Franklin, The Documentary Impulse

Patterns, connections, community, beauty, fishing… What is writing poetry? Sandford Lyne, Writing poetry from the inside out

Drop a bucket down the well. See what you can pull up. But don’t get stuck at the bottom of the well. And make sure your bucket isn’t a colander. From Writing Poems by Peter Sansom

It is impossible to combine work and motherhood. But poetry starts from impossibility. An Alice Oswald interview. Cut out of The Guardian and glued into a notebook. As I would say more generally, constraints liberate. Given your impossible limitations – of time, form, talent – do what is possible.

One of the good things about getting older is that your kids are old enough to choose amazing Father’s Day gifts. It’s time to step recklessly into the book I have not yet written. From the White Book, by Han Kang. Thanks Evie.

Writing is hard work. The task is seemingly impossible. When you don’t know how to start, just start. When you don’t know how to continue, just continue. As Rebecca McClanahan says, reach for your journal. Writing is easy.

I was away in Northumbria last week leading a Dark Angels writing course. One area we explored is the different ways of finding “voice” – whether that’s your own voice, the voice of a character or the voice of an organisation you might be writing for. So, rather fitting to stumble across this piece from […]

A forlorn beach hut. I’m writing about Rye Harbour Nature Reserve as part of a residency project with creative collective 26.org.uk.  It’s a beautiful place, but my word is it windy! Hard to hold the camera steady outdoors. And the few notes I scribbled in my book are almost indecipherable. But this process of walking, photographing and […]

This is Chris. Her father raped or abused her every day until she was 15 years old. “I just knew he couldn’t break me,” she says, when I asked her how she survived. “There was something about me that meant I wouldn’t go under.” To help other abused women – and, increasingly, men – for […]