Blip (a short story)

(the first of a series of 1-page shorts on homelessness, destitution, stories that document the homeless experience for our homeless project. Some will be fictional, some factual)
He sits on the sloping stones. He sits at the end of the cycle lane that passes by the University library, on the way into town. It can’t be [...]

Andre Brink: A Fork in the Road

Andre Brink reads from his memoir tomorrow as part of the season of guest speakers at the Newcastle Centre for Literary Arts.
‘It started with a passionate love affair with Jeanne d’Arc when I was not yet fourteen,’ writes Andre Brink, the South African novelist, scholar, and opponent of apartheid, of his Francophilia—or more precisely his [...]

Ian Jack on tense and cherries

I have just had porridge for breakfast. I mixed it with a banana (Dominican Republic), a Clementine (Spain), some organic raisins (Kenya) and some almonds (also Spain). I sprinkled on some linseed (Canada) and some cinnamon (unspecified within the EU). I have no way of knowing where the oats came from, but as the bag [...]

Ian Jack on the unsteady British

A twitterishly short post as I wait for A to arrive by train in Oxford. I’ve read through half of Ian Jack’s collection of writings The Country Formerly Known as Great Britain and — at this point — the words of the unsteady, the unstable, the unhinged — are peeking out at me from the [...]

Writing destitution: some ideas

I’m involved in a new project to look at homelessness and destitution. The idea is to get a wide spectrum of writers either telling their own or retelling the stories of others, leading to a theatrical or film project, to update some of the ideas and emotions found in, say, Orwell’s Down and Out in [...]

In writing, don’t chase your themes

I’m off to see Peter Brook’s 11 and 12 in April at Northern Stage. On Radio 4 a few weeks ago, a fellow guest on Start the Week challenged Peter (and Lucy Prebble, the playwright behind the story of Enron) on how a writer could not be aware of the themes of her/his writing. Surely, [...]

Tense affects between creative & critical

I’ve just put in my abstract for the PhD conference here in Newcastle in April: ‘Creative Friction – How do the different modes of creative practice intersect with the world of traditional academia?’
The theme looks at how the two parts of a creative practice PhD – the critical and creative – interact, and what are [...]