Old Hat?
...a nightmare: to suffer ‘memory loss’ (a component of dementia) is to live in the eternal present. Four small envelopes dropped on to my doormat once, many years ago. My...
Writing And Sickness
...it comes to dreaming up fresh approaches and narratives. For many of us, it simply comes with the territory. Sometimes illness itself can be mined directly for storytelling. While memoirs...
The Challenges Of Group Biography
...country, movingly conveyed. The biographer is of course, throughout these preliminaries, keeping her notes in order. When you begin, you optimistically open a computer file for each artist. Soon you...
Writing And Madness
...secrets from us. ‘Look into my eyes and lie to me,’ I said when I was manic. No one could. It is a terrible power. We drink the milk of...
Naked In The Spotlight
...near Edinburgh. He studied Philosophy and English Literature at Edinburgh University. He is a lecturer in Creative Writing at Lancaster University. His most recent collection of poetry is Zero (2009)....
My Life In Libraries
...a Mumbai suburb. Ceiling fans stir the hot air. Outside it’s raining; has been for days. Each week during the three months of monsoon a young assistant wheels a step...
Rejection
...run by two people; our mills grind slowly — I wouldn’t say how small.) Replies to rejections tend to come back rather more rapidly. The gracious replies certainly do. One...
Fears Old And New
...by W. W. Jacobs, ‘The Willows’ by Algernon Blackwood, ‘The Signal-Man’ by Charles Dickens, ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’ by M. R. James, ‘Three Miles Up’...
Writing In My Mother Tongue/s
...subsequent plays that were often created and produced within a local community and community arts context. Like many artists, a diversity emerged in my practice out of having to pay...
Pepys: Spirit Of His Age
...my own hair, which comes to 21s. and 6d.’ (13/11/1663). With my ‘research hat’ on, I’m invariably taken by Pepys’ descriptions of everything from food and drink, fashion, housekeeping and...