Archive

“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 in Swell (Bloomsbury, 2017)

Selected Interviews & Profiles

• For Love The Words podcast, July 2021: Tanya talks to poet and presenter Peter Spafford about her forthcoming memoir The Cure For Sleep (W&N: 2022) and its themes of late-waking, renewal and becoming open to surprising connections.
• For Not Too Busy To Write with Ali Millar: Ali asks Tanya about The Cure For Sleep, and then the two memoir writers discuss transformative experiences, class and finding a literary form for these.
• For The Wintering Sessions with Katherine May: Tanya talks about how facing death made her bolder. From sudden clarity, to life-changing impulses, to being of service and of course her own writing studies (including the mile-long journal), it’s an intimate and ultimately uplifting and inspiring journey.
• For Wealden Literary Festival As 2019 Writer-in-Residence for the Festival, Tanya recommends essential texts and other tips for aspiring writers.
• For BBC Radio 4 Pursuit of Beauty: Slow Art – Tanya is interviewed in 2018 alongside her mentor sculptor David Nash, discussing his Ash Dome at 40 and her two-year Wild Patience mile of writing, in a programme which also features durational sculpture and music.
• For PechaKucha Wild Writer – Tanya Shadrick explains how her response to an act of vandalism set her on a journey of career change and creativity. Recorded live in 2018 using the global PechaKucha format of 20 slides x 20 seconds of talk per image.
• For BBC South East BBC Arts Correspondent Robin Gibson makes a return visit to Tanya at her poolside mile of writing, following the 2017 announcement of her award from the Jan Michalski Foundation for Writing and Literature in Switzerland.
• For the Canal and River Trust The Unexpected Fisher – Narrator and subject of this short 2017 film by the Canal and River Trust.
• For BBC South East Today Profile of Tanya at work beside Pells Pool in 2016, having embarked on her Wild Patience Mile of Writing.
• For Life. Death. Whatever. Tanya talks about her sudden near-death and subsequent work as a hospice scribe for the Five Things I’ve Learned series.

Selected Projects

• Birds of Firle (2020-2030): A single book of rook images being sent by Selkie Press founder Tanya Shadrick to 100 people across a decade, inviting responses on ‘grief and hope as the things with feathers.’
• One Minutes (2016 to end of life): One minute sound recordings of place begun on the tenth anniversary of a sudden near-death.
• Concentrates of Place (2016 to end of life): Tins of place and people begun on the tenth anniversary of a sudden near-death.
• Wild Patience: A Mile of Writing (2016-17): 100,000 words of pen on paper, created in public at England’s oldest outdoor pool and completed at the Jan Michalski Foundation, Switzerland.

Selected Essays & Articles

• It’s Something About Sharing by Tanya Shadrick (mentor) & Izzy Dignum (mentee), Feasts & Fables, March 2021
• Birds of Firle, Little Toller/The Clearing, January 2021
• Three Views of a Chalkstone by Tanya Shadrick, Jo Sweeting & Louisa Thomsen Brits, Little Toller/The Clearing, January 2020
• Wild Woman Swimming, Outdoor Swimming Society, September 2018
• Winter Walk, The Guardian, December 2017
• A Wild Patience, Outdoor Swimming Society, April 2017
• The Romance of Maintenance, The Simple Things, March 2017
• The Centre Cannot Hold, REFRAME, University of Sussex, October 2015