Blog & News
“Slouch to 5k (for writers)”
"Unlocked in Lockdown: Slouch to 5k (for writers)" is a 10-week blogpost series (started in response to the COVID-19 crisis) aiming to support you if you have stalled with a writing project, by rekindling your connection to it. Each week, I'll post about an...
Journaling – a Tactic for Writers/Creatives in Difficult Times
17th March 2020 Dear writers and creative folk, We are going through unusual times and many of you will have had your lives already affected by restrictions imposed as a result of national and international Coronavirus health concerns. In these circumstances, I am...
Frankenstein in the 21st Century….
For fans of Mary Shelley / Frankenstein, and any literature lovers curious about this masterpiece of Gothic / Romantic literature / science fiction in its 200-year anniversary: If you're within reach of Frome, Somerset, on Saturday November 17th, I'm teaching a...
Prose Poetry, Flash Fiction, and Venn Diagrams
At the recent Flash Fiction Festival in Bristol, I had the pleasure of co-presenting a short workshop with the writer Carrie Etter about the relationship between flash fiction and prose poetry. It’s a topic that fascinates me – two forms that are close to my heart....
An Artistic Temperament?
An Artistic Temperament? The third section of Three Men on the Edge (I’ll get to the second section next time), is a sequence of 36 micro-fictions called ‘Chewing Glass’, and it revolves around the life of Martyn. Martyn is a young, melodramatic and impotent artist in...
Cause for Alarm
The stories in Three Men on the Edge are divided into three parts. Here's the first of three blogposts, one for each of the sections, which I hope might serve as a useful set of introductions. The sixteen stories in 'Cause for Alarm' - the first part of the book - are...
Why Clowns Have Never Been Funny
When did clowns stop being funny? Some trace a change back to Stephen King’s 1986 novel It (adapted into a TV miniseries in 1990 and a film in 2017), where a malignant being disguises himself as a clown called Pennywise and terrorises neighbourhoods. It spawned a...
Living on the Edge
I grew up with a form of identity confusion. My family home was in Northwood, in the former postal county of Middlesex, a region on the Northwest edge of Greater London. “Middlesex” belonged to London. But we had a Hertfordshire phone number. We lived on a quiet...
Tuberous Begonia
Below are two additional stories I wrote during Christmas 2017 for the Denholm section of Three Men on the Edge (V. Press, 2018). Both of the stories focused on Denholm and his wife Joan, and I felt that they brought out new elements in Joan's personality. I sent them...