‘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
“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
