Caitlin & frieda

A Far Away and Nameless State: The Travel Narratives of Frieda Lawrence and Caitlin Thomas. Not I But the Wind … and Leftover Life to Kill, the somewhat obscure mid-twentieth-century memoirs by Frieda Lawrence and Caitlin Thomas, were written, at least in part, in the countries that the authors eventually made their permanent home: New Mexico and Italy, respectively. While neither was marketed as a ‘travel book’, both works share many of the characteristics Read more…

Silence fiction

‘A Man of Violent and Ungovernable Temper’: Can Fiction Fill Silences in the Archives? Biofiction can be defined as fiction about a named, real person and is characterised by creativity, invention, and imaginative exploration. In this essay I deploy a mixture of nonlinear narrative and theoretical writing to explore the argument that creative ways of responding to archival silences illuminate, and also complicate, our attempts to recover women’s lives from obscurity. As the text evolves, the narrative sections become more invented, , something more like fiction. Read more…

the lille diaries

A Writers’ Group Weekend I slipped this slim, unassuming little volume into my bag, planning to have a look during my daughter’s swimming lesson. I pulled it out – pleasantly solid and tactile, with crisp cream pages – while perched on the unyielding plastic of the pull-down seat in the stuffy, chlorine-scented spectator area. As I began to read, the muffled hum of screeches and splashes faded away into the thick air, to be replaced in my mind with the sights and smells of the 17th century Couvent des Minimes in Lille. Read more…

Material metaphors

Woven into the fabric of the text. Often there is no space in my favourite café with its walls of textured teal, thronged with faces that may have meant something once to people who’ve long since donated the quirky paintings and photos to a charity shop. Anyone can find their place among them, bending or stretching to frame a new face in one of the pitted art deco mirrors. Even the rickety tables in the middle, little inhospitable islands buffeted by passing elbows and rucksacks, are full. Read more…

hinterlands

…where life begins and ends. The pain began at 5am, after a night of fitful rest and vivid dreams. In bed, lying on my left side, facing the white lacquered built-in cupboard lined with shiny green and pink 1980s wallpaper. The cupboard is too narrow to be useful but we can’t change it, it’s not our cottage. Later I sit bolt upright on the sofa, like a suspect in an interview room. Where were you on the afternoon of the twelfth of November? By that time I was on the way, travelling Read more…

back to the beach

This lyric essay was inspired by the relationship between a landscape and the narratives by which we understand our lives. The photographs came first: family snapshots discovered in dusty cardboard boxes under beds; in heavy brown albums with sticky pages, held in place by fragile, statically charged plastic sheets; in carefully organised and backed-up files; and then hundreds, drifting chronologically through gigabytes of iClouds…Scanned, assembled in virtual space. Themed, grouped in categories like light and water. Unthemed again. Read more…

on illigitimate texts

A mere literary woman: on illegitimate texts I can’t make up stories even when there are props. A miniature pair of glasses, like the ones John Lennon and Ghandi wore. A miniature candlestick, a small square yellow sponge, a white cardboard circle and a navy blue elastic hairband. The first thing I wanted to do, I don’t know why, is put the circle inside the hairband. It took some fiddling, but I made it fit. Was this a strategy to give me more time to make up my story? It might have been. Read more…