Blog

  • Bards, Idols and Liars – an exhibition at Room 700

    Since last blogging, I feel I’ve lived a whole lifetime. There is so much to say about Haunt, Wakefield Lit Fest, the young writers groups, a Forward poetry commendation, a project with women in a bail hostel, running a steering group for people with learning disabilities, a CPD session for support workers and the Love…

    Read more

  • Baby X, Rebecca Ann Smith

    Plaiting together the stories of Dr Alex Mansfield,  Dolly, and Karen Frey, Rebecca Ann Smith’s Baby X tracks these women’s relationships with a human foetus as it develops in an artificial uterus. This is a novel about fertility treatment and its implications, about the danger of privatising health services and the ways in which a…

    Read more

  • Why I’ve decided to write about books written by women

    It is well-known that there are inequities for women at all stages of their writing careers.  (This is valid for other groups but here I’m focussing on gender, although intersectionality will feature). Catherine Nichols found a scandalously more positive response when sending her novel out under a male pseudonym than when she attributed it to…

    Read more

  • Collecting flowers

    For the last two years I‘ve been working on longer pieces – putting the finishing touches to Empires of Clay and Echolocation, collaborating on the poems for the Altofts commission and the first incarnation of Corseted. More recently, I have completed another edit of my second novel. As a result I’ve written very few individual…

    Read more