School uniforms and new pencil cases are in the shops and this is the time, every year since 1989, when I look forward to meeting my new students at Bangor University’s School of Lifelong Learning. But not this year. Lifelong Learning closed on 31st July. So although we’ll be teaching out all those who want […]
My novel about the Surrealists, Swimming with Tigers, is loosely based on real people and events, but having the latitude to adapt, recombine and invent elements and individuals within the movement made it possible for me to recreate key moments so that they reflect the guiding themes of my book. One of the things I […]
When I began writing ten years ago I thought that there was some natural process by which writing became published: you did it and then it would appear in print, rather like going through with a pregnancy and ending up with a baby. Now I know that there are as many ways of being a […]
This is a freewritten blog, the first time I’ve tried it and it’s not going to be easy to be thinking in public and actually put down my genuine thoughts as they occur because that’s what freewriting is and there’ll be a fight going on here, even fiercer than usual between my hand moving the […]
Imagine what it’s like to be an Olympic athlete about to compete. Your name is called. You raise your arm, or fit the pedal straps to your feet, or stand at the edge of the diving board, or crouch in readiness on the track. Then it begins. Everything is a blur of no-time time and […]
Right now, like my own students, I’m revising my work. On April 8th, a year after starting, I completed the first draft of my new novel The Dead Have Time to Listen. It was an intense last few weeks in which the writing took over my waking and sleeping life and I wrote more and […]
I’ve been writing for nine years and produced a handful of short stories, some performance pieces, a completed novel and about a third of a second novel. I’ve also filled at least a dozen notebooks with freewriting. As I plan a new course on using freewriting to generate finished, edited prose and poetry, I have […]
I’ve been trying to work out if what I know about yoga, which I’ve practiced on and off since childhood, can help me with freewriting because these two activities seem to be very similar in their aims. The aim of yoga postures, as I understand it, is to alter the way the mind works. Whilst […]
What is your definition of beauty? Have you got a favourite line of poetry that describes beauty by using an image to suggest it? If you have, it’s probably not this often-quoted Surrealist simile: “As beautiful as the chance encounter of an umbrella and a sewing machine on a dissecting table.” The author is Isidore […]
Major solo exhibitions of women Surrealists are extremely rare so when I first heard that Liverpool Tate were putting on an exhibition of work by the painter and writer Leonora Carrington, I was excited. This would be the first British exhibition for 20 years and, after her death in 2011, it felt like a summing […]