A writer's life for me

I will hold my hands up and proudly admit that up until last Thursday, I was a Worcestershire Lit Fest & Fringe virgin. I toyed with the idea of going last year but never actually made it; so this year, whilst trying to find my feet on the performance poetry scene, I decided it was time to give the festival a go, and I’m so glad that I did.  Thursday night (June 26th) saw the SpeakEasy Festival Special - SpeakEasy being a popular open mic event in Worcester already - and not only did I perform here, but I also saw some amazing artists. Complete with two amazing headliner acts, Scott Tyrrell and Emma Purhouse, poets from around Worcester, and I’m assuming from other corners of the West Midlands, banded together for what turned into a brilliant couple of hours of spoken word. A first-timer to the event, I was absolutely over-whelmed by the massive amount of support from both other performers and from audience-members - it truly was a brilliant atmosphere and I was so hap...

Yesterday I asked the potentially awkward question of whether writers are difficult to be romantically involved with. When I wrote that piece and then blogged it, I had no idea that there would be so many opinions on it; and I had no idea that discussing those opinions with people would lead to yet another question, that I felt the need to blog about today.  If writers aren’t compatible with people who don’t write, do they stand a good chance of being compatible with other writers? And, if that’s the case, what happens to the creativity in that situation? Does it suffer, like it can when you’re involved with a non-creative person, or does it blossom? In other words, does creativity breed creativity? Oh, sorry, did I say one question? I actually meant about one hundred.  I’ve been on both sides of it, and I’m honestly no closer to answering any of the above questions, so please, if people have opinions about this post too then I strongly encourage you to share them with m...

It might be a bit of an awkward question to ask, but is a writer possibly one of the worst romantic partners that a person can find themselves lumbered with? I’m drawing again on something that a lecturer recently said to me; she admitted that she actually felt a remarkable amount of sympathy for partners of writers, because they really do have an awful lot to put up with. Admittedly, the thought had crossed my mind before. I’ve had more than one unsettling argument with a past partner who has found an argument recreated in a poem, and then blogged for the rest of the internet to read - shame on me, I know - but is it really, really difficult to be in a relationship with an artistic type, or do people just think it is? During a recent Jack Vettriano kick, I was reading one of the many, many biographies about the painter where he admitted to finishing a relationship once because the girl that he was with made him too happy. He found himself sitting around, staring at the sun and lovin...

Generally speaking mental health is a bit of a taboo subject, although in this day and age, it absolutely shouldn’t be. Given some of the outright disgusting conversations that I overhear on an average night out, I’m amazed that anything can be considered taboo in 2014, because many of us have the luxury of living in a no-boundaries society these days. Unless, of course, you’re talking about problems with the human psyche, in which case you might as well lock yourselves away now and resign yourselves to a life of only discussing this topic with trained professionals who are paid to listen. Not for public consumption. Nuh-uh. No, thank you. For the sake of this blog post actually going somewhere, let’s just put a pin in the notion that we can’t talk about mental health and pretend for a second that we can. Or, let’s be even more risqué and talk about mental health in relation to art, because that’s really what I’m interested in right now. After reading an article recently, I discove...

I’m fairly certain that I have a vague recollection of a lecturer once telling me that anyone who writes can call themselves a writer, but only someone who is published can call themselves an author. Is that how it works? Genuine question, because I’ve been wondering this for a while. I don’t know why, really, but I have massive problems with calling myself a writer. Whenever someone asks what I do, and I nervously tell them, I always say something like, ‘I’m trying to be a writer’, which doesn’t exactly sound like a wonderful preoccupation. On the other hand, when I answer, ‘Oh, I’m a writer’, I feel like an out and out fraud for putting myself in the same bracket as rich, famous, and fabulous writers that have gone before me. For a lot of people, when they hear writer they think of people like JK Rowling and EL James (bleurgh!) who have made a rather impressive living out of their writing; and, in case you haven’t quite guessed this already, I’m far from being in their league, and ...

When I was doing my undergraduate degree (in English and English language) I was introduced to the amazing Perfume by Patrick Suskind. I sort of fell in love with that book a little bit. It was like nothing I had ever read before, and nothing I’ve read since, as Suskind plummets readers into a world of vivid sensations and an outright peculiar existence in the form of his misguided protagonist, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille. It’s stunning, descriptive, disgusting, and eerie, and I can’t recommend it highly enough. Yesterday evening I found myself at a loose end and with 142 minutes to kill, so I decided it was time to watch the 2006 adaptation of this novel, fully loaded with preconceptions about how bloody awful it would be in comparison to the book. I was wrong. Last term as part of my current degree I took a module that explored the concept, interpretations, and uses of intertextuality (the old text within a text sort of principle, for anyone who hasn’t come across it). My understa...