“In Tanya’s words one can feel the sense of personal ownership and self-sufficiency…Nobody rules you, nothing has ruined you, you are gleefully, determinedly, yourself.” Jenny Landreth writing in Swell (Bloomsbury, 2017)
“Tanya creates intriguing space in public places where the curious find themselves engaging in a writer’s practice and volunteering their own stories to be woven into her work.” David Nash RA
As a writer and former hospice lifestory scribe, I work often in residence: open to the elements and chance encounters, both. My practice of encouraging others to share stories and take creative risks has earned me Fellowship of the Royal Society of Arts.
My major work to date is Wild Patience: a mile of scroll writing undertaken beside the country’s oldest lido and completed by Lake Geneva as guest of the European publisher Vera Michalski Hoffmann at The Jan Michalski Foundation for Writing and Literature. It asked the hundreds who came close: When did you feel most wild and free?
The Wild Patience Scrolls have been featured alongside my mentor David Nash’s Ash Dome and James Turrell’s Roden Crater in the BBC Radio 4 show Pursuit of Beauty: Slow Art (while an Outdoor Swimming Society feature on the work gives a sense of the depths it sounded in the lives of others).
Founder of The Selkie Press, I am editor & publisher of the Wainwright Prize 2019 long-listed Wild Woman Swimming: A Journal of West Country Waters by the late Lynne Roper.
My five-minute live Wild Writer talk for the global PechaKucha network is a quick telling of my late-emerging creative life and commitment to public art & service.
Writing and presenting credits include The Guardian, Radio 4 Extra, Oh Comely Magazine, The Simple Things, Rakes Progress, & Kendal Mountain Literature Festival.
“Profound. Liberating. Empowering…Tanya’s teaching feels like an incredibly constructive discussion, engaging not only the learner’s mind but also body and whole way of being in the world. The weeks spent in her company have had a profound, long-lasting impact.” Student (New Writing South, 2018)
