Later generations think that they can judge earlier ones because we who come later must be morally superior, having greater awareness and more enlightened attitudes. That’s a delusion. I know, because, at seventy, I’m embarrassed at some of my own attitudes when young.
'That we should yearn for points of stillness within a madly spinning world is very understandable, very human. I'm only suspicious if the idea of a work-life, or writing life, balance is conscripted into a goal-driven agenda that has Wellness at its centre.'
'If something really gets to me, I want to figure out how and why. What is it the writer does that takes me to a particular place, or time? How do they expose a character and make them compelling? And what makes a voice special?'
'I wanted access to people, places, cultures, different from my own; and reading, especially fiction, seemed to give me that.'
'Jean Rhys taught me about writing; the process, the agony, the joy of getting it right. Perhaps she taught me about the grand Art versus Life dichotomy. '
'It's not so much individual works of literature that transform, as Literature itself; the great smorgasbord of these vividly imagined, precisely delineated worlds, the astonishing was a book can hold you.'
'Jane is completely reliant on Rochester's account of his marriage; he refers to Bertha's madness as hereditary but also admits that she had been a desirable woman and the centre of attention when they met. '
14-11-2019
Rukhsana Ahmad speaks with John Siddique about her peripatetic childhood in Pakistan, how her concern for other people motivates her to keep writing across years and genres, and how she’s avoided the constraints of the ‘post-colonial’.
Tiffany Murray’s mother worked for a time as a cook for various rock bands, including Freddie Mercury’s Queen. Here, Murray describes what it was like growing up in such ‘Bohemian’ company.
'Most of the Victorians I loved have lost their shine, too, for me, except George Eliot; her luminous sense of justice and vision distinguish her. However, recently Hilary Mantel has begun to supplant her.'
'This is reading as a meander and a different kind of immersion in a subject than the reading I do when I'm working on poems with a specific theme. I tend to read novels to relax or to be lost in a narrative.'
01-03-2018
Cherise Saywell describes how an unexpected writing career descended into paralysis, and how a short and anonymously-published piece helped her to reconnect with what she loves about writing.
Cynthia Rogerson explains how escaping to a weekly writing group turned her from a frustrated mother-of-many to a fledgling novelist, who discovered that as far as family went, ‘it was extraordinary how happy we all were just suiting ourselves’.