Bit slow to share my news on this one, but I ran a workshop on writing with constraints as part of the Guildford Literary Festival this summer. All of the 20 tickets for the event sold, which was very pleasing. It was wonderful to see a room full of writers beavering away with their pens and notebooks, and …
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THE STORY INSIDE
This is Zoe Tynan Campbell, designer at Stumped Studio. I’m writing a piece of short fiction for Fiera magazine inspired by work she is showing at the London Design Festival. Last week I popped round to her home/workshop to find out more about what she does, and why. It was also a bit of a trip down memory …
What is art for?
If you’re trying to make Art – and the capital A is deliberate – is it helpful to have some kind of end purpose in mind, some kind of idea about how your Art might be useful to the world, or even just to one person? Back in my student days I wrote a 10,000-word dissertation about the value …
Straight to the bottom
My copy of Raymond Carver’s complete poems arrived today. I opened it and read one at random, while my lunchtime bagel toasted. The Fishing Pole of a Drowned Man. What a beauty.
Economist article: Hanli Prinsloo
My article for The Economist about ocean campaigner Hanli Prinsloo (above) has just been published. Here’s how it starts… Hanli Prinsloo was jogging on a Cape Town beach when she found two girls kicking a dead dolphin that had washed ashore. It could have been a creature from a distant galaxy, for all they knew. …
The Sevillanos in his yellow hat
I spend so much of my time writing. Yet I don’t think I have any photos of myself actually doing it. So the one above is rare indeed. I was on a writing retreat in Spain, in the hills above Aracena. I took this photo as I wanted to work out the self-timer on my new …
Running pictures
Training for a marathon, I run 20 miles every Saturday. To distract myself from the pain – and sometimes the boredom – I externalise, focusing not on myself but on the world around me. To help with this, I take photos with my iPhone. The harder the run becomes, the more photos I take.
Talent + effort = success
What kind of effort does it take to get a first collection of stories published? There’s no one better to ask right now than Dan Powell. I’ve been a fan of Dan’s writing for a long time and he’s done me the honour of beta reading some of my stories. So I was delighted when …
Hearse rake the coals of my heart
The 26 Words exhibition – “exploring the DNA of language” – opened in London last week. Among the works on display was the piece that I made with Mark Noad, inspired by the death of my mum earlier in the year. Here’s the project in a nutshell: Take 26 pairs of writers and artists – …
Plant life
My main contribution to the gardening at home is to cut the grass and dig holes where I’m told to. But I enjoyed the ceramic flowers I found on a summer visit to the Botanic Gardens in Ventor. Frances Doherty‘s pieces were strange, unexpected and beautiful. I particularly liked the simple words that came with …