It takes a community to write a book
(This first appeared as a guest blog for Booka Bookshop, Oswestry).
I grew up with the image of the lonely artist; Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, James Joyce sitting in the lonely garret writing in splendid isolation. I accepted that Wordsworth really did wander lonely as a cloud and that Yeats wrote about things falling … Read more
Violets, oaks and how we are all connected
Violets
Have you noticed how many violets there are this year?
The warmer weather has drawn them out. They peep from the hedgerows, the verges, the woodland. Tiny, purple, delicate. This year they have had a chance to bloom before the more robust plants like nettles and grasses crowd them out. They glow in the … Read more
New connections and why community is important
Thank you all for your lovely messages about the launch…I’m really glad it has created so many connections.
Here’s one of the poems from the collection:
And here is an essay about the poem, but also about the launch and my thinking around community and why it matters.
… Read more‘Ultimately, I think it is connection that
Can you make yourself invisible (and then very visible)
Last week I was out just after dawn and at the top of a hill, where I always stand for a moment of gratitude (at the view, but also that I can still get up the hill!), I saw a fox.
It was at the bottom of the field, running diagonally across it in the … Read more
Book launch 2nd April
Morning,
Just a quick email to let you know/remind you that Farmotherlands is launching on 2nd April at The Holroyd Community Theatre, off Station Road, Weston Rhyn SY10 7SZ.
Doors open 6:15pm and the talk starts at 7pm. Tickets cost £18 from Booka (and include the book as well as the evening’s entertainment). You can … Read more
Enough
Enough
as in ‘that’s enough now stop hitting your brother’
as in ‘you’ve had enough wine/ice-cream/chocolate for today’
as in ‘as much as is required’ (by whom? for what?)
as in ‘sufficient’
as in ‘adequate’
as in ‘ample’
What dull words. No wonder we don’t like ‘enough’. It feels like curtailing, settling, depriving, not … Read more