Creative writing
I have written books. A couple I self-published and there are still gremlins in my head sneering ‘That’s not real publishing, it’s vanity, who cares, you’re not good enough’. That was the same voice asking me who I thought I was as I walked to corridor to meet my PhD supervisor for the first … Read more
Opening doors
Sharon Green and I went to Sunderland Poly to do English at the tail end of the 80s and then for a large part of our adult life lost touch with each other, not out of malice, just life. Facebook reconnected us and so we followed each other from afar, then Sharon announced she was … Read more
Finding your thing and a man on a bike
There will be those of you reading this who are old enought to remember the Queen song; ‘I want to ride my bicycle’...that line sums up Gary MacGowan.
At the age of 5 he was fed up because his bike didn’t go fast enough to win the race. He didn’t let it stop him, … Read more
Sustainable or regenerative?
Until I did my Permaculture Design Course with Steve Jones, I didn’t really pay attention to the words in the title. In my head ‘sustainable’ and ‘regenerative’ were synonymous, I hadn’t bothered to unpack them until I started to listen to Steve and Ian Steele, whose farm the course was held on.
Sustainable agriculture … Read more
Dwelling on the edge
Carol Shepherd is bi-sexual and Christian and proud of both and therein has been the thorny point of her explorations. How does someone who defines themselves as bi-sexual find belonging within the Christian world? Carol speaks with zeal and determination about the dilemma that many bi-sexual Christians face and her research has found such intersecting … Read more
Perfectionism
So many of the young people I have worked with over the years struggle with perfectionism. One of the ways I work with perfectionism is to turn it into a character and very often she is very closely related to our inner critic.
Perfectionist and the Inner Critic hang out together and sometimes seem like … Read more