Archive for the ‘teaching’ Category

Smithy Update

Sunday, August 14th, 2011

I’m really proud of the progress Sarah and I have been making at the Writing Smithy over the past few months. Recently Sarah and I have been guest blogging about our work at the Smithy for Andrew Oldham. We do have plans to extend the Writing Smithy website by adding a blog – where we’ll expand on some of the topics we brought up in our residency. But in the meantime, you might be interested in these posts.

Setting up the Smithy (it’s all in a name)

Miners and Watchmakers (using metaphors to think about writing process and to work with writers)

The Poet as  Novelist (the bigger picture of structure and sequencing)

Before you start (some things to consider before you commission a mentor / editor)

Goal Setting (not just SMART)

Making a Space (tips on carving out time to write, think, read and daydream)

Going it Alone (working without a mentor – or moving on from a mentoring relationship)

Posted in ideas, teaching, tips | No Comments »

Back

Monday, July 18th, 2011

I spent this morning visiting the high school that I ‘attended’ as a teenager. It’s not far away from when I live and I drive past it often but I have always looked the other way. When writing Cold Light I wondered about contacting my old teachers and asking for a tour, just to get my imagination kick-started, and then decided, probably through a mixture of shyness and cowardice, not to bother. Today was the first time I passed through those doors in (gets out fingers and toes) thirteen years.

It has been repainted, rebuilt, gentrified. There is more glass, less grass, more computers, better equipped art and technology spaces. It smells the same, though. And the chairs in the dining room have been replaced, and somehow the room which used to feel like a football stadium has shrunk a little, and there isn’t a library any more (!) but the sound of classroom doors being kicked open and crowds spilling out into corridors hasn’t changed either. The door handles were lower than I remembered them to be, the stools in the science labs nearer to the floor.

I spent the morning in a tucked away, slightly more bedraggled bit of the school meeting the students and teachers who work together on an ‘Extended Curriculum’ – which is school for those who, for whatever reason, can’t, don’t or won’t manage the standard syllabus and structure of secondary education. If such a thing had existed back in the day, I’d have been there. A can’t, don’t and a won’t. It was written on my records that I was a school refuser. I prefer to think of myself as a school decliner. No, but thank you.

It might be that I go back in a little while and do some creative writing with these students. I think something that can help make most people feel happy and more settled in the world, more at ease with their own existence, and more comfy about the existence of other people, is doing something that only they can do. I’ve never taught young people before, and it might be that the thing they discover about themselves is that they are not writers, but artists, or musicians, or listeners, or cooks, or teachers, or cyclists, or something else. Or that they need to hang on a bit longer because what it is that they do hasn’t become apparent yet. If I can get writing to help with that, that will be a good thing, I think.

Posted in busy, childhood, in two minds, memories, reasons for writing, teaching | 4 Comments »

Tug O War

Monday, April 11th, 2011

Bad blogger again.

I am very deep into my first draft of the third book. As yet mainly un-named. Just over 50k words in. I want to get it written as fast as possible because I can already guess the sort of editing that it is going to need and I want to give myself plenty of time to do it.

I didn’t think writing to a deadline would suit me but imagining my editor drumming her fingers on her desk waiting for me to type a bit quicker is actually very helpful. Vanishing into the spaces between the words and the noise the keyboard makes is wonderful. I reckon if I could fully explain how happy it makes me I wouldn’t need to do it.

But there are other demands on my time. I am pulled out of my head and into the world and then the book makes me irritable and hauls me back again. I can only imagine how fun this, along with the anxiety about Cold Light’s imminent arrival, is making me to live with.

Tugs in the other direction include two recent interviews – journalists coming inside the house, which was new and strange. Both very nice and polite and complimentary about my domestic offerings (tea, fig rolls, a token amount of pre-visit hoovering up) but Strangers all the same, inside My House and with Tape Recorders.

I was naively unprepared and expected to be asked only about the books, but that wasn’t how it panned out. I’d really like to have a body double Jenn for interviews. Someone bubbly and cheery with thoughts like lasers instead of grumpy, inarticulate woolly me.

Something I have learned this week about being interviewed: the only way to deal with the thoughts about what an idiot you were, and what stupid things you said, is to refuse to think them at all. Type, instead. Drink tea. Get over yourself.

Teaching – busy at this time of year as I have one set hurtling towards the end of their first year, and the handing in of portfolios. I suspect they are still disbelieving when I tell them one of the most useful things they can train themselves to do for their writing is to read it out loud to themselves, look up words they’re not sure of and be consistent about italicising the names of books and computer games. It is true. Little things count. And the other lot, slowly losing themselves in longer short story collections and novels and forgetting that they’re going to get marked on this sort of thing, because merits and passes and distinctions are not that important when it comes to writing good books. It’s a tiring time, working with them, but the best time so far.

On the way home from Manchester there’s a man who has sat next to me twice now who does that legs wide apart thing. He opens a textbook to learn Chinese and then puts his head back against the seat and closes his eyes. I coughed a little and touched his arm (I thought he was sleeping) and I told him he was squashing me a little bit. He said, ‘I know love,’ and I laughed, feeling envious of that amount of confidence, and leg room.

More things tugging me away from the first draft, and the pleasure of becoming invisible:

My first event in a long time as part of my fellowship at Manchester University. I read a bit from Cold Light AND a very early drafted part of something from book three. Which I worry might have been a mistake. It’s like a new love right now. I want to talk about how brilliant it is all the time, but I’m experienced enough to know we’re heading for a fall out sometime soon and those sort of spats are better fought and won behind closed doors. I read it anyway, never heard it out loud before (that’s right, I don’t take my own advice you clever, close reading devil, you!) but I think it worked okay.

I don’t think I would do it again. It felt like taking off my clothes and pointing out my problem areas to a gathering composed of all the people who have ever dumped me. But it only seemed fair – the audience was stuffed with students who have been trusting and brave enough to show me their drafts and speak to me about their ideas. It felt right to return the favour.

I ate frogs legs, that was new. And was very sad to wave goodbye to my fellow fellow, the poet Paul Batchelor who moves onto new things this month, and whose poems have restored me on more than one occasion, especially in the past few weeks when all my typing has left me emptied out and tearful by the end of the day.

This week there is lots of writing to look forward to and on Friday I am helping to make a book trailer for Cold Light.

(the picture is of Florence La Due who was a cowgirl and ‘champion roper’ and, I imagine, able to handle herself very well in a tug o war, thank you very much)

Posted in anxiety, brown cardigan, busy, Cold Light, doubt, interviews, teaching | 2 Comments »

Nothing

Sunday, January 30th, 2011

I think the fetishisation of process is both an exercise in procrastination (for the maker) and a refusal to engage with the finished work (for the audience).  But what do I know?

From the Q and A section of Jon McGregor’s website – in answer to a question about the pens and paper he uses to write with.

As always, I’m in two minds. I’m  not sure if I should have this quotation printed out on the back of my business cards, tattooed on the inside of my eyelids and scrawled in black marker on the wall in front of my desk  – or if I should write a long ranty blog post about how much I disagree with the sentiment.

I admire Jon McGregor’s work hugely and as a writer I can hear his frustration with interview questions about typewriters and at times I have shared it. But then discussions about ‘process’ more generally are a huge part of what I do as a teacher – helping students to learn technique, or to isolate and improve the technique they are already using instinctively. I think having students reflect on how they write and to examine how other writers read and write is integral to their improvement.And it is what I try to do to improve my own writing.

But then again, what do I know? I am always in two minds about everything.

I’ve noticed several spats going on in facebookland recently about various political events – topics I never talk about in public at all. This silence of mine is because I believe the days when novelists had status as public intellectuals and rent-a-gobs, trotted out for an opinion on every major event in public life are gone, and properly so. We make things up, more or less well. We use stories to comment on the real world. Or we don’t. We use fiction to tell the truth. Or we don’t. Why would any of that make our opinions especially valuable?

And my silence also exists because I am so utterly of my generation it is unreal. I find it more or less impossible to come down on any particular side in very many subjects. Everything I write examines the idea of truthfulness, of reliable arguments, of words meaning what they are supposed to mean. Point of view. It isn’t that I don’t care – it’s just that by virtue of being a writer I think I’ve made it impossible for myself to engage with these debates in any meaningful way.

Perhaps it’s because I grew up in a household where there was certainly a right and a wrong way to see the world, and my opinions about things were consistently wrong. Growing up under the weight of that kind of intellectual violence makes me uninterested in dishing it out to others. So if you disagree with me, I’m not interested in proving you wrong or convincing you to think what I think. If I even think it.

It feels very important to me to practice informed disinterest. I know it is an impossible stance to truly have. But I am interested in getting there.

Which brings me back to Jon McGregor. Maybe he’s right and I’m wrong after all.

Maybe all this blogging about writing, teaching writing, reading writing and talking about reading is just getting in the way of the reading and writing. Maybe the reflection is the final step of the process, maybe it’s just all hot air.

I think it probably depends.

And if this all sounds like cowardly navel gazing and a waste of words to you, well, I can see the value in that argument too.

Posted in brown cardigan, in two minds, procrastination, reasons for writing, soapbox, teaching | 5 Comments »

Better

Monday, October 18th, 2010

Well, if you’ve time to moan about it, you can’t be that busy, right?

After four months of getting to grips with a new baby and working on edits, copy edits, cuts etc to Cold Light – all of which has taken place in the tiny, quiet (although fairly clean…) world of my own house, it has been lovely and strange and scary to get out into the world again. I feel like I’ve emerged from a really long sleep in a hot, dark room. Like I did when I got woken up at 11.30pm as a child and brought into the room where the New Year’s Eve party was happening. Rubbing my eyes and working up to joining in. I’ve had the shortest maternity leave known to woman-kind (nine days, I think, and for six of those I was in hospital) but never mind. I can sit about when I’m old.

So yes, I’ve been busy. There’s the regular teaching at UCLAN – the Introduction to Creative Writing module, which is a series of two hour workshops meant to, as it says on the tin, introduce the students to various forms and techniques in writing so they’re prepared to hand in a portfolio shortly before Christmas. It is an introductory level course (as you may have gathered) and there’s the difficulty – how can you do ‘character’ or ‘setting’ in two hours with twenty students? As always with short courses, I can only show the students some of the possibilities, let them practice and give them a place to get mine and each other’s feedback – most of their learning, I hope, is going to take place between workshops.

Then there’s the occasional workshops I do for other organisations – no marking, no pressure on me to make sure the students pass – the workshop isn’t a component of a course. The participants on these courses are often older, more widely read, less confident about reading to each other. The difficulty is establishing trust and a rapport with participants who don’t know me, don’t know each other and who usually have totally different experience levels and ambitions for their work. There’s no continuing relationship, so warming up to each other and getting to know each other gradually. You’re in at the deep end.

At the end of last month I did a three hour session on Creating Character for the Lancashire Writing Hub – I was supposed to teach this before the summer, but had to unexpectedly cancel all my work – it was great to pick up where I’d left off, see some familiar faces and deal with the ever-fascinating task of inventing imaginary people with increasingly tricky games and writing prompts. We got a few brilliant pieces of writing by the end of the night – the beginnings to some interesting stories about undertakers as accomplices to murder, commuting agoraphobics, and a monologue about cleaning a toilet before a hot date. Good stuff!

After that, two workshops for Salford Libraries about writing personal histories for the Pages Ago competition -  library workshops are always so friendly and I love helping people turn real experiences, memories and settings into fiction. I get nervous when I teach, but never in libraries. I still feel at home in them.

Soon, a day long workshop for Litfest about blogging – I’m especially looking forward to this one as I’ve not done any work with bloggers since the Out on A Limb project. I think there may be one or two places left, if you’re commutable to Lancaster, free on the 6th of November and interested in learning about blogging from a writer’s perspective.

And finally, resuming my (small) mentoring practice, working with two mentees at various points along the journey of their first novel.Feeling privileged to be standing by and cheering on from the sidelines as writers wrestle with the difficult problems about tense, structure and point of view – weighing up the options, experimenting, dealing with the anxiety and the writer’s block. Talking about character and watching these imaginary people develop and make journeys of their own. It’s tiring and I should probably charge more than I do but I love it. Mr gets annoyed on my behalf when people ask me to do  / write  / teach things and add that they won’t be offering a fee, because I do if for the love of it, right – ‘only people who hate their jobs can get paid?’ (he says). I know what he means, but mentoring is something I could almost do for free, I like it so much.

Who’s Rocky’s manager? Mickey? I feel like him, hanging about very close to, but outside the ring with my sponge and bucket. *hit the one in the middle!*

I need to watch Rocky more. I’ve got the boxed set. Fine set of films. There’s very little you need to know about life that is not contained in Rocky 1 or Rocky 4. I’ve always seen myself as more of an Adrian than a Mickey, but everyone can change (boom!)

Funny, because some days all this peripheral work about writing, other people’s writing, feels too much – and drains me, and makes me wonder why I bother, and other days it can feel exciting and stimulating and as if I’m involved in a community of people doing just the same sort of things as I do. Just like some days my novel can feel like a wonderful, special, clever thing, and other days the dullest most inane set of words anyone has ever inflicted on the world.

The work doesn’t change that much. Sleep, and unceremoniously deleting a few emails, and getting to the end of a t0-do list and playing with clay can make all the difference.

Posted in anxiety, busy, library, multi-tasking, teaching | 2 Comments »

Blogging Perils and Pitfalls

Monday, August 23rd, 2010

I am looking forward to the Blogging For Beginners day-long workshop that I’m doing for Litfest. The Storey is a magnificent venue and Litfest put on some brilliant events there. I also love meeting people who are interested in the same sort of things as I am, and getting to talk to them about it. Which is a big part of what teaching is all about. If you are interested in signing up, details are here.

Part of the workshop is going to be about the tricky side of blogging – the worrying things that can sometimes happen as a consequence of putting yourself out there on-line and how you anticipate / prepare for / avoid them.

Perhaps I’m just noticing blogging perils more now I’ve started to think about them in advance of my workshop, but recently I have noticed a few on-line friends having bad experiences – with trolling from anonymous commenters, sarcastic remarks on facebook pages from envious fellow writers, hacked twitter accounts,  plagiarism of stories and poems posted on blogs and forums… all kinds of horridness.

My version of a bad experience might not be yours. I don’t think I’d be upset by an anonymous trolling commenter because they usually make themselves look so daft it would only be funny, although I do worry about my privacy and the privacy of my family. The benefits I get from on-line exposure (making friends, getting invited to do readings and workshops, increased promotion for my books which might, one day, translate into increased income through royalties…) outweigh the risks for me right now. But that is always something that could change.

There are other kinds of pitfall – it isn’t all cyber-stalkers and trolls. Perhaps some of you pour time and effort into blogging and feel that your ‘real’ writing is suffering. Perhaps by publishing yourself on-line you worry you are giving away something for free you could have been paid for? Maybe your work colleagues and employers don’t know you’re also a blogger and you worry about what the consequences would be if they did? Feel free to chip in if you’ve experienced a blogging pitfall that I haven’t thought of yet.

My own approach is fairly simple. I always keep in mind I’m talking to strangers and not friends – even when that isn’t entirely true and I’ve actually met many of the readers of this blog. I don’t talk about other people when I know / guess they wouldn’t like it, and if I don’t have anything nice to say, I don’t say it (hence no real book reviews). This isn’t how I conduct myself in real life (I can be an opinionated over-sharer at the best of times) but I know that once something is in writing it is there forever and can be quoted into infinity without me being present to explain myself.

These aren’t things that I thought about when I started blogging three and a bit years ago but apart from a few strange emails and the someone who persistently finds this blog by googling for my children’s names, I’ve been very lucky. Because I’ve worked in prisons I know just how careful I need to be with my personal information, but I also want to live and write my life, and so I take calculated risks that may be different to yours. My own comfort zone (ugh, what a phrase) has also evolved from what I’ve observed from other bloggers.

As many of the readers of this blog are also experienced bloggers, I thought whose better brains to pick? What advice would you give to a beginner – someone who has only just started reading blogs and hasn’t started their own yet, or perhaps who has been blogging for a little while but is looking to expand and get a wider readership?

My teaching style isn’t prescriptive, so I’m not looking to create a set of rules or guidelines. I’m researching other people’s experiences so I can lead a discussion on the way the bloggers in the workshop can think about what parts of themselves they want to put on-line and how they go about safeguarding themselves. I know what I do and why I do it, but there are as many ways of doing this as there are blogs and bloggers, so the more you share with me about your own thoughts and methods, the richer the discussion will be.

If it could be guaranteed that your personal information was safe, that you’d never be misquoted or offend someone you later want to employ you, how would your blog be different? For long time bloggers – have you ever been back over old posts and deleted content you wish you’d kept to yourself? What about photographs? Have your ideas about what it is ‘safe’ to write about online changed since your readership has increased? What is your policy on anonymous comments? In what circumstances would you delete a comment?

Comments on this blog are public and so I may quote them in the workshop or direct workshop participants to this post for ‘further reading’. Emails sent direct to me are private and won’t be shared in any format either anonymously or with your name attached unless you give me your permission.

Go!

Edited to add: someone kind sent me these links, which may interest you:

Only You Can Prevent Blog Trolls and Comment Jerks

Developing a Personal Social Media Policy

How To Protect Against Social Media Remorse

Posted in blogs, help, ideas, teaching, web-geekery | 42 Comments »

Who needs a blindfold?

Sunday, July 18th, 2010

On her blog, Elizabeth Baines* reports that Jonathan Franzen claimed to require blindfolded solitude in order to complete his novel. A requirement, like all the best stories about authors, that turned out to be apocryphal (i.e a lie).

It reminded me of a game I did in the last workshop I taught before the summer – one designed to help people get going with their novels, get unstuck with half-finished works or get the courage to turn their never-spoken-out-loud-before idea into a pile of paper. One of the common things that I’ve discovered stops people getting started is feeling that they need something they haven’t currently got – a real office, a better computer, two days free every weekend, older children, new pens… they wait for this magical blindfold-thing to appear, and wait, and never write a word.

The task I do in the workshop is to get all the participants to contribute to a list of things they ‘need’ in order to get started and then we have a discussion around the items on the list – what are real ‘needs’ and what are excuses for delay and procrastination? No-one ‘needs’ a real office or room of their own, even though it’s nice to have, but perhaps spending an afternoon clearing off the table in the hall way would be time well spent. A pen and paper, some privacy and access to a computer are reasonable requirements for getting started. Three afternoons a week in a café for fag smoking and beard-stroking? You should be so lucky. And blindfolds? Days or weeks of silence and solitude? Not if you live in the real world, or with other people, or need to go to Morrison’s now and again and don’t have anyone to heat your beans up for you.

Silence and long periods to concentrate in are brilliant. I snatch them when I can get them. I’d love a room of my own but for now I’m happy to share and I don’t think the stories are poorer for it. These things are lovely, and they help, but they shouldn’t stop you starting and not having them doesn’t make you a pretend-writer. What about the novels written on trains, in cars during lunch hours, in prisons, on the kitchen table while babies scream overhead? When you’re reading a book can you tell if it’s been written in silence and calm during a series of expensive retreats, or in two hour bursts between the requirements of a job and the school run? A blindfold might help some writers, but I think it hinders a lot of other writers who get luxuries mixed up with necessities and swallow the story that the business of writing is somehow more mysterious than other jobs – that writers are allowed to make claims that bus-drivers and child-minders aren’t (I need a blindfold, I need to be in the mood, I need a special room to do it in).

What do you need? Do you have it yet? Is your writing the better for it?

*whose book, Too Many Magpies, I read recently and is a beautifully brief, eerily spare account of an affair, among lots of other things.

Posted in procrastination, teaching, writing method | 2 Comments »

Writing in Prison

Thursday, February 4th, 2010

This week I’ve been working in the prison on the project I mentioned here a couple of months ago – holding a series of creative writing workshops for an established writing group that meet in the prison library.

My aim is to get the group of men writing together to produce a small booklet, with images, that they can put forward as a group entry to the Koestler Awards. They enjoy writing autobiographically, but my brief was to move them onto trying fiction with more confidence and enjoyment so I devised a project that allowed them to do a bit of both, with the autobiographical pieces being natural jumping-off points for the made-up ones (although we know it’s never as black and white as that, don’t we?). I’m going to try to get them to write flash fiction because I like it, and because then they can also enter it for the Bridport’s new Flash Category. (Bridport entries are free for prisoners, you know.)

It’s an easier job than it sounds, firstly because I like it so much – I’m familiar and comfortable with the environment and the men, and it’s brilliant to work with a group of people who are genuinely, unpretentiously interested in reading and writing. I’ve found that when doing community based creative writing projects the experience of the participants is often given more emphasis than writing they produce – there’s nothing wrong with projects like that, but I’m really enjoying working with writers who are interested in improving their own work and helping each other along the way – as well as ‘improving themselves’ (what ever that means) by the act of writing.

They’re a good group with varied abilities and experiences and what helps is that they are used to working together, both by doing writing prompts and timed tasks, reading aloud to each other, using images and stimuli from films, music, books and magazines to create inpiration boards and jumping off points for new stories, and workshopping each other’s writing with a surprising (given the way they talk to each other the rest of the time) amount of sensitivity, tact and insight.

The workshopping element has gone so well that it inspired me when teaching my intermediate group about feedback, and thinking of ways to coach writers new to the workshop method of learning about writing in how to give and get good feedback. I worked it up into a hand-out, but seeing as I’m thinking about my teaching a bit more and reaching out to the teachers and workshop leaders who read this blog to pick up new tips for myself, I thought I’d share it here.

So, I think you can split up a piece of feedback into two parts – your response, and then a suggestion. The second part isn’t totally necessary and can be intrusive for some writers, in my experience, but there are ways of making your initial response as helpful to the writer as you can. Saying that something is boring isn’t as useful as pointing out the offending paragraph, and if you can go one step further and suggest what to do with that paragraph to make it a bit less boring (dialogue? a few jokes?) you might be onto a winner.

I’ve found that thinking about feedback in this way (response + example + suggestion) has helped me when teaching using the workshop method. When one of my participants gives a bit of feedback that seems vague or unhelpful, ‘I really liked that, I did!’ I’ve been asking him to go back to the text and point out the sentences he liked best, and see if he can tell the writer exactly why he liked them. Getting readers to articulate what they think works and doesn’t work about a piece of writing can be as helpful to their own writing and the development of their own taste and style as having their work put under the workshop-microscope themselves.

So, that’s what I’ve learned this week. How about you? My ears are open.

Posted in ideas, multi-tasking, teaching, tips, writing method | No Comments »

Teachy McTeach

Thursday, January 21st, 2010

This has been a week for going out into the world and talking about writing. I’ve been preparing all week for the second instalment of my fortnightly intermediate creative writing class which happens on Saturday morning, out on Monday night to give a workshop on blogging to a creative writing group in Ormskirk, giving a workshop in the prison on Wednesday morning and tomorrow I’ll be teaching a workshop in Burnley as part of the Inspire Burnley project. Phew.

My favourite workshop so far has been at the prison. I know the men, they know me and they’re used to working with each other, writing together and giving each other feedback. It’s exhausting but I like it so much it doesn’t feel like work. My aim this time was to have them work on editing the autobiographical flash pieces we’d been working on before Christmas. I noticed a memey thing going around on a couple of my favourite blogs last week – a creative writing prompt that I decided to try with the men.

Writing lists of the things you like, and don’t like to write felt like a good way to warm up after a too-long gap between workshops (damn snow, again) and sharing the pieces opened up into a discussion between the men and me about voice, and style, and priorities. I know editing is about making a piece of writing better, but it’s really hard to explain what better means – especially to group of writers diverse in their tastes and experience. I think we decided ‘better’ meant closer to your own ambition for the piece, and Sarah Salway’s writing prompt helped us all to get a bit closer to what our ambitions for our writing were – what we liked to write, and how we’d like to be helped to do it better. That’s something handy to keep at the front of your mind when editing, and seeing as I’m doing a lot of my own editing now – it helped me too.

I don’t talk very much about my teaching on here, even though sometimes I spend half of my week doing it, and even though I like it very much. I’ve no qualifications to be a teacher, which makes me nervous, and my spelling is pretty atrocious, and although it’s never my intention to talk about myself or my own work, so much of my teaching method is to say something like this:


Look, here’s how I’d do it. Here are some other ways to do it. I’ve noticed this… and when I’ve done this, that sort of thing has happened. Now here’s a pen, you try, and I’ll sit here and cheer you on until you’re finished then we can have a look at it and a chat afterwards. Don’t worry.

Someone told me that wasn’t teaching, that was facilitating. I don’t know what that means. I’ve felt a bit nervous about what I do ever since. Some of my ‘students’ know a lot more than I do, and many of them are certainly better read. But I like it a lot, and seeing as the last great idea I had for a workshop was stolen from Sarah’s blog, I thought I’d throw-open the blog door and invite you all to tell me about your experiences with teaching.

Have you any tips for me?

So, Teachy McTeach with the teach-hat on this week. And in-between, there’s been interviews with old and new friends for Preston FM, busying myself with preparations for the launch of the very new Lancashire Writing Hub website, preparing posters, publicity and arranging tour dates for the show
and editing Cold Light. I’m looking forward to a quiet week. It seems like months and months and months ago since Christmas.

Posted in anxiety, doubt, in two minds, teaching | No Comments »


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