Change is inevitable. How often do we hear those words, and how much resistance do we carry for them? 2020 has been, for our entire planet, a year of deep change. The global COVID-19 pandemic has torn us all from our familiar patterns and imposed a different sense of time and place. For many of […]

Landscape and place in writing is as much a character as any protagonist. The landscape we reside in, and travel through, shapes us with the same inexorable force as wind and water sculpt the hills around us. In writing we strive to recreate, in someone else’s mind, the place we are describing – a place […]

Uncertainty runs counter to human comfort. Most of us like to feel we know what might be coming toward us, that in knowing we may somehow ward off disaster and pain, make future events bend under our will and our want. Whenever we begin to explore our creativity, in art, in music, in writing, we […]

Today I planted spring flowering bulbs in a wide shallow bowl of duck egg blue. The pot was heavy once filled and I didn’t know quite where to put it, eventually settling on a flat rock in the garden near the pond. It looks forlorn there, covered in mulched hay like an empty nest, but […]

I have a wonderful signature. I really do. It speaks on the page of boldness and adventure. It is the signature of someone forthright and true, sure in themselves. The sort of person those of lesser spine look toward in a crisis. There are sweeping loops and a rather stylish underline punctuated by a thorough […]

Is there such a thing as a writer who knows what they are doing? If there is, I would love to learn their secret. Writing for me is just an extension of life. Bumbling about like a sailor on the high seas, flung from one side to the other by rough weather, marvelling at the […]

  Is anyone else bothered by the way things are no longer put down on paper? Will historians, a hundred years from now, be reduced to scrolling through neatly stored and categorised emails spell checked and eminently readable, instead of sifting through unruly piles of letters, documents, and diaries? Have we forever lost the excitement […]

We were a nomadic sort of family. Dad worked in a mysterious government department necessitating moving home, town, state, country on a more or less regular basis. Anyone who has grown up in that way knows how it feels. The new kid. Always the new kid. Unfamiliar streets to navigate, working out quickly who your […]