Here’s a photo of someone writing in the morning sunshine. It was taken last month at Bore Place, site of our Dark Angels summer residential. If you look closely, and if you know what I look like, you will see that it’s me. Here I am, on a bench, writing. The photo captures a special …
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Out of Winter – a booklet of haiku
33 haiku with illustrations Out of Winter is a little concertina booklet that collects 33 illustrated haiku I made as part of a daily walking and writing practice. All of the creative work was done on the spot and in the moment. My brilliant mate Michael Gough turned them into this beautiful booklet. I like …
Inspiration and new projects
I’m featured in the Dark Angels newsletter this week, answering questions about what I’m up to, what inspires me, what advice I have – that sort of thing…. 1. Tell us about something you’re working on right now. During lockdown I worked on a daily process of cutting up client drafts and recycling the words …
The Writing Sutra
I wrote a thing recently about myself as the gardener of my own creativity. The first draft was rather too earnest. With tongue gently in cheek, it became a fruitful metaphor… Imagine that your writing practice is a garden, and you are the gardener. You plant seeds, see what grows, do a bit of weeding, give …
Creating a virtual community
Howard Rheingold published The Virtual Community in 1994. The internet then was about email listservs and dial-in message boards. Facebook was a decade away. The blurb on the back says, “All over the world, people who have never met before are sharing information… and forming electronic communities, based on mutual interest rather than mere geography. …
How to make anything astonishing
I’ve been away and now I’m back. Whenever I go on holiday, the first things I pack are a notebook and pen. This time I also packed a sketch pad, some charcoal pencils, two oil pastels, an ink brush, various other art-making implements, and a camera. They were all left unused in my suitcase. Actually, …
Looking for inspiration. Found this.
I’m working on a new writing project for 26 and the Bloomsbury Festival. The brief is wonderfully – and worryingly – wide. I’ve been allocated one square mile of London’s Bloomsbury district; I need to write something inspired by it. Max 500 words in any form, plus a haiku. The idea was that I’d wander around, …
Writing: four noble truths
Sitting at my desk at the end of a busy day. I’ve had too much client work to get through lately, but now I feel like I’ve got a bit more space. One thing that’s fallen by the wayside is my daily experiment with Mary Oliver’s instructions for living: pay attention, be astonished, tell about …
Learning and failure
I’ve become a bit obsessive about figure drawing over the last few days. I tried my first life class last week, on Zoom, and I’ve spent hours sketching away since then. When I’m doing it, I forget everything else. I haven’t been thinking about whether my efforts were any ‘good’ or not. That didn’t matter. …
Familiar yet strange
Today I went to a cafe for the first time in three months. A tentative step back into the life I used to live. Or is it forwards into the new? Something as simple as ordering a flat white felt strangely exotic; paying for something I can make myself at home felt wonderfully indulgent. But …