Tanya Shadrick, writer-in-residence for the 2019 Wealden Literary Festival, recommends essential texts and other tips for aspiring writers. Is there one work of writing about the natural world that has had the biggest impact on you? After my near-death at 33, the book that became talismanic was Matsuo Bashō’s 16th century travelogue and haiku collection The… Read More Interview with Wealden Literary Festival
The prestigious Wainwright Golden Beer Book Prize – which celebrates the best books about nature, the outdoors and UK travel – included the posthumously-published Wild Woman Swimming: A Journal of West Country by Lynne Roper (the only book from its editor Tanya Shadrick’s Selkie Press) in the 2019 longlist. Celebrating its sixth year, The Wainwright Golden Beer… Read More Wild Woman Swimming in The Wainwright Prize 2019 Longlist
Ten Days of Normal It was sudden and painless, a decade ago and perpetual, the emergency which altered forever my sense of time and space. In the minute before it happened, I was normal. Playing at it almost. For ten days following the birth of my first child — spring thaw after three frozen years… Read More The Slow Time of Accidents
‘We can ask and ask but we can’t have again what once seemed ours for ever — the way things looked, that church alone in the fields, a bed on belfry floor, a remembered voice, a loved face. They’ve gone and you can only wait for the pain to pass.’ J L Carr, A Month in the Country It… Read More A Matter of Life and Death
‘There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places, and desecrated places.’ Wendell Berry, ‘How to Be a Poet’ FIRST IN OUR FAMILIES TO ‘GO AWAY’ for education, my husband and I were oblivious to loss of kith and kin in our first decade. Happy playing house in an historic town on the Sussex… Read More Putting Down Roots
I am knelt for the day in residence at Brighton Museum, and not now among the hallowed Constables but across the hall in the fine art gallery with its theme of The Language of Flowers. And the alchemy, the chemistry, occurs immediately, where I feared it would not. I will myself be a flower, a… Read More Being Seen: Extract, Wild Patience Scrolls
A decade after the cluster-bomb of events that shattered my early thirties, I think now that what saves us, and makes us strong, is neither what we own or whom we love. I think our essential survival kit is composed of what we do: the everyday habits and routines that help us build and… Read More The Romance of Maintenance
