writer | editor | artist
This very ordinary little wooden plaque with tin triangle advertising the sale of watches played a role in saving hundreds of people’s lives in Haarlem during the Second World War. During the period of the nazi occupation of Holland, the Ten Boom family ran a safe house above their clock and watch store. Their modest…
God, I think I’m becoming a museum tragic. All of my letters home are filled with the stories I find in them, and in the conversations I rarely have the courage to strike up with strangers. I’m sure I’m boring all my long-suffering friends to death, so instead I should start posting these snippets of…
I really enjoyed visiting Waterland, the district that encompasses both Monnickendam, where these photographs were taken, and Broek. I’m not the first to enjoy a stroll through the area. In 1905, an Englishman by the name of Edward Verrall Lucas published a book about his visit to the Netherlands: A Wanderer in Holland. It’s an…
Guess what? My latest novel, Rupetta, is about to be launched by Tartarus Press in the UK. They are hosting a launch in an old, reputedly haunted, pub in York on February 9th. The pub is called The Golden Fleece. If you can make it, I would love to see you there! In the meantime,…
I know, I know. I’m working on that long, wordy post. I promise. I was working on it today, in the snow, at the Cafe Tuin just around the corner in Tweede Tuindwarsstraat. But I got distracted and made a new friend. I hope you like him as much as I do. His name is Tabor…
As a reader, I’m fairly hard to please. I never used to be. As a small child I would happily read cereal boxes, ticket stubs, IKEA instructions. But, these days, my tastes have changed. Lately, I’ve read some amazing books, including Lauren Groff’s Arcadia, Wade Davis’s The Wayfinders (based on his Massey Lectures), and Cate…
This is the beginning of a story – the opening ‘note’ of a story about Matilda, a young girl whose life becomes entangled in the life of the orphan king, Edward VI. This story takes place during a time in English history that never quite happened. Here are some things you may already know, if…
As you probably already know, in a recent act of outstanding idiocy, the new Premier of Queensland withdrew funding for the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards. Plenty of people have posted detailed and intelligent responses to this outrage, while I’ve been offline, so I won’t add my indignant restating of their valid critique of his position…
Today, I was reading Barry Lopez’s essay ‘Landscape and Narrative’ from the collection Crossing Open Ground. Lots to think about here, but two things that I want to come back to, and think about some more: A story draws on relationships in the exterior landscape and projects them onto the interior landscape. The purpose of…
Loving a child is a dangerous thing. I think I knew this at the beginning, with my first daughter, when they laid her in my arms. But then again, not really. You can know things and not know them at the same time. I don’t know how this can be true, but I believe that…