Today, it’s all about connection.

Day-7: Writing as Connection

Invitation: Writing provides a direct connection between your inner world and that of another. And sometimes YOU are both the writer and the reader.

Write: Choose one line of your writing from this week and expand it.

Just let it go where it wants to, no questions asked.

Reflect: What has changed since the first day, in your writing, attention or mood? (p.s. there are no right or wrong answers!)

Note them down.

Connect: If you’d like to, you’re welcome to share a sentence from your writing, or a few words about your experience of saying yes to 7 small invitations.

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Closing Thoughts

I devised this series after reflecting on the role of writing groups in the current age: what they’re for and why they matter.

Thinking about my own experience of sharing a writing practice with others, I asked myself: what is it about being part of a creative writing community that feels so nourishing?

And it’s this: first we write, then we reflect, and in that process, we connect with others. It’s a simple trio of actions that affirm our shared humanity.

In such a setting each writer is vulnerable. When guided with heart, the group will find a rhythm.

We learn to listen attentively, to be tender, to reflect with kindness, to reveal some of our own vulnerabilities that a sharing of words can illuminate. A writing group asks us to bring our thinking, feeling, creative, complicated, imperfect selves to a shared space, to participate in and witness process.

It’s a deeply authentic form of engagement.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this short series of invitations. Think of it as watering a small seedling to help it grow.

Thank you for taking part and look out for more opportunities to write, reflect and connect in the coming weeks and months as things take root.

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Write · Reflect · Connect.

No pressure, no performance.

Just a page, a pause, and a moment of shared attention.

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#creativewriting
#writetogether

Day-6: What Wants to be Said.

Invitation: No structure today. Just listening, with patience and quiet attention.

Write: Freewriting for 10 minutes without stopping. Open your notebook, pick up your pen and write down whatever comes into your mind. No audience, no agenda, just you and the page.

Reflect: What words or ideas emerged that surprised you? Note them down.

Connect: Today we connect through the action of writing.

Share in the comments your experience of freewriting, if you’d like to.

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Write · Reflect · Connect.

No pressure, no performance.

Just a page, a pause, and a moment of shared attention.

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#writereflectconnect
#creativewriting
#writetogether

Day-5: Writing as Movement

Invitation: Paths invite movement and writing has its own momentum.

Write: Describe a path you have walked many times, paying attention to atmosphere and sensations.

Reflect: What new details emerged when writing about something familiar? Note them down.

Connect: What word or sentence from your writing surprised you today?

Share in the comments if you’d like to.

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Write · Reflect · Connect.

No pressure, no performance.

Just a page, a pause, and a moment of shared attention.

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#writereflectconnect
#creativewriting
#writetogether

Day-4: A Voice in Conversation

Invitation: Writing can be a dialogue - with self or others.

Write: Write a letter to your younger self about something important you want them to know.

Reflect: What hope or question did your words reveal? Note them down.

Connect: What word or sentence from your writing surprised you?

Share in the comments, if you’d like to.

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Write · Reflect · Connect.

No pressure, no performance.

Just a page, a pause, and a moment of shared attention.

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#writereflectconnect
#creativewriting
#writetogether

Memory fragments help writers bring truth to their storytelling. They can also illuminate forgotten corners, helping us to reflect and see our own patterns in a new light.

Day-3: Memory Fragment

Invitation: Memories don’t need to be complete to be meaningful.

Write: Write about a moment you remember only partially - a smell, a sound, a colour, a word, a place.

Reflect: What stayed hidden, and what surprised you? Note them down.

Connect: What word or sentence suprised you?

Share in the comments, if you’d like to.

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Write · Reflect · Connect.

No pressure, no performance.

Just a page, a pause, and a moment of shared attention.

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#creativewriting
#writetogether

Day-2: The Small Detail.

INVITATION: Attention is a form of care.

WRITE: Look around. Choose an object that interests you. Write for 10 minutes, describing it slowly and precisely: its colour, shape, weight, texture - everything you notice.

REFLECT: What memories or ideas came to mind as you wrote about your object? Note them down.

CONNECT: What word or sentence suprised you?

Share in the comments, if you’d like to.

Leave a comment

Write · Reflect · Connect.

No pressure, no performance.

Just a page, a pause, and a moment of shared attention.

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#writereflectconnect
#creativewriting
#writetogether

So, welcome to day 1 of 7 small invitations to write, reflect, and connect.

No pressure, no performance.

Just a page, a pause, and a moment of shared attention. Grab yourself a cuppa, pick up a notebook and pen/pencil, and settle in.

Day-1: Begin where you are.

INVITATION: No preparation needed. Just arrive.

WRITE: Write for 7 minutes starting with “Today, I notice…”.

REFLECT: What changed once you began writing - even slightly? Note it down.

CONNECT: What word or sentence suprised you?

Share in the comments, if you’d like to.

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Come back tomorrow, for Day-2…

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#creativewriting
#writetogether

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At the start of my DYCP project, I already had a first draft of 36 Hours, a creative non-fiction work of life writing. What I needed was time to hone it, to shape it into something others might want to read, to figure out how to get it out into the world and what it might mean for my future creative life. Although not all came to fruition during the project, the connections were made, conversations had, and ideas shaped that have led me to where I am now. And it’s a very different place from where I began.

Post DYCP Book Journey (the unfiltered version)

36 Hours was published in November 2022, three years after the DYCP project ended. It was an interesting journey, full of twists and turns and bumps in the road. In the best tradition of saving you from reinventing the wheel, this is how I did it and what I learned along the way.

Editing the manuscript (at least twice):

I read and reread each chapter, weighing and tweaking the language until it held my attention as I hoped it would another reader. In the process, I noticed a gradual distancing from the text, which was something unexpected. It felt like a necessary letting go, a transformation from the status of ‘my book’ to an artefact I was the custodian of.

Getting feedback from many readers:

I asked many people to read and comment on the manuscript. Anyone who was willing. People I ran into at the local Co-op, who wondered what I was up to, got a copy (sorry, not sorry!). This included family, friends, acquaintances, members of a writing group, artists working in other forms, colleagues, former tutors, notable memoirists, especially those dealing with grief or health themes, and professionals working in palliative care.

I wanted two things: honest, constructive feedback to improve the work, and confidence-boosting encouragement.

Although I write and put words into the world, and can appear confident, inside I am an introverted, shy, reticent person; I don’t like to make a fuss. I’m the least likely person to high-five my wins or say, ‘go me!’ I was taught young not to blow my own trumpet; one’s successes were something to be rather ashamed of. Later, I had a professional life on the business end of other people’s creativity, and although happily backstage, it left me insecure about my own creative voice.

So, I needed other humans to read my book and celebrate it as a well-written text. I needed to hear that it was okay for me to claim this version of myself.

The DYCP project was a game-changer in this regard because the funding body I’d approached numerous times, scoring grants for clients’ projects, had permitted me into the same club. This validation, in part, gave me the confidence to approach people for help and to share the manuscript.

Without hesitation, readers were generous with their time and encouragement. I listened to the feedback, as though we were discussing an external project that we all intended to improve.

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Making Publishing Choices and Decisions:

Mainstream publishing is still fairly traditional. So, most MAs in creative writing include sessions on acquiring an agent and getting signed to a publisher, and that had been my intention during the DYCP – to ready myself, to make connections, to gather the right team around me. Afterall, how else do you get your book into the world?

There were a few snags.

One: a powerful sense of protectiveness about my book. It’s a memoir about a deeply personal subject. What on earth would happen if I got signed? I wondered. I imagined the publicity rounds, the bookshop banners, selling the work with Hey, come and buy my amazing new book about my dying husband! It felt unseemly. I realise it’s a massive contradiction. I wanted the work to be out in the world, but I was uncomfortable with it being the centre of attention. It needed something gentler.

Two: the timescale. My first husband, the subject of the book, died in 2009. I had lived with PTSD for a decade when the DYCP project concluded. At the end of 2019, one publisher said to me, The book’s great, but we already have our grief memoir for 2025. This says a lot about the publishing cycle. I knew it would be a long haul, too long.

Three: the editorial process and creative control. One agent wanted me to flesh out the details of my late husband’s life; another wanted a backstory for my stepchildren. But the book deliberately focused on a specific thirty-six-hour period, aside from one or two historic moments deeply relevant to that span. It was an artistic choice. I could foresee other things being challenged, for example, my decision to write in a first-person present voice. Well-intentioned suggestions, but I just couldn’t do it. My doggedness surprised me. I discovered that I wasn’t prepared to alter the book’s shape to fit a genre or a marketing plan. The sense of custodianship ran deep.

Abandoning the traditional route for something hybrid:

My arts career had included a few years in the music industry, where DIY is celebrated. Releasing an album on your own label is smart. It means creative control and financial reward, especially if your work is niche. DIY book publishing, on the other hand, still carries a somewhat negative connotation, associated with poor-quality vanity projects. The assumption is that if the book was good enough, a ‘proper publisher’ would have taken it on.

But consider, for a moment, that in traditional publishing, authors might earn 5%-8% of the retail price in royalties on a paperback. And that, unless you’re likely to be a big-ticket best seller, the marketing budget will be small, and you’ll be expected to do a lot of it yourself. There’s no guarantee retailers will stock your title, especially if it’s leftfield. And there’s the question, as above, about artistic control and editorial process, and the choice of book cover, and… and…

So, for 36 Hours, I decided to take a leaf out of my musician friends’ book and go DIY. I’m not saying it’s the best route for every author or project. But it was the right choice for me at that time, with that book.

I commissioned a respected editor, and we worked together on the final finessing whilst honouring the artistic choices. For the cover, I sketched a dandelion clock with thirty-six seeds floating away. Simple, sparse, quiet and spacious. The authors, academics, and medics who’d read the manuscript, generously offered testimonies I could include in the book and use in publicity. I secured printing and distribution deals, ensuring national and international reach.

Then, in November 2022, I released 36 Hours through Word After Word, a company I’d co-founded a few years earlier to offer creative writing courses, mentoring, editing, and publishing. Ah, the unboxing moment. Unforgettable, because of what it had taken to get there, as a human, as a writer.

The book launch was hosted by my local independent bookshop and held in the annexe of the ancient parish church. It was full of familiar faces from the small town I’d called home for thirty-odd years. This felt safe, held, appropriate, and reverent, honouring the account of my experience and the memory of my deceased husband in the most careful way. It was the best decision and outcome for my first book.

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Future Creative Life

The journey from manuscript to publication would have been plenty to occupy the three years it took. But life rarely goes in a straight line.

The same period also included (but was not limited to) a new job, the COVID-19 pandemic, two house moves, a seriously ill dad and a cancer diagnosis.

The year after the paperback edition, I released the book on Kindle. I was invited to take part in two festivals: the City of Literature Festival, with the National Centre for Writing as part of Norfolk and Norwich Festival (with whom I also recorded a podcast), and in the autumn, the Birmingham Literature Festival. 36 Hours was shortlisted for the East Anglian Book Awards.

I wish I could report that I’ve pursued further opportunities since then, with more festival appearances and work on my next book. But life rarely goes in a straight line.

The two years since publication have included (but are not limited to): deaths of my father and brother, deathmin and house clearances, another cancer diagnosis, becoming a grandma, getting married and turning sixty.

The lows and highs of life lived, within which creative life unfolds.

Re-reading my DYCP application, I’m struck by how tentative yet urgent the language is. I remember well the sense that it was surely my time. That I’d waited long enough. That all the other kids had been playing on the merry-go-round, and I wanted a go. And how I’d tried to put this feeling into an adult, serious register that I knew, as an arts fundraiser, would hit the right notes.

What I’m most struck by is how contained my thinking was then. I made a false distinction between different aspects of my life: Fi the arts professional, juggling with Fi the carer, desperately wanting to be Fi the creative. What was beginning to emerge, unseen, was foregrounded in the very act of applying for the DYCP, even if I couldn’t yet articulate it: to start fully living my creative life, I had to stop seeing it as something separate from the self that had hitherto occupied the world.

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Being Ready

Being ready to make a grant application doesn’t mean having all the answers. I didn’t have the answers when I applied, but I was ready to ask the right questions. The answers began to take shape during the project and have continued to emerge since then: not held within a container called ‘creative life’ but distributed across the wider field of life, lived in all its glorious, terrible, messy humanness.

The DYCP fund reopens this year, with guidelines due to be published in April and applications opening from June. There’s no harm and every benefit to throwing your hat in the ring. If you’re not sure you’re ready, journal your ideas and talk with friends and other artists you trust until you understand what you need and what you want and can articulate it clearly. It’s hard to tell a compelling story about something that lacks shape or substance.

Whether you apply or not, I urge you to honour your creativity as a true facet of being human. Especially now, when so much human creativity is being delegated to AI platforms that provide quick wins (write me 500 words on this, make me a picture of that). Your creativity is your birthright, and a wholly legitimate use of your time, energy, and focus. Whether you bag a grant or not, develop your creative practice, own it, and let it run through every aspect of life. In the end, that’s what really matters.

Here’s a link to Arts Council England: Arts Council England Developing Your Creative Practice Round 24

I used to sketch with a propelling pencil in a small plain paper notebook. I was given an iPad and Apple Pencil for my 60th birthday, and since then, I’ve been enjoying drawing in Procreate. Each has qualities to recommend it.

It’s not about good drawing vs bad drawing. It’s about free drawing, just the same as journaling is about free writing. I do this because I want to, and because I need to. I like playing with words and pictures. It helps me feel calmer because, when I free-write and free-draw, I also notice: this is a thought, this is a feeling. Putting the words and pictures in front of me, I can observe more dispassionately and see where patterns emerge and where I get stuck. I can see where my fantasy version of life meets reality. I can experience where my thinking has got caught in an unhelpful loop and what lights me up.

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This morning I was thinking about writing groups - what I like about them, and how I’m going to start a new one. Tea, biscuits, a few spring flowers, and thoughtful listening came to mind. I was there, quietly present, holding the space, hoping people felt safe to explore with their words.

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We already possess the potential for transition from grub to butterfly.

I’ve reached the end of the my DYCP project and that means drafting the final report for Arts Council England. So it’s a moment for final reflection, thinking about what I’ve learned and considering next steps.

The biggest takeaway for me? This DYCP project has forced me to consider my relationship to life writing. Especially my ability to manage the realities of personal exposure. I committed to a gruelling project. As such, I’ve had to re-inhabit a distressing and painful period in my life. And I’ve had to consider how much I want my creative life to be bound to the public reliving of personal experiences.

There have also been some moments of sheer joy, insight and opportunity, some of which I’d hoped for, and some completely unanticipated.

Stilling the Inner Critic

The desire to have others bear witness to one’s experience, whilst simultaneously wanting to hide behind the sofa, is a contradiction inherent in life writing. And it’s one that I have not fully resolved. I’m not a ‘me’ sort of person. I’m more of an other-focussed rescuer. In this context, writing about myself with the express intention of sharing it publicly feels unnatural and awkward. I can hear my Grandmother’s stern reproaches about showing off – small children, especially girls, were to be seen and not heard.

Whilst other writers might have the confidence to ‘write it, publish it and be damned’, I worry about upsetting people. It feels selfish to own and share one’s story at the expense of another’s well-being. But this means committing to a lifetime of not speaking up, of not authentically being the protagonist in one’s own story. It’s a sacrifice I seem consistently willing to make, but one I wouldn’t demand of others.

Being awarded the DYCP grant has helped me stand more boldly in my own light. The Grandma in my head might still be telling me off, but the award has helped give validity to my creative practice. This, in turn, has helped me to turn down the volume on her megaphone.

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Arts / Science Collaboration

Thinking about the uses of life writing and how to share my work, I met with Bobbie Farsides, Professor of Biomedical Ethics at the Brighton and Sussex Medical School. We talked about using the text as a tool for trainee GPs.

Following our initial conversations, Bobbie introduced me to Rose Turner FRCP, Consultant in Palliative Medicine at the Martlets Hospice in Brighton. We’d hoped to organise an event as part of Brighton Festival in summer 2019. The event was to feature readings of my work, an interview/conversation with Rose, and a panel discussion before an audience of the public and medics. Sadly, due to circumstances beyond our control, we decided to postpone. But watch this space.

Although now on hold, this is a really exciting development and a positive outcome for the project, as it means 36 Hours could have real, lasting public benefit. It’s been exciting to consider the potential of an arts/science collaboration. And to consider how these initial discussions might spark further public engagement with the work.

My Story – a course in life writing

In addition to the DYCP work, I wrote and delivered My Story, a Life Writing course.

Developing and delivering this programme has been a way to explore and share my life-writing practice. The aim is to help people to find the story within their story, often with surprising (to them) results. Life writing, as a process and practice, is perhaps as important as the resulting text. It’s been interesting to witness how a deep engagement with personal narrative has proved a catalyst for getting to grips with what makes a great story in more general terms. In other words, life writing is still creative writing; it needs shape, intention, drama, place and pace. And the techniques of life writing - telling personal narratives - can be equally deployed in creating fictional worlds.

Next Steps

Overall, DYCP has been a game-changer for me. Receiving the award boosted my confidence and helped me own my identity as a writer.

Next steps for me are:

> confirming an agent to support the distribution of 36 Hours.

> developing an online life writing programme to build an international community of life writers.

> delivering a public event with BSMS and exploring the potential to extend it to other areas.

> holding a residency at two locations in the east of England to roll out a life-writing engagement programme.

Emerging

I can now see that a future career transition really is possible: moving away from my life at the business end of the arts and towards a focus on my writing practice. This is an incredibly energising thought.

What this journey has revealed to me is that we already possess the potential for transition from grub to butterfly. With the right encouragement and commitment, whatever our age or circumstances, we can emerge and fly.

This will be my final DYCP blog post, but it’s not the end of the story.

A series of blog posts about my journey through my Arts Council England Developing Your Creative Practice project.

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Zero-point energy is the lowest possible energy that a quantum mechanical system may have. In this project, Zero Point stands in for the contradiction of the chaotic void, the intense single point of energy and the enervated vacuum of grief, whatever its source. Each painting represents a different expression of that experience.

Before I began to find the words to express my experience, I moved paint around on canvas, pushing, pulling, smoothing, disrupting. I was trying to get at the thing behind, beneath, between. I was trying to see it, feel it, represent it. I was trying to rend the veil between my outer, coping, resilient social self and my inner selves, who were struggling in their various ways.

My mother was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2005.

Her illness was ongoing when my husband became ill. She watched his terminal journey, fearing it might foreshadow hers: the brain metastases in particular. Daily life became dominated by one form of cancer or another. I felt surrounded by things I couldn’t see, confused by the two-faced otherness and sameness of rogue cells and unable to protect those I loved from their lurking, sinister and destructive squatters.

I found myself drawn to neoplasms as things in themselves. If encountered in a more benign context, they are complex, beautiful and extraordinary natural phenomena. As viewed under electron microscopy, they’re like some kind of exotic seed or marine creature.

In their final weeks and days, I sat vigil at my loved one’s bedsides, in my mind’s eye, trying to see inside; to imagine what was going on at that moment, the industrious, pointless replication of cells that would ultimately wipe themselves out in the process.

The paintings were attempts to capture this experience of trying to see.

I used to think that, philosophically speaking, language was bound to miss the mark when expressing experience – that words were conceptual containers of social-historical making that inevitably constrained thought and experience by what was permitted in a given lexicon. I felt that visual art may have done a better job of communicating what it is to be in the world. But what does an abstract painting communicate, without a label or explanation from the artist? Would a viewer look at the four images in this post and understand them as views of the same scene through different windows?

As I explored the potential of metaphor, proxy, myth, and narrative, I found language to be far richer and more nuanced than I’d allowed in my earlier thinking. The right words in the right order allow us to look slantwise at life, revealing experience in richer, more layered, more nuanced ways. Words, language – these are not hermetically sealed containers for experience. The myriad combinations reveal conceptual boundaries that are porous and leaky.

In Zero Point #3 above, the dark point is a throughway, a liminal threshold to another hidden space. Life and death are thus. These images are a physical, visceral experience re-worked into canvas.

In 36 Hours, I want language to expand and fill out these attempts to see. And whether it’s a painting or a text, it’s about a viewer or reader bearing witness to the microcosm of my lived experience and extrapolating this to the macrocosm of the human condition. We all die, we all grieve, we all suffer. I claim nothing unique about my losses, but my experience of them is unique to me. Maybe in sharing them, others will find validation, recognition and some comfort.

A series of blog posts about my journey through my Arts Council England Developing Your Creative Practice project.

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36 Hours is a detailed account of a man’s last day.

The man, my late husband, died at home, just short of a year after a diagnosis of lung cancer.

I began writing the book during my MA in Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths. It didn’t emerge until the summer term of the first year of the programme. I’d skirted around the topic, writing various pieces of fiction that felt like playing in the dressing-up box. As in, they weren’t really me; the language was not quite my own voice.

It was a Sunday afternoon in late March, around the anniversary of the death. I was sitting on the sofa, looking down the hallway towards the front door. Memories flooded in, I picked up my laptop, and began to write.

I was almost a bystander in the process, observing myself with interest. It had been six years since my husband’s death, and it had taken that long for me to reach a point where the experience permitted itself to be written. I’m not entirely sure why, given a long habit of keeping a journal, other than this was a different approach altogether – a clear and deliberate intention to write a complete work with a strong narrative structure.

The words tumbled out with urgency, each sentence making visible an interior experience of loss that had, until then, been hidden.

The form emerged spontaneously: writing in the first person present tense. The effect was to drop the reader unambiguously into the scene where the day could unfold without the distancing effect of third person and backstory.

I wanted to convey the intense feeling of claustrophobia I experienced – being isolated at home as a carer, knowing what the outcome would be, but not knowing exactly when or how.

As the work progressed, the narrative began to organise itself into hourly blocks as I worked my way through 36 hours, beginning at 6am on Monday and ending at 6pm on Tuesday. The effect for me was an unfolding of memory – re-living each hour in vivid detail.

I shared the opening two hours with my MA workshop group and was moved and pleased by its reception. For the first time, I felt I’d found and shared my authentic voice. The work is an intensely personal and intimate account, which might be a reason to hold back when sharing it with strangers. Yet it felt liberating – bearing witness to my lived experience.

I completed the work during the second year of the MA, benefitting from a weekly life-writing workshop with Blake Morrison. The feedback and suggestions helped me shape and hone the structure and bring even more authenticity to the narrator (aka me).

The therapeutic impact of life-writing has been profound. When I weighed the printed, hard-bound manuscript in my hands, my MA thesis submission, with the title printed in gold along the spine, I thought, ‘There. It’s out. I don’t have to carry it around in my head anymore.’ That’s not to say that I miraculously ‘got over’ my husband’s death, but rather, that I could permit myself to set it aside when the burden was too much to carry. The book became a container for my lived experience, something I could refer to whenever I wanted, like one might pull a photo album from the shelf. The act of committing memory to text allowed me to reclaim some of the inner mental space that had previously been swallowed up.

This is why life-writing is so interesting to me – of course, I want the work to have merit ‘as writing’, but also the process is philosophically and therapeutically potent. It reveals something of the human condition through an account of a particular moment, allowing the reader to bear witness to the writer’s experience.

Returning to the image at the top of the post, in Chinese conceptual artist Liang Shaoji’s work, the silkworm symbolises generosity, and its silken thread is emblematic of human life and history. Many of his sculptures consist of objects, such as the wire cots in Beds/Nature Series No. 10, around which silkworms have spun their cocoons. Exhibited as part of Art of Change – New Directions from China, at the Haywood Gallery in 2012. I am strongly drawn to the literal, lyrical, and metaphorical possibilities of threads, spinning, weaving, and mark-making as a way into untangling, unravelling, and revealing lived experience.

A series of blog posts about my journey through my Arts Council England Developing Your Creative Practice project 2018-19.

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During my career, I’ve worked with a multitude of theatre-makers, actors, directors, dancers, choreographers, composers, musicians, artists and curators. I’ve never met one who considered themselves beyond learning. In fact, I’d say quite the opposite. The majority will have studied their chosen discipline in further and higher education, and many will later relish the opportunity to advance their practice at a postgraduate level, feeling all the richer for it. They might have arrived with talent, but it’s guidance, dedication and practice that will have transformed them from good to great.

It’s been a surprise, then, to find such contempt expressed for creative writing as an undergraduate and postgraduate discipline. The prevailing idea is that writers are born, not made. It’s a view that I’ve heard expressed by published authors who haven’t been down the bachelor’s or master’s degree path. Moreover, it’s a view that I’ve heard expressed by published authors who teach on creative writing programmes and still judge them fairly worthless.

This seems a wholly miserable and negative position to take, devoid of generosity, kindness or appreciation for the multitude of reasons candidates might embark upon an undergraduate or higher degree, in any discipline.

MA in Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths College, University of London

I’m all for people pursuing learning at any level, at any age, with whatever background and motivation. There’ll always be the negative naysayers who get a kick out of ridiculing others’ endeavours. But I say, ignore them! If one of the things you want to do with your one wild and precious life (thank you, Mary Oliver) is to dedicate your time (and money, if you’re not fortunate enough to get funding) to the pursuit of learning or excellence in your chosen discipline, then why the hell not? I’m ever thankful that I did because it meant two thoroughly interesting years with a truly diverse group of writers. Whether specialising in fiction, poetry or life writing, each had their own authentic story, motivation and legitimate reason for being there. Bonds were formed, and writing was improved.

In my case, the reasons I chose an MA in Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths were as follows:

1. To re-learn how to live:

After three major bereavements, a little under 5-years apart, I had a choice. Either get busy living or get busy dying. In the derangement of grief, the rules that once applied are forgotten. Grief makes infants of us, and we must learn again, almost from scratch, how to walk and how to live in the world. For me, there was a great comfort to be found in the nursery that was Goldsmiths: new people to meet, interesting ideas to think about, even the 2-hour commute from Wivenhoe in North Essex, to South London was an important exercise in being in the world, negotiating and managing the overwhelm of the morning rush hour.

2. To gain confidence in my voice:

I’ve been scribbling my whole life – poems, songs, observations, stories, journals, ideas. It’s been my guilty secret. My Mum was a writer. My brother is a writer. Both, in my opinion, goliaths, in whose shadow my sloppy spelling and grammar shrunk my already small voice to a whisper. Nothing intentional, I’m sure. Mum was also an editor, and from her, my brother and I learned the discipline of the editor’s knife, a skill that’s benefited both of us in our own fields. I took a couple of excellent creative writing courses at Wivenhoe Bookshop (my local!) with Petra McQueen. I wrote a few short pieces, and I shared them with Mum. They came back with a red pen and comments. Although grateful for the care she took, I just never felt that anything I could write would pass muster or be good enough.

It wasn’t until after Mum’s death in early 2014 that I allowed myself to entertain the idea of the MA. Once I’d been awarded a place, I imagined sharing the news with her in one of our regular phone calls or emails. In my imaginings, rather than a doubting, judging voice, I heard her say ‘Oh, well done, love’. I felt that I knew she would have been thrilled. Her being there, but not being there, gave me the encouragement to go for it and the space to pursue it, which highlights one of the strange contradictions about love and loss, missing and moving on.

Over two years, I gained confidence in my voice, always hearing her gentle scolds about my grammar and spelling, which kept me on my toes.

3. To study with some interesting mentors and peers:

After decades of filling notebooks with the outer, observable world and my reflections upon my inner orientation towards it, life writing felt like my natural home. Of course, fiction, too, is a reflection of the human condition, and I’m an avid escapist. I love a damn good story, well told. But in my own writing, I’ve always been drawn to the real and the possibility of language to get to the deep heart of the human condition. It’s about revealing the universal truths in the particular experience. Poetry does this for me too, and I often approach a story as a problem space, trying different forms until I get to the nub of the thing. Sometimes this will be verse, sometimes prose.

I chose the Goldsmiths MA for the opportunity to be mentored by Blake Morrison, a poet and memoirist. The second-year Life Writing workshop with Prof Morrison was worth the rest of the MA put together. We were a small group that year, joined during the term by a couple of PhD researchers: all fascinating women with remarkable stories to tell. Small was definitely beautiful because we had lots of opportunities to share, give, and receive detailed feedback on our developing projects. I’d already begun work on what was to become my portfolio and what would be my first book – the work that DYCP is providing the time to finish. The opportunity to bring this work before the scrutiny and gaze of my peers and mentor was incredible. I received encouragement like never before, as well as astute, careful notes from all concerned, something I’ll be forever grateful for.

4. To Put my Creativity Front and Centre:

The MA was the first time in 25-years that I’d allowed myself free rein to pursue my passion. All that time focusing on other people, professionally and personally, and coming to terms with various things that life chucked my way, had dulled my creative spirit. I felt a terrible void at the core. Whilst the MA didn’t fill that void (that would have been asking too much), the simple act of enrolling and committing to it put my creativity front and centre. It was a tectonic shift, after which I knew nothing would ever be quite the same again.

Closing the Circle

To come full circle, being in a community of learning and experimentation is a joy and a privilege. Not all MAs are created equal, and even the excellent ones have plenty of room for improvement. Choose wisely, but manage your expectations. Tutors and peers are fallible humans, and there’s a huge element of luck when it comes to connecting with your cohort. Will an MA turn you into a writer? No. Will it guarantee you publication? No. It can do neither of these things. Like everything else in life, what you bring to the experience and what you invest in it – your talent, time, passion, energy, commitment – is what, in the end, will make the difference between, on the one hand, a mediocre and, on the other, a transformative experience. Your improvement as a writer and the creative life that follows your MA is in your gift.

On Giving Back

My MA was transformative. It put me on a new trajectory. I was freed from the doubting-mother voice and began to hear something more helpful instead. I realised I had a top-notch, encouraging editor by my side forever. It allowed me to face my truth and to write it with authenticity – to be seen and heard. I was even able to put my helping gene to good use, finding a natural comfort in mentoring and tutoring other writers at different points in their journeys, and after graduating, co-founded a creative writing development project, Word After Word. I found my tribe, my creative home, my voice, my mojo.

For these reasons, I say ignore the naysayers. If you want to devote your time and energy to the pursuit of excellence and learning, then do it, own it, whatever form that takes. In the end, I find myself disinterested in the debate about the value of creative writing MAs. It’s a rather pompous conversation happening in an echo chamber driven by a controversy-hungry media.

I’m much more interested in how learning shifts perspective, how it opens people up in new and surprising ways and ultimately, what people do with their experience, with their ‘one wild and precious life’.

A series of blog posts about my journey through my Arts Council England Developing Your Creative Practice project 2018-2019.

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Writing is my business; turning artists’ visions into funder-friendly prose that will engage and persuade and generate a grant. Begging letters, as my Dad likes to call them. I don’t see it quite like that, but I get his point. For nearly three decades, I’ve dedicated my professional life to the realisation of people’s creative visions, as a producer, as a strategist, as a mentor and as a fundraiser. I’ve considered this a privilege. Think of me as an arts’ Doula, supporting creators during the birth of an idea, helping them to ease new works into the world, shape them, grow them and put them before audiences. However modest the ripple, I hope I’ve made a difference and contributed something to our shared cultural life.

Beneath this public persona, there’s been a shy creator beavering away, wrestling with self-doubt. It’s taken me decades to reach the point of claiming my own voice. The reasons are complex and numerous, nebulous and concrete; a mixture of circumstance and excuse. For now, it’s enough to share that it took me until 2014, my 50th year, to acknowledge the voice that had been whispering in my ear for decades and allow it to be heard. I embarked upon an MA in Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London. Under the naked, strip-light scrutiny of group critiques and gloves-off tutorials, the voice was small and faltering; shy at first and barely audible. I put words down on paper, but they weren’t quite my own. Gradually, with encouragement and help from various quarters, the small voice became stronger and bolder and began to sound more like me.

Thus it was that after various creative experiments and searching and some false starts, I wrote the first draft of a memoir (more about that choice later) and then in July 2018, drafted an application to Arts Council England to the newly launched ‘Developing Your Creative Practice (DYCP)’ fund, to finish my first book.

The Application

I know lots of people are writing DYCP bids right now. It’s very competitive, precisely because, uniquely, unlike ACE Project Grants, this fund really is about your creative practice, not about realising a project that has a public benefit. If I can share some helpful feedback, do take time to consider whether your bid would be better suited to an under-£15k ACE Project Grant. Ask yourself if the bid is about your practice, or about public outcomes and outputs.

For me, the application process was filled with anxiety and self-doubt, which seems incredible given a near 100% success rate with Arts Council applications across my career. The difference was that, confronted with the reality of writing about my own work, I now fully appreciated why artists commission me to write for them. Unless you’ve got a great big ego (spoiler alert, I don’t have), it’s damned hard writing about your own work. I knew this intellectually before, but when confronted with my own insecurities, I felt the sting of doubt precisely.

Writing about my writing forced me to consider it in the round – not solely as a production (my book) but as a process and as a deeper expression of a creative voice. This reflection forced me to really interrogate exactly how the support would help me to develop my practice. My imposter syndrome was huge and crippling. I felt like a fraud. The words I rely on every day, my familiars and friends, scattered and scurried to hidden places, the way silverfish slip through the cracks in the skirting and floorboards when the light’s turned on. The barren page mocked me with all the usual believable nonsense: ‘Who do you think you are?’, ‘You’re not a writer, ‘you’re a fraud, ‘you’re a joke. And so on and so forth.

If I could have written from my heart, I’d have said: ‘Please help! I’m a highly sensitive, introverted creator who’s rubbish at speaking up for myself. I’ve been kidnapped by a lifetime of over-helping, and whenever I’ve tried to escape, I’ve fallen into deep potholes or got lost in the fog or misread the signposts or taken directions from variously malevolent or well-meaning or lost souls.’ I’d have pleaded: ‘Just give me a break! Please, please, please let this be my turn, because I’ve waited so long and I’ve not asked for anything before and I’ll be really, really good, I promise. Instead, I wrote what needed to be written. Adopting the mantle of arts professional, I wrote about transitioning from producer/consultant to creator. I wrung the damned words out of me until, at 2-minutes to the deadline, feeling sick and stupid and embarrassed, I pressed submit.

The Decision

Hot-desking in a cafe in early October 2018, my laptop open and working on a grant application for a client, an email arrived from Arts Council saying ‘Action required: Your decision letter is available for review. Project Name: Transitioning. Here comes the rejection, I thought, as I logged in to Grantium, Arts Council England’s electronic grant portal, my shoulders already slouched in preemptive disappointment. I had to read it twice. Three times. On about the fourth time, I took it in: Offer Letter. I felt fireworks going off inside and a grin as wide as the Golden Gate Bridge starting to stretch across my face. I looked around the cafe. It was okay; no one had noticed.

Now, to be transparent, I’m not a published writer, but then I’ve never sent my work out into the world. It’s been my secret thing, so I can’t honestly say how it would have been received if I’d given it wings. But there in front of me on the screen, in black and white, was an endorsement of sorts. I sat back in my chair, took a sip of my coffee, and said to myself, ‘I write. I’m writing. Ergo, I’m a writer. And it’s no longer just me who knows or believes it.’

The secret was out.

It felt phenomenal.

A series of blog posts about my journey through my Arts Council England Developing Your Creative Practice project 2018-2019

So, I want to define this fledgling Substack space as a place of unravelling: untangling, organising, discarding and keeping.

When my maternal grandmother died in 2003, I inherited an old biscuit tin full of embroidery silks, neatly organised into a palette of vibrant colours. In the way that held objects permit time travel, I was for a moment 7, Grandma showing me how to thread an embroidery needle and sew a series of neat, flat leaves with satin stitch and three shades of green, to edge a white linen tablecloth. That delicious new fabric scent when we lifted the lid, and the feel of the soft skeins between my fingers.

A few years after she died, I had an idea for an embroidery project of my own. I opened the tin only to discover a wild chaos of colour, everything tangled like it had been buried alive and struggling to get out. It seemed fitting. She was a complicated woman.

That’s what my thoughts feel like right now, across multiple axes.

If only I could tip them out and dump the whole sorry confusion onto a big, clear surface. Let’s say a farmhouse table, something of substance, solidity, and calm. I might be able to begin the slow, patient work of unravelling, trying to find an end and unknot each thought back to the source. I might have a fighting chance of making some sense out of the chaos.

Let’s say this Substack space is that big farmhouse table.

But still, where to start?

It’s January, and if any month is for list-making, this is it. Over the years, I’ve made them all: ways I should try to improve on last year. My hopes, dreams, and ambitions. What I want to be when I grow up and things to do before I die. All the exercises I’ll do, languages I’ll learn, books I’ll start and finish reading and writing, and tunes I’ll master. Occasionally, I’ll open an old journal and find such a list. They’re remarkably consistent, which suggests little progress is made from one year to the next. I suppose that makes me an optimist.

In a break from tradition, rather than the usual intention-setting hoopla (and to create a little frisson of curiosity when I re-read this in 2032), I decided to write a list of things that have got me all knotted up.

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I ummed and ahhed, dear reader, about whether to bore you with the full list, because it turns out I’m extremely knotted up about many things. However, to summarise into a few broad categories (politics, art, life, etc.) feels like a cop-out. One purpose of this Substack is to be a permission giver to others, which means encouraging by doing: taking up space, having a voice, being visible, and being human. As an introverted, conflict-averse, people pleaser who doesn’t like to make a fuss, putting my words into the world like this is quite a thing for me. And I know it’s a thing for many others. Please accept it as an invitation to share a moment of lived, authentic humanity in this strange plastic age we’ve slipped into.

What follows is the first pass through the tangle of thoughts dumped out onto this virtual farmhouse table. It’s a map of the terrain I’ve walked, presented not in order of importance but in the order in which the words popped into my head. These themes are connected solely by virtue of being ideas and questions I hold in mind. Some will elicit responses as tiny as a paragraph, and others will invite multiple reflections.

When I attend or facilitate creative writing groups, a prompt offered with the right sort of encouragement can help spark the imagination into creation: a word, a phrase, a title, a question. My list of knotty topics will serve as prompts to get me going over the coming year. No promises. No expectations. Just a modest ambition towards a slow, steady unravelling. Maybe they’ll generate a page or two in your journal, too.

Let’s see how this experiment plays out!

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Departure

It’s taken me two years to write this, my first substack post. So hello, thanks for being here, thanks for reading, and sorry to keep you (and me) waiting so long.

Beginning

I’m at a threshold: the end of a year’s sabbatical during which there’s been much time for reflection, thinking, healing, working stuff out. I dare say some of this will emerge in my future musings, but for now, being human is a messy business, right?

Becoming

This is a thinking hearth, a safe space where I will share thoughts, ideas and reflections. on the things that nag at me: creativity, philosophy, women’s health, AI, grief, love, kindness, slow living… It’s new, so bear with me while I find my feet (and my pen!) and get going.

The overarching theme is a deep curiosity about how in these strange times we can better companion each other across the major thresholds of life. It’s an invitation to shared humanity.

I will write something at least once a month and maybe more frequently if the mood takes me. It’s about becoming more visible and being heard above the noise of an increasingly confusing and chaotic world, and you are so welcome here.

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