For a few months now, my family and I have been putting our screens away from Saturday to Sunday evening. Everything goes into a locked box (yes, laptops, phones, i-pads, all of it) and I place the key in a hidden place in case it feels too tempting to take a quick peek. Have my […]
A couple of years after moving with my family to Nairobi (where we lived between 2013 and 2017), I started thinking about the fact that the school my children attended didn’t have a library and I felt unhappy about this. A reading culture in a school is so vital and I don’t need to go […]
I realise that I’m pretty good at telling myself – and other people – carefully crafted stories that have endured over a long period of time; stories that I’ve never thought to question. In my non-fiction book coming out later this year in which I explore living for many years with chronic insomnia, I talk […]
When my children were really little, I used to read poems to them in the bath. I had a stack of poetry books down by the side of the tub and I found that while they were splashing around, it was a good opportunity to grab a book and read two of three poems to […]
I have been teaching creative writing to a child called Carina, aged 7, for about a year and a half now. Even writing that sentence gives me pause for thought, because can creative writing actually be taught? Well, I prefer to think of it as enabling, empowering and encouraging, but obviously this doesn’t roll off […]
In my previous blog, I penned a few thoughts around the curbing of my incessant travel habit. As I was writing it, I considered a poetry competition I entered last year with Trip Fiction (a brilliant online resource pairing books with travel). The remit was to write a poem with a strong sense of place, […]
✰ Caveat – Before anyone reads a word of this, the following blog is not intended to make anybody feel guilty. Guilt is such a counter-productive, ungenerous emotion. It leaves no space for change, for reflection, for openness. Everybody has their own realities and family / personal /professional circumstances that they are trying to balance […]
Published by Nine Arches Press and edited by Jo Bell and guest poets, this wonderful book is a year of poetry-writing prompts. I can’t quite remember when it first came on to my radar – possibly through a podcast. But I am now up to week 40 of 52 and could not be more delighted […]
Towards the end of 2020, I decided to spend the following year reading outside my ethnic group. If you’d like to see my original blog post and the intention I set, click here. The vast majority of books published globally are written by authors of my ethnicity and this is obviously not due to a […]
It was only a couple of years ago that I first heard about Iceland’s Christmas tradition of Jólabókaflóð, roughly translated to ‘Christmas Book Flood.’ On Christmas Eve each year, Icelanders cosy up in front of the fire, drink hot chocolate and exchange books as gifts before spending the evening quietly together reading. For a bibliophile like […]