Category: art
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Gently altering the world – the arts
Returning from a writing residency in Cill Rialaig, in Ireland’s County Kerry – https://cillrialaigartscentre.com/residencies/ – it was weird to be back yet not be able to hop on my bike and see friends, go to tango lessons, films, cafés and libraries or walk around the lake. I watched that ingenious ABC program You Can’t Ask…
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Yellow horses: a story of thwarted ambitions and coming full circle
Silver needles in my knees I’ve been working on a book about an abstract artist and having some minor setbacks. First, a previous writing job kept spilling over into the time I wanted to be researching the new, much bigger project. (And this keeps happening. They come back wanting more and I do more because…
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Go on – make something beautiful
I believe that we’re all creative. We can express our creativity through dancing or drawing, cooking or wood-carving. We can express it in how we live ordinary life or in taking beautiful photos of our life, through making people laugh or by writing a blog. Nigel Andrew once believed that blogs were ‘an outlet for…
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Cheerfulness is an achievement: favourite books of 2015
The Guardian Weekly ‘Books of the Year’ (18-31 December this year) is where writers and critics present their favourite reads of the past year and it is a reliable guide to some great reading. You can also hear authors speak about their work on theguardian.com/books/series/books Popular choices of ‘Books of the Year’ were Ali Smith’s…
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How to write violently and live peacefully
‘Be regular and orderly in your life so you can be violent and original in your work.’ Gustav Flaubert said that. So I make my house clean and tidy and lay the fire and fill two blue vases with bunches of my yellow jonquils, and I write my commissioned Churchill book. Not that the Churchill…
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Beyond all rights and wrongs…
‘Beyond all rights and wrongs, there is a field – I will meet you there.’ Rumi said that. I found it in Richard Brennan’s Alexander Technique: Change your posture, change your life. It’s in the Canberra public library system and fairly recent. It’s a good book with some wonderful quotations in it. Who was Rumi?…
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Happiness and the What if…? questions
‘Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.’ Ghandi said that. It makes me happy just thinking about it. Although for most of us it is more an ideal to strive towards as we flounder our way through life trying to earn a living. In our society…