“Belief and Technique for Modern Prose.” Jack Kerouac

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house
4. Be in love with yr life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Don't think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. You're a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

Reading at Ledbury Poetry Festival

Catherine Crosswell, Sarah James, Jenny Hope and me: The Vaginellas

song that is stuck in my head today...

Jesus was a Jewish philosopher
Had a lot of nice ideas
About our existential fears
Much admired by his peers
Short and Jewish and quite political
Often hesitant and very analytical
Praise be to Jesus
Praise be to Woody Allen Jesus,
Woody Allen, Jesus

Tim Minchin

“If Jesus came back and saw what was being done in his name, he'd never stop throwing up.”

― Woody Allen, Hannah and Her Sisters

Zitkala-Ša 'Red Bird'

Zitkala-Ša (1876–1938) (Dakota: pronounced zitkála-ša, which translates to "Red Bird") also known by the missionary-given name Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, was a Sioux writer, editor, musician, teacher and political activist. She wrote several works chronicling her struggles in her youth as she was pulled back and forth between the influences of dominant American culture and her own Native American heritage, as well as books in English that brought traditional Native American stories to a widespread white readership for one of the first times.

Thesis writing is like giving birth

Dramatic post title. Yes, I admit it is but writing my dissertation has felt comparable to one metaphor: childbirth. I have nurtured and agonised over this document for 9 months or more and now the final stages of labour are upon me. It is like being in a black space where the only light and focus is that distant moment when the thing is finished and handed in. It has consumed me. I have been dreaming about different phrases and terminology. My children think I am a grumpy, desk bound misery. This last push is the most painful but then it will be finished and what will I have? Just a certificate. But also another thing ticked off on my list of life challenges. I am going to celebrate loudly on Thursday!

donkeys in a field near our house