In-sistered writing

A-way to write With bell hooks’ Teaching to Transgress open on her lap, she gently closes her eyes and focuses on her breath. In and out. Until now, she had never seen the words of Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh [1]Thich Nhat Hanh, (1992), Peace is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday…

  “She had in her seventh year, she recalled wistfully, dreamed of a wishing-box land above the clouds where wishing boxes grew on trees, looking very much like coffee grinders; you picked a box, turned the handle around nine times while whispering your wish in this little hole in the side, and the wish came…

“She was a homely body; an old lady in a plaid shawl which was fastened by a large cameo; and she sat in a basket-chair, encouraging a spaniel to look at the camera, with the amused, yet strained expression of one who is sure that the dog will move directly the bulb is pressed” —…

Just an ordinary day Shirley wore a dark brown cardigan over a plain cotton dress and sensible shoes to carry the weight of the words she wanted to write. With four children to raise, she hadn’t had time to make herself look pretty or straighten her lipstick on just an ordinary day.[1] Shirley Jackson, 1996,…

“When I lived with my people, I spoke the lingo. I was a happy little Aboriginal kid. We just enjoyed life and played, and we were all Yanyuwa. Our mothers all loved us”, Hilda Jarma Muir, 2004 [1]In “Not thinking about colour”, Hilda Jarman Muir, A Very Big Journey: My Life as I Remember it,…

Sylvia cries, “Shirley! Come let’s be grisly and girly together!” She looks at the light streaming through the cracks in her quill feather.  Words arrive incandescent and spare; Sylvia cries, “Shirley! Come let’s be grisly and girly together!”     Another angle flares the passage of time as it weathers; They are friends forever called and…

The number 21 demands attention What if I decided that number 21, reducible to three, thereby naturally imaginative, creative and optimistic, was worth paying attention to? And, what if turning to page 21 of books written by feminist writers I adore, a particular sentence demanded my attention? Then, what if I took that sentence on…

Soaked by sentences on a rainy Sunday morning Trying not to wake the slumberous body beside me, I reach over and quietly pick up my recently purchased copy of Charlotte Wood’s [1]A fiercely eco-feminist friend and voracious reader often recommends books she has recently read she thinks I might like. For weeks Renee kept saying,…

    15th January, 2023: Stanley Street, Liverpool In a grey backstreet, Eleanor Rigby sits on a stone bench where a memory of her and so many others have been. She sits down next to her as close as she can to pick up Eleanor’s silent words living in a dream, waiting at the window,…

“Thought is patchy and material. It does not find magical closure or even seek it, perhaps because it’s too busy just trying to imagine what’s going on”. “The act of description, then, is a peering, accidental glimpse of what matters” (Kathleen Stewart, 2007, p. 5; 2016, p. 31). A light that tries to write “In…