Living Life Twice
Writer, Teacher and Storyteller
Welcome to Living Life Twice
All you lovely readers and writers, friends and new acquaintances. On here, week by week, I hope to share my current and past writing projects, as well as inspirations, enthusiasms and reflections about the pleasures and processes of a long and still busy writing life.
ABOUT ME
I am discovering that the education process in the broadest sense underpins my novels and stories - starting out as a shy working-class girl in a grammar school, then a shy teacher in primary and in secondary schools, then a tutor and mentor in Higher Education, and then in writing workshops encouraging individual writers. Through all of this all I was an eager student in the esoteric field of psychology and sociology when, in my mid-thirties, I achieved my Master’s Degree in Education.
This focus stayed at my core when I made the decision to reject the University’s encouragement to sign up for a doctorate to move on to concentrate on my first big adult novel after the series of published children’s novels gave me a calling card into the arcane world of London adult fiction publishing.
I knew then, and know even more so now, that stories are the most ancient teaching tools in every culture. All good mothers are at heart teachers, weaving the web of stories from the everyday life of their families in this and the preceding generations. Many of my novels – while not strictly autobiographical emerge from that tradition.
For me, at centre of the web, through all of this, was my own family - my boy, my girl and my very different husband, whose own stories sprang out of loving sport and his complex working life in industry - all a mystery to me...
For your interest I will write here on Tasting Life Twice how, in those years before ‘getting published’ had been industrialised and monetised, I found my own prestigious publisher for the children’s books while I was still working. As well as this I wrote short stories for magazines and journalism - mainly a weekly column in the wonderful Northern Echo. And so later, as a full time writer, I became totally committed to the long series of adult novels that transformed me into a professional writer.
This change - when I became a full time writer - set the pattern for the second half of my long life, This was how my scholarship and experience as an educator, a mother and a citizen came together to be invested in the series of historical and contemporary novels, set not just in England but is far flung places, which defines me now as a what I used the call ‘a proper writer’…
So it is that in these locked down days, confined by my challenging role as ‘carer’ I am still very much a writer, Here I am: as well as having two novels in plan I have already written about my own writing and my lived life in my short volume A Life In Short Pieces, and in The Romancer: A Writer’s Tale and most recently in Kaleidoscope: Stories From The Frontier – an experimental blend of fiction and memoir.
Here on my Newsletter I will discuss my activities as a writer, past and present, obeying Anais Nin’s maxim of living life twice, Or even three times…
So I hope to share with you my history and my further adventures in writing ever-expanding fusion of my writing process and my daily life.
Coming Soon…
Forthcoming items in my newsletter:
Art and writing – Davey’s story,
Ways to begin – different strokes for different folks!
My embarkation – how I am dependent on my ink pens and notebooks.
Embodying the past – the relationship between Barbara and Lizza and two contrasting covers.
Encouraging others – the importance of workshops, the significant context of the novel Under a Brighter Sky.
The significance of writing buddies.
Writing in prison – the significance of oral traditions behind locked doors.
The importance of lists – for example see this list! Putting a mark on pristine paper.
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