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Writing about your parents, by Elizabeth Kay

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  My dad, Feliks Krzewinski, at work as a display artist in London in 1960 Most people seem to prefer to do this after those concerned have died. Not so easy if your mother lives to 104, like someone I know. However, if you had a good relationship it’s not such a problem – it’s the things you’d like to get off your chest that’s the issue. My parents were elderly, 42 and 49 when I was born, and I was an only child. They both died over 40 years ago. Having a clear-out, I recently discovered a note I wrote after my first trip to Poland to visit my father’s relatives on my own. My mother was English, and after my father died the Polish side cut off all contact. Unbeknownst to me my mother, on her one and only trip abroad, she told my father’s relatives I considered myself to be entirely English, and didn’t want anything whatsoever to do with my Polish heritage. Many years later, out of the blue, I had a call from my cousin who was in the UK for a visit. I cried my eyes out with relie...
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DOUBLE YOUR ODDS OF SURVIVING--BY REB MACRATH

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  You and I have never met. But I know at least two things about you. 1)  At some point in your life you've been in sudden trouble. Medical, financial, career, relationship. So you understand the assignment: you've got to stay focused and faithful, organized and calm, while your world seems to be swirling about you. 2) Whether you work from your smart phone or handwritten notebooks and planners, somehow you must find your own eye of the storm. Your way to keep your (bleep) together when the turmoil threatens to addle your brain and you don't even know where your keys are. Where the devil is that all-important link to your GoFundMe account? Where's the ID you'll need? Have you gone shopping but left your debit card at home? Where did you put that all-important number you got during a call on a bus? And so on. Friends, I'm with you. As a non-techno soul, my solution is grounded in hard copy. But you can tailor it simply, I'm sure, to your smart phone you adore...
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Seen from the Water by Julia Jones

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Ann Davison arriving in New York Our holiday in America began in New York. I knew that the place I most wanted to see was the Hudson River. I’d read and re-read the last chapters of My Ship is So Small, Ann Davison’s funny and moving account of her arrival in Felicity Ann and the end of their record-setting voyage together. Desperate to find somewhere, anywhere, to tie up for the night, Ann accepts a tow from a fisherman, runs aground on a sunken barge and spends the night in a mysterious boat cemetery.  The following morning she sets out to sail the last few miles to 79th Street yacht basin. But it’s closed. Everyone tells her this is the only place for yachts. Where else can she go? Darkness is falling once again when a crew of Engineers take pity on her. ‘Why don’t you tie up with us at our place?’ ‘Why don’t I indeed, where are you?’ ‘Pier 75, the fireboat pier.’     So away they go together, moor for the night and settle down to some serious celebrating. T...
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Debbie Bennett's Cover Story

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2011 version I first wrote Edge of Dreams way, way back. It was probably my third completed novel and the first that was realistically worth carrying on with! I think I posted a couple of months ago about my first novel I hand-wrote as a teenager? After that I wrote an otherworld fantasy that was also pretty dire (but again, I got to the end) and I can’t even find the dot-matrix print out or the old computer files, which were pre-Word and would probably be unreadable anyway.  So Edge wasn’t too bad. And I know I posted about the motivational aspect of this book a couple of months ago too, but stick with me - this isn't a complete regurgitation. I sat on it for a long time while life happened, then dusted it off and rewrote it a few times. This was the first novel I submitted to traditional publishers (indie publishing wasn’t a thing back then), and it did almost get picked up by Chicken House, failing at the last hurdle of the Acquisitions meeting. Still, it gave me a little confi...
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Letters from my Mother (Cecilia Peartree)

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 We've just had the de-clutterers round again, and I think they've at last finished with the front room. After a couple of sessions earlier in the year they had got rid of most of the complete rubbish, so this time they reached the far corners of the room and retrieved some treasures, relatively speaking. Old photographs and holiday souvenirs, a bit of family jewellery, more sheet music, and what seemed like thousands of letters from my mother. To put this in some sort of context, the front room had started out as quite an organised sitting-room, had morphed into my bedroom for a while and then into a store-room which as well as our own family clutter had accommodated whatever was left over when we cleared out first my mother's house and then my brother's some years ago. While I was in hospital having my hip replaced, family members had pushed things into the corners to make sure I had enough space to walk about in safely, and then the next time I was in hospital, havin...
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A Misalignment of the Stars by Peter Leyland

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A Misalignment of the Stars   Recently I suffered a painful bout of sciatica, something which I have experienced before but never with this level of intensity. I was becalmed for a few weeks, being unable to walk more than a few paces. Stairs were almost impossible to climb. Co-incidentally, however, the author Lissa Evans* with whom I have an online acquaintance, posted a compelling recommendation on social media of a book entitled  To Exist As I Am  by Grace Spence Green. It was subtitled  A Doctor’s Notes on Recovery and Radical Acceptance . Trusting in Lissa’s judgement of the book, I ordered a copy using my local library’s reservation service. It arrived within three days, and I began reading it.    The book is the extraordinary story of Grace Spence Green’s journey, after suffering a spinal cord injury which paralysed her from the waist down, which gave a completely new cast to a life that was up to that point her training as a fourth-year medical stu...
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Metaphor, Imagery… But Where’s the Story? Asks Griselda Heppel.

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The lure of computer games.  Photo by Boris Hamer: https://www.pexels.com/photo /young-child-engaged-with-laptop-indoors- 29545224 / Recently a headline in the Spectator caught my eye: The Real Reason Children no Longer Enjoy Reading by Mary Wakefield. Given that Received Opinion blames the lure of the mobile phone, computer games, social media etc for the sad decline in young people picking up books, I was intrigued.The article title implied something else was afoot. And indeed, according to Wakefield, it is. The author describes a train journey whiled away (if you can call it that) by coaching her son for his 11 plus exam. The boy’s increasingly stubborn refusal to answer a simple question about an image in an English comprehension paper drives her dotty, until she realises there’s something else going on here. It’s not that her son can’t understand. He’s fighting back. Against a curriculum that has airily dispensed with any need to introduce children to the delights of litera...
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