It’s just turned 2011. So I’m going to write a list of what I want to happen that would greatly improve my life and the lives of others. It’ll start off with ‘Give Arnfrid a big load of cash’, then ‘let him achieve world-wide fame yet keep him anonymous and happy’ and ending with ‘peace…
During the last few weeks I have enjoyed BBC4′s German season, about Art, about walking and sharing Al Murray’s wonderful big-hearted intelligent view of a country he’s made his reputation out of mocking. It felt good being German, coming from such a varied cultured people who have such rich history and for a few hours…
Manicured lawns green and even, hedges straight and crisp, driveways black and smooth, cars new and shiny, paintwork bright and gleaming, shops a’plenty, trees with blossom, why do I hate it so? Why does it represent a place of desolation of the human spirit to me? And what on earth made me move here in…
Maybe I’m the Mystery Shopper of Life, doomed to walk the highways and byways we all tread, but with a bit of a twist, or a slight sting in the tail. Days unravel in many ways. Do you ever have a day where you feel if it was a film you could accept it more…
I’ve even been to the Himalayas but sometimes I wonder how I got there, not in terms of route or transport systems but how this heap of quivering manhood broke through his worries about travelling, bit the bullet, boarded the plane at one end and got off somewhere else. My travel anxiety (or Reisefieber) which…
I attempted to write LOVE LIES: A Journal in a consciously random way, does that sound wrong? Does it seem counter-intuitive because surely, it’s conscious or it’s random? But for me, surrealism’s strength is in its non-logical nature, not illogical but just not following what we know as logical. Do you associate ‘surrealism’ with the…
This is where I’ll publish news about my work and activities relating to creative writing.
You stop, you look round and wonder how you got to where you are. Do you ever feel as if you blinked years ago and now it’s your life? Whenever I feel hemmed in by life or by people or by circumstances or even by the glorious British climate I try to remember that the…
You wake up in the morning with words in your chest, bursting to come out. They may not make much sense and I’ve been trained to reread and edit, punctuate and make things look and read elegantly, but there’s something so fresh available to me now in writing blogs. I love the works of Thomas…
Are you at a stage in your personal or professional life where you’ve lost sense of your needs? We ran four workshops based on Mindful Writing, all four were useful for our clients. Our work raised as many questions as it offered solutions, but often it is more helpful simply to get a sense of where we…
‘Inny’ and ‘Outy’ are words we sometimes use to describe our navels. Does yours stick out or go in? Is yours an Inny or an Outy? I don’t really want to know, but the word navel interests me in the context of navel-gazing and writing. Are you someone who likes to go deep as a…
I’m wrestling with something after reading Brian Dillon’s article ‘Malignant Sadness’ (Saturday Guardian, 22.08.09) chronicling the history of creative people’s predisposition to hypochondria.* Freud thought it was a ‘state of being in love with one’s own illness’, but I support Charles Darwin who claimed that ‘ill-health … has saved me from the distractions of society and…
I have been quietly excited about launching our Mindful Writing workshops since the page has gone up on the website. And then doubts set in. I began to think, what do I really know of Mindfulness and what fundamentally is the purpose of writing? Even though for me there is something truly marvellous about the act…
I believe in writing things down. Writing my novel LOVE LIES: A Journal allowed me to make sense of dark periods in my life and the act of writing served as a catalyst for my creativity. So I am very interested in people who also have written things down and therefore made a difference to…
If you’ve only ever thought Psychology was an entertaining read in women’s magazines, and if there’s Positive Psychology is there Negative Psychology, and can books on psychology really help you when you’re in distress? Then read on dear Reader. Positive Psychology is a term that’s in use a lot today. It’s a bit related to…
I don’t compare myself to George Orwell, but when I read in the Observer Review (10/05/09) what he’d said about writing, it resonated deeply with me. “Writing a book is like a long bout of painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if not driven by some demon.” Amen to that George! However…
I had a few starts to my life. I wandered from Germany into teaching and counselling and along the way wrote a book. Life happened around me but I’m not sure I was in it. My life was a rich, slowly cooking soup of Buddhism, therapy, writing, working, living, breathing sprinkled with a facility for…
When you’re as well known as Hanif Kureishi (novelist, screenwriter and playwright) and you express your scorn for ‘creative writing courses’ calling them the ‘new mental hospitals’, it makes humble beginners, like me, in the field of running workshops sit up and take notice and wonder if he’s got a blooming point. The piece I read…
I wonder if anyone suffers from the same complaint as me. I call it ‘Slingo’. It’s when, as a German, I can’t quite believe what I’m reading in all sorts of situations. I can’t work out if it’s wishful thinking, a Freudian ‘slip’ or my Germanic eyes misreading English as if it were some weird,…
Many people think ‘LOVE LIES’ as a title sounds cynical. That is not my intention. I saw Andre as another kind of ‘Everyman’, carrying a bag of rubbish, unconscious of its existence. He wanted to feel better and thought ‘love’ was the answer. C.G. Jung says we’re born with a black bag attached to our…
After writing LOVE LIES: A Journal, rather than embarking on a follow-up novel, I wanted to grow from it. So I went to my ‘allotment’ at www.eaglepeace.com and planted LOVE LIES like a seed in the ground. What’s great about working with the Internet is that it actually feels like planting a mystery seed not…