Time and time again students ask how can they improve their writing and I always reply with the same imperative. READ! How simple and how empowering! Reading inspires you to write and to write effectively. If you read, you have access to so many different minds, minds equipped with al

This still remains one of the most vivid and revealing dreams of my life! I woke up feeling so protective of my dream companion; deeply affected by  the emotional power and resonance of this strange encounter in the dusky heat of a Roman night.  Who could resist this beautiful arctic

I love writing six word tales. They have a intimate compression that ‘leaks’ drama and mystery, adding resonance to a simple idea so that the idea becomes wider and suggestive. Like poetry, the words each have to connect in immediate yet sometimes unexpected ways. It’

Demeter was walking in her favourite wood. She had left school for the dentist and then found no reason in her form diary to return that day. All the golden leaves lay sodden before her like some dismal bridal train. She felt in her duffle pocket and discovered something chipped and r

    At first there were just two. A pair of heavy hands that did things and then suddenly could do nothing at all. Looking back there, I am aware that I am looking at his hands still, reading them as if to decide how much of me he needed, how much I could let go. We were a f

Demeter could not easily differentiate between one shape and another. Her toes would stroke over objects at night and she would wonder what she was sleeping with- an old shirt, a newspaper, a biography. Everything seemed differently arranged and she would act surprised and say out lou

She first saw him one Sunday afternoon  amongst her  magnolias. She had finished with the paper and was sitting as neatly as she could (angles were important to her) in the corner of the garden where all the pets were buried in rows. Each Sunday she would remember each pet and the pla

Today’s dream. Something small and soft brushed against my legs as I was about to open the door. Two black eyes looked up into mine and a beak opened and then shut again. Brown feathers  too. Even a hop.  Only 7am with  a quail in my bedroom-  intent on  following me to the bath

The visitor had been sitting on the step since George had left the house with his dog. It was peculiar to watch him without speaking,  but the visitor had no choice. The boy and the dog set set off all tangled up in good humoured orders, hectic barks  and a new red  leather lead, yet

It was a mean house nowadays.  Even when the rooms were filled with visitors, laughing and eating, there was this deposit of smallness on everything, like cold fat after cooking. Plants rarely survived, they couldn’t breathe here. There was a queue of dead things in pots by the

The tiny red hand lifted the bottom blind and watched the boy trying to pick up a worm on the path. He looked happy for once and the hand let go of the wooden blind and started to climb the kitchen  tiles.  This was just a practice. Sometimes when you were new the bits didn’t wo

It burnt him. Stung at his open eyes. And even if he found he could blink away the  sharp grains, the room still  looked odd, far away. He felt tired of the effort of being watchful and now the edges of everything hurt him. He blinked again. What was sand, what was dust? He felt his f

Someone famous  had once turned their face to the wall and died because they had run out of the words they cared about.  The face couldn’t recall who they were and perhaps they hadn’t remembered either.  When words turn your heart to dust, your who or why  crumbles too. He

It was late July. Summer Sturridge was watching her brother, Stephen,  eat an ice cream for the first time in nearly ten years. Aside from their surname and the fact that their father had an alliterative ear, they had nothing in common except ice cream . Ice cream joined them together

George leant against the old chair and spoke to the wall. His voice was quiet. Careful.  Everyone was asleep, though he could smell smoke from somewhere outside.  The  eyes watched him, taking in the boy’s angles, his uncombed hair, his need to be noticed. The face felt old toda

Phoenix Writers’ Group Horwich, meets every Thursday between 10-12, except during school holidays at Horwich resource centre.  Their book entitled Fleeting Moments has just been published and will shortly be available on Amazon and kindle. Anyone interested in joing the grouip c

If anyone had left the kitchen before coffee, Carla would have been discovered in the hall. But as fate would have it, they all remained together around the table, each fearful of leaving the room and all feigning holiday good will. Outside the small red figure carried on climbing acr

The red plasticine figure crouched besides the clock. She had taken her time to get here. But she had lots of time now she was reforming. Her shape and size were not a disadvantage. There was a freedom to plasticine. Any problem you had, just pause and reform. There was no training gi

The cemetery car park was choked with cars. Everyone was patient though most of Caroline’s friends were not patient by  nature. But this was a sad afternoon and besides that, everyone knew that something must happen to explain it all. Caroline may have been patient too, of cours

That Saturday afternoon George had gone to Buxton with several friends and his Aunt in her last blue mini. They had stopped on the long hill leading down in Buxton’s centre, and climbed out of the car, following Gertrude’s rather large brown boots up the  path of an old  s

The face in the wall heard voices through the old plaster. Hoarse voices whose breathing came slowly and hard as if time was short. Houses like these carried memories deep in the walls, in the floors in the very stones that held up the strong, lonely building that some ambitious merch

Yesterday we had a lovely session where we were encouraged to remember a time at home or in the garden, when we were about just five or six years old. This memory was instanteous for me and I can still feel the soil on my hands. Chapel-en-le-frith was hard to spell and once learned, l

George knew all about rooms. He had read about rooms where people started to rot inside and stare at each other across furniture where dust sat waiting, denying them light. His Aunt had told him about Dickens. Lots of rooms  there were in Dickens, she would tell him, where hatred slep

This  plasticine man was small and had a pair of purple legs with green feet and a very round yellow head with orange hair.The others were only one colour. Uniform and collected in their boxes next to his  computer. George was still thinking about the eyes. He looked up, at disappoint

It  began when they moved house of course. They had all been quite settled as their Aunt Dorothy used to  say to anyone who would listen during her weekly  trips  to the supermarket. After all it had been such a relief to be so settled after what had gone on before. The time before wa

Carol Ann Duffy’s Demeter is one of my favourite poems and moves me intensely. I think its position at the close of Duffy’s The World’s Wife is essential as it reminds us that reconciliation is still possible. It is a love poem and the rush of feeling  Duffy communic

‘Where are you going?’ Such a simple question. Yet the man who asked George was not a simple man. He was eager to talk because he had lost many things; money, wives, houses, friends and  George had seen the books left lying around, with bright titles promising change in 10

  Today I shall puff on an uncharacteristic cigar by way of a fond farewell to of one of TV’s greatest, most loved and  iconic detectives, Peter Falk, the singular Lieutenant Columbo. Yesterday Falk hung up his signature coat, stubbed out his last cigar, kicked the car, let the dog ou

In 2008 I published a long essay on Carol Ann Duffy’s powerfully erotic poem, Warming her Pearls, comparing it not unsurprisingly to Sarah Waters’ tantalising Neo-Victorian Thriller, Fingersmith. The essay appears on Duffy’s site Sheer Poetry, The Tutor Pages, and of

George wanted  some one to answer his question about love and Demeter, but his Aunt was dead and no one else knew his soul. So he leant against the kitchen door post, and pretended to be Sydney Carton from A Tale of Two Cities, because he was a hero and neither  the French Revolution