A single edition book being posted in sequence to one hundred collaborators by TANYA SHADRICK GRIEF IS THE THING NO HOPE IS THE THING 21 IMAGES (6CM X 6CM) TO PROMPT A CUMULATIVE, COMMUNAL RESPONSE On New Year’s Day 2020, Birds of Firle – a single edition, handmade book – was placed in the post to… Read More Birds of Firle
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
‘The horizon should be hills, not water…’ Painter Mary Stella Edwards writing in 1935, while seeking to persuade her fellow artist and life’s companion Judith Ackland to make the North Devon coast their setting that spring for plein air painting instead of Wales. I write now, over eighty years later, at the small table… Read More Seven Days in Bucks Mills Artists’ Cabin
In August 2018 I was artist-in-residence for the North Devon National Trust at the Artists’ Cabin at Bucks Mills. In the tradition of uncanny tales told as one year turns to another, here is one from the week I spent there in two rooms still filled with the clothes, paints, teacups & other possessions of… Read More Story of a Floor: National Trust Artists’ Cabin, Bucks Mills
“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
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
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
All the fragile heat built up in the last week is blown away. One hardy father (a weekday lunchtime regular) and his happy, enthusiast son are the only ones in: “Let’s do a length of breaststroke — race this time.” says the boy, and the father is game, sets off, fast. Doesn’t see, as I… Read More By a Lido, after Rain
