My Writing Process: Blog Tag Tour
So here we go, one of those writer’s tag games. The multi-versifying poet, performer, celebrant and sailor Sarah Hymas has asked me to share a little about my current writing project, and then pass the baton along. I’m going to keep this brief-ish, because really I ought to be working on my current writing project! Which is the second novel…
English PEN Ukrainian Poetry Evening
Given the current crisis in Ukraine, and my own lack of expertise in the country’s history and politics, it is humbling indeed to be included in English PEN’s Ukrainian Poetry Evening in Oxford this Thursday, featuring poet Ihor Pavlyuk and translator Steve Komarnyckyj reading from A Flight over the Black Sea, published this month by…
Telling Time: A Poetry Course in Brighton
PLEASE NOTE: THIS COURSE RAN IN 2014 AND IS NOT BEING REPEATED THIS YEAR. IF I EVER DO RE-RUN IT I WILL POST A NEW BLOG. TELLING TIME a poetry course with Naomi Foyle Structured around the themes of past, present and future, this six week poetry course will address traditional forms, free verse, and speculative writing. A mixture of…
2013: Not just another listless year . . .
The publication of Seoul Survivors made 2013 a busy year for my writing career. With the next two SF novels pawing at the door, however, at times I feared my reading was suffering. In line with my random book-grabbing habits, I made a haphazard effort to post reviews on Goodreads, but found it impossible to keep up regular appearances. So…
Midnight Mass and Christmas Thoughts
Midnight Mass isn’t really my tradition. I was brought up a Quaker, and while my ex-Anglican parents would occasionally take us to a hymn service at Christmas, I much prefered being tucked up in a duvet on the sofa listening to Twas The Night Before Christmas, read to us from a little red book with a sellotaped spine. Christmas was…
A Medieval Christmas in Gaza?
Raw sewage and muddy rainwater rising in the fruit and vegetable market. Six hours of electricity a day, while snow blankets the Middle East. Will it be frostbite, corpses and medieval diseases this Christmas for Gaza? The world’s media, of course, pays not a fig of attention to the crisis.* Meanwhile here in Brighton &…
Christmas Spice & Speculation
Here we are once more, gearing up for the annual winter whirl of gift-giving, soul-searching & future-facing. If you’re looking for an unusual present for the person who has everything, I am offering Tarot Card Reading gift certificates this year. Sensitive and compassionate, my readings are intended as opportunities for the querent to pause and…
‘The St Pancras Pianos’ : A Poem
A poem that emerged from a memory cloud as I dashed through St Pancras Station – the first draft was typed into my phone on the Underground and read an hour later at my National Poetry Day gig. As I was Tweeting about the pianos a fortnight ago, it seems fitting to publish it online. (And if anyone can explain…
The Blu Tack of History
Jenny Diski‘s characteristically pithy LRB blog today on Thatcher’s funeral ends with a quote from Peter Hennessy: ‘More of Margaret Thatcher… will cling to the velcro of our collective memory than any other politician of recent times.’ Velcro’s far too suburban for Brighton, of course, where we prefer to camply flick about grotty balls…