“A month in to my Wild Patience, I was sighted by visionary wild swimmer and OSS press officer Lynne ‘Rivers’ Roper. She was drawn first by a scroll extract I’d posted describing my girlhood’s glorious sense of self-sovereignty got from the wild Cornish sea…Soon afterwards, she read of my hospice lifestory work and revealed her terminal diagnosis for… Read More Wild Woman Swimming: A Journal of West Country Waters
“Yet there is so much that fills me: plants, animals, clouds, day and night, and the eternal in man. The more uncertain I have felt about myself, the more has grown up in me a feeling of kinship with all things.” Jung The year before my public writing life began, when I was still only… Read More Why I Write Outside: A Fish & the Heron
Genius loci, one regular calls me. Spirit of place. This season, I kneel daily beside my town’s historic lido, writing slow on scrolls of pool-length paper while swimmers do fast laps and grab the lunchtime sun. Writer-in-residence. Genius loci, one regular calls me. Spirit of place. The emergency which delivered me into this strange occupation… Read More Why I Write Outside: Laps of Longhand
Words to open the launch of Watermarks: Writing by Lido Lovers & Wild Swimmers (a Frogmore Press & Pells Pool collaboration), spoken by Tanya Shadrick, Watermarks co-editor & Pells Pool writer-in-residence. Because this book sprang from deep sources during my residency at Pells Pool — & because I feel so entirely at home among you who love words &… Read More Watermarks Book Launch
A short, true story: On finding an old photo of myself When I was 18 and looked like this and sounded – as I still do – like the place I come from, and was taking a year to work in a holiday complex and earn enough money for university (the first in my whole family… Read More Why I Write Outside: Taking Up Space
“And after the swimming there was watching. Watching a writer at work…with the patience and strength to kneel for her craft, and a great capacity for thought and communication.” As co-author of the forthcoming Lido Guide, Emma Pusill has had a busy summer: Around her demanding day job, she was in training to do 5k of… Read More A Lido Daytrip: Emma Pusill of The Lido Guide
It is, I say, the happiest I’ve been: For a single, mid-life season to be out of doors all day, open to the elements and whoever comes, and in the official role of writer-in-residence after two years of writing without an audience and roaming the Downs, wondering what on earth had possessed me. Yes. The happiest… Read More Loneliness of the Long-Distance Writer
