Welcome to my writing pages

As a writer I have several books in print, and my poetry, prose poems, short stories, essays and articles appear in others' books as well as in many journals, magazines and anthologies.  I love collaborative work, and as a member of the occasional environmental arts group Genius Loci I've worked with visual artists on the land. I've also been involved in various projects with musicians, as well as with other writers. A number of my pieces of writing are embedded in public art installations; they've appeared on cathedral websites, been etched into glass, hung from trees, printed on T-shirts, carved into stone, metal and wood, painted, sung, composed to, choreographed and performed... and, errr, eaten by sheep... View from Argyll Hotel Iona; see Courses page           The history... When I was eleven or twelve, three things happened which indirectly shaped my current path. First, I used my twenty-five pounds Post Office savings to buy a wild colt straight from Dartmoor. I spent most of my teenage years out in the woods, on the hills, dunes and beaches of North Devon on my own, amongst flora and fauna, on horseback, or later kayaking offshore or amongst the swans, seabirds, flag irises and Devon Red cattle of Vellator Marshes. Then, in my favourite childhood book Ring of Bright Water, I came across a wonderful poem by Kathleen Raine (I didn’t entirely understand it all but it affected me). I knew then that I wanted to be a writer, preferably a poet. Lastly, an essay I wrote on ecology took a prize in a children’s writing competition.

These things ensured that for me, ever since, a deep love affair with the natural world and with wild places has been inextricably bound up with my creative response to my inner and outer environments.

When I was sixteen, I came across two books which have underpinned my life: one was The Dharma Bums, by Jack Kerouac, which in turn introduced me to the writings of poet and environmentalist Gary Snyder ('Japhy Ryder' in the book); the other a little book called Beyond the Death of God - the gospel according to Zen. Both set me on the road of Zen Buddhism and later the tradition of mindfulness (I am a member of Nebsangha, which is the Network of Engaged Buddhists). This has shaped both my personal and my professional life.

 

Other elements in the pot, or in the plot, if you prefer, are my commitment to deep ecology and a profound interest in British and native American shamanic traditions and Wicca as well as in the Grail cycle, and my training in transpersonal pyschology. I love myth and metaphor, archetypes and symbols.

Consequently, many of my workshops have as their ‘ground’ an attention to mindfulness, and to ways of accessing the symbolic life of the soul and the creative imagination in order to tell the stories we need to tell. Writing for me is many things, one of which is a way of maintaining and celebrating the connections between inner and outer, so group workshops as well as my own creative process also include the environment, which is a reason I love working outside.

How I got here from there...

I read Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic at Cambridge. But in terms of what I was to ‘do’, as far as I could see the only vocational options for anyone with an interest in mythology (especially the Grail cycle), wisdom traditions and lost languages, a qualification in Middle Welsh and a poor understanding of Irish Glosses and Paradigms (!) were teaching and archiving.

I threw over the delights of academia to travel in the Pyrenees, where I met and later married an Italian, who was to become the father of my daughter, Eloise.

By my late twenties, but now a single parent, I had earned my living in a kind of collage of fruitpicking, goatherding and cheesemaking, managing a surf shop, textile designing (hand spun and handwoven fabrics dyed with the local plants), leatherwork, gallery proprietorship and incense-making, settling finally as a shoemaker.

Somehow bits of writing happened. At A-level college, I had founded and edited a journal called Unicorn; an eclectic ragbag of esoterica, poetry, folk and herbal lore, arcane subjects and political, largely environmental, rant. At the same time I was spending a lot of time on a smallholding on Exmoor. Both then and later, I acquired various skills connected with assorted traditional arts and crafts, including herbal medicine. At university I picked up a commission from ‘Midi Libre’ newspaper to write my first block of paid written work: a contribution on traditional British folk medicine for a French encyclopaedia; the first of many articles on complementary, psychological and spiritual health.

After my part-time training in transpersonal psychology I started to develop in 1991 a series of workshops based on my own inner understanding and experience of the real significance of the Grail legends, called them ‘Myth as Metaphor’ - and began my ongoing apprenticeship to what is known as the Human Potential Movement. A far-sighted Adult Education co-ordinator booked me to run a series of such workshops, followed by creative writing courses, and so this leg of the journey began.

I still designed and custom-made shoes for a living. I wrote in the corners of my life. I had some articles published, and some of my stories and poems picked up some smallish prizes. One day, as I was in the shoemaking workshop, covered in glue and dust, I received a call from Element Books, commissioning what became my first book, Riding The Dragon - Myth & the Inner Journey.

It’s true that you have to be a little crazy to be a writer. On such tenuous grounds as the commission of a minority interest book, the advance and royalties from which might just pay my and my daughter’s (frugal) grocery bills for a few months (but not the rent), I launched myself penniless into the precarious world of a full time writer. Here I am, still, about 14 years on: writing books, poetry, essays, articles, reviews, stories; working when I can on the land with visual artists; working with individuals and groups, giving readings. The things that inspire me remain the same.

Writing, it seems to me both as writer and reader, is a small but profound way of making and re-making connections; a way of bringing things to consciousness; a way of navigating the fractures and rifts, inner and outer, of our individual psyches and our unstable twenty-first-century world.

          And the painting?

Well, I've always painted – privately. Then in 2006, after two more books came out on which I'd worked hard, I hit writer's block... and felt terrible for telling my students so many times that it was a myth! Suddenly I had nothing I wanted to say. There was a deep (but temporary) relief for me in using only non-verbal images, and as a member of the Drawn To The Valley group of artists I was lucky enough to be able to exhibit and sell my work (largely semi-abstract sea and landscapes, as well as a series of paintings based on the prehistoric caves of southwest France). This continues, in an erratic but passionate, if small, way.