It’s not often that I sit down with a book of poetry and find myself so drawn into its world that I read it in long, deep draughts, like a novel. But this is the effect that my first encounter with the work of Canadian poet Don Domanski had on me. These are poems of...
In the correspondence I have with the wonderful people I work with as coach and mentor I am often struck by how harsh they are with themselves, how much their confidence and wellbeing seems to hinge on achieving this or that creative goal. Indeed, the wider world of...
It’s fair to say that these are trying times. Each news bulletin seems to bring more evidence of the madness, destructiveness, greed and mendacity of those who hold power. My Twitter feed is full of righteous anger, denunciations and calls to action to fight for the...
That I live right beside a good trout fishing loch and have yet to pull a fish from it is a source of some embarrassment. As a girl, my dad taught me how to bait a hook with a worm, tie it to a bubble float and fish for shy brown trout in the fast-flowing Highland...
The wheels of the publishing industry turn incredibly slowly. It’s quite normal for a book to take two full years from acceptance by a publisher to actually hitting the shelves. There are so many behind-the-scenes stages a book has to go through between acceptance and...
So I got COVID, finally. Or COVID got me. It fairly knocked me out, so last week I had a few days of not being able to do as much as usual, and my brain was fogged and sluggish. I found myself gazing out of the window a lot. So I’m returning to a pet subject of mine...
