or Icarus redux — All her life she has watched the birds fly over and wondered about her brother. Mother will never speak of him. But Sophia, her nurse, told her his story. Black Feathers floating on a cobalt sea. That is what she thinks of when she thinks of her brother. On her…

the who as well as the what of writing — All writers want readers. Good writing alone doesn’t always guarantee them. Medium followers in the high hundreds do not either. Nothing does. But making your reader part of your writing process can help. So how do we actually bring the reader into the business of writing a story? Not when…

Books that Helped me Get Out of My Own Way. — I’ve written elsewhere on Medium about how I first wanted to be a writer when I was seven. But wanting to be a writer is one thing, writing is quite another. …

It all started with a transistor radio — How did you get into music? Was it the records your dad played? Or maybe you had an older sibling, the one mum was always yelling at to ‘turn that music down.’ We all discover music in different ways. Growing up, the only music I heard at home was when…

Celluloid Heroines Never Really Die — Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Rudolph Valentino. Great stars of the silent movies, still remembered today. But their leading ladies are largely forgotten. So, let’s meet some of these queens of the silent screen. Mildred Davis.

Sometimes the English language is no joke — I have a confession to make. I’m a complete language nerd. I still look up words in dictionaries, yeah the actual printed kind, the size of a brick or three with yellowing pages. I use Google if I’m in a hurry to check a definition because open the dictionary and…

Three other Margret Atwood novels to consider Margaret Atwood is becoming like a singer who is best known for one song, despite having a considerable body of other work. …

Putting the signals into words — I love my mother. Those words should be easy to say. But three decades after her death saying them still feels awkward, like speaking a language I’ve never learned. We did not display emotions in my family. We lived with a subtext of feelings and the untold history that kept…

Stepney, east London, 1960 He was on stage singing with Ray Charles and the audience loved him, the applause was louder than the music as he stepped up to take the second verse solo… Not asleep but nonetheless dreaming, Chas opened his eyes. A skinny 14-year-old kid coming back to…