Finding your personal magic – talking to @thecreativepenn about forgotten places, historic landscapes and Not Quite Lost

This interview was such fun. You probably know Joanna Penn for her legendary Creative Penn podcast, but here she is in alternative guise – Books and Travel.

She invited me to chat about my memoir Not Quite Lost so we took off our teacher hats and nattered about the pleasures of purposeless wandering, the charm of seasides out of season, and the way a low-key place can be personally magical if we just bring our imagination.

Do come over.

And if you’re curious about what’s going on at my own writing desk, find my latest newsletter here and subscribe to future updates here.

 

 

Power stations of the mind – a piece of Not Quite Lost at the Liminal Residency

If you enjoyed my interview with Krishan Coupland of The Liminal Residency, you might like this post by me on their blog. It was inspired by a weird weather effect after a long, long drive in the fog, and perhaps a bit of headlight hypnosis. You can find a longer version in my travel diary Not Quite Lost: Travels Without A Sense of Direction.

Anyway, do hop over … and if you’ve had a similar experience, let’s discuss it in the comments!

PS And here’s my latest creative news, hallucinatory and not, in my newsletter

 

Not going to AWP19 – try 7 authors free on audio for your commute

Right now, the annual conference of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs is taking place in Portland, Oregon, a mecca for writers, teachers, writers-in-training (actually that’s all of us anyway, we never seem to stop training).

Meanwhile in the ether, another event is afoot. Literary editor, critic and tireless author John Madera (tweet him as @aredamnhoj) has convened an alternative AWP for his podcast Jamming Their Transmission, on his site The Big Other (he has a lot of web territories!).

He’s handpicked a set of literary folk to give short readings (less than 5 minutes each) to let the world hear their work, in their own voices, and he’s publishing them as half-hour podcasts during real AWP. I’m thrilled to be one of the authors on part 3 and you can hear me read a piece from Not Quite Lost.

I’m even more thrilled to be sharing the stage with six exciting poets, memoirists and novelists, who are Tony Trigilio, Valerie Nieman, Kallie Falandays, Seth Berg, Cris Mazza and Michael A Ferro. Find our episode and the rest of John’s programme here.

A childhood home: read an excerpt from Not Quite Lost – in The Woolf

Those walls and rooms, the fields under that bright spread of sky, contained me in my earliest years. A family house is one of your guardians. As a quiet, imaginative child, I had spent as much time alone with it, on my inward paths, as I had with its people. I had a relationship with it in its own right.’

This is from the opening piece in Not Quite Lost: Travels Without A Sense of Direction, just published in the winter edition of The Woolf. The piece is an obituary for the Arts & Crafts house in Alderley Edge, Cheshire that was my family home and was demolished in February. The Woolf has made a special feature including my photos, so if you’re already familiar with the piece you can see the wood-panelled hall, the distant view of Jodrell Bank radio telescope, the house with its original windows and its ‘bus-garage’ makeover that I was so snooty about. And a rare sighting of the giant stone ball that caused a madcap afternoon long, long ago. Do come over.

Prefer to go straight to the book? Find it here.

Southerners going north, the most romantic ruin and the town you can’t leave – interview at Chris Hill’s blog

Chris Hill is a name you might recognise here. A while ago he appeared on The Undercover Soundtrack with his prizewinning novel about young men taking lessons in love, The Pick-Up Artist. Today he’s picked up a copy of Not Quite Lost and asked a few questions.

Chris is originally from the north of England, and enjoys teasing southerners who never venture to those wuthering regions. Especially if, tsk tsk, they have the temerity to write a travel book. (In that case, he got a surprise – I’m from the north.) Chris also knows that travel isn’t all about postcard-perfect places and is not afraid to wield the term ‘crappy’. Expect a blunt conversation with a dash of Laurie Lee and The Prisoner. Come over if you dare.