Authors Electric

                                      POETRY FILM: APOPTOSIS, or CELL SUICIDE Sometimes we have to lose bits of us. It’s called Apoptosis: some of our cells have to self-destruct, instead of living on and multiplying by splitting in two. They do this for our benefit. My animated text poem in the video above undergoes apoptosis to tell that story. An example; the foetal hand is a paddle – many of the cells between the finger bones kill themselves, to free our fingers to gesture, point and grasp things. Things like books. 'I don't think I lost enough cells to grasp this book.'  Writing, in any genre, is as much about taking words out as putting words in. Poetry is about losing as many words as possible without losing any meaning, so that the remaining words also contain homeopathic amounts of the ones that went, concentrated and rich like a reduced sauce. Plays and novels, e...

Let's start off with hair, since we all love our hair though we're often driven nuts by it. From (t)hair we can move on to killing our mates when they hate the books we love or don't share our craving for pasta. Luck allowing, we'll have time to share a few thoughts about ebooks. Okay! You have four basic choices for cutting your hair: 1) You can cut it yourself. 2) You can go to the cheapest spot in town. 3) You can go to an old school-style barber who's mastered all the basic cuts and charges only a few dollars more. 4) You can go to a salon and pay designer prices for a more individual and expressive look. You can shave have your pate or mow your hair down to a passable buzz cut. For anything else, though, you really should pay....top dollar to get what is best for your hair. Good, we're making progress here. And, because you're all clever, I know you'll have guessed that the same four options apply to the killing of spouses. ...

Last month I wrote about the sweet success of having a first book published.   This time I’m moving on the story by fifteen years.   During those years, as befit a child of the sixties, I did the hippie thing, moved to the countryside from the city, grew vegetables [not very well], baked bread in a solid fuel stove, collected cats and dogs – and five children.   I also taught myself to weave, and made cloth, wall-hangings and rugs. Then suddenly I found myself heading for my forties, the mother of five children under the age of eleven, including a new baby. And despite all my busyness, an overwhelming sense of emptiness settled like fog upon my life.   Who was I really?   Was I the person I seemed to be, or someone else? Where was I going?   Where was the person I used to be? That little girl once called Pauline Fisk who had so longed to be a writer when she grew up – where was she? For more than a decade, Dave and I had lived in a cottage in ...