6th - 10th July 2026: Writing the Body at Faber Academy in London

One week intensive course (in person)

More info and book here

How can we render the pain, joy and expectations of our bodies in the world? How can we translate our physical experiences in language which will resonate with readers?

In this one-week intensive course, novelist Jessica Andrews will guide you through a series of close readings, generative exercises and discussions to reimagine how you might write about the body.

You’ll consider a diverse range of extracts from writers – such as Garth Greenwell, Eimear McBride and K Patrick – who articulate the physicality of the body through sensory and emotional writing and experimentation with form and linguistics. You will also deeply consider the political implications of bodily writing – as well as the freedoms and limitations experienced by different bodies, as determined by society’s codes, expectations and histories.

By the end of the course you should have an effective piece of writing centred around the body, which can be used to begin a new project, or to refine or improve a project you’re already working on. You’ll also leave with the support of fellow writers keen to go and continue on the same journey of writing about the body.

(This is the same course I taught last year, so if you have already attended, the material will be fairly similar. This course is my favourite thing to teach!)

There are scholarship places available.

*

3rd October 2026: Writing the Body at Faber Academy in Newcastle

One day intensive course (in person)

Book and more info here

This is a condensed version of the week-long Writing the Body course. We will read, discuss and explore writing exercises around:

1. What is embodied writing?

2. Action, physicality and emotion

3. Formal and linguistic experiement

4. Sharing work, ideas and Q&A

*

18th August 2026: Dialogue and Detail masterclass at ARVON

2 hour masterclass (online)

Book and more info here

‘I like language that sounds quotidian but poetic. That quality of stumbling into beauty and then it’s gone’

Greta Gerwig

How do you write good dialogue in fiction? What does it mean to create subtext? How can you improve your observational skills and use small, specific details from lived experience to bring your characters to life? In this Masterclass, award-winning novelist Jessica Andrews will cover some of the technicalities of writing dialogue. You will think about different ways to use dialogue in your work and consider how dialogue can help you best represent character. Taking inspiration from both prose fiction and screenwriting, you will develop voice and master the art of creating effective subtext. Through guided writing exercises, you will develop an eye and ear for the ways in which people around you speak, move and act, and learn how to use those details to craft authentic writing.

This course is for writers who would like to improve dialogue-writing skills, create subtext and sharpen an eye for detail. Jessica will focus on prose fiction, but playwrights and screenwriters should also find this course helpful

*

And if you’re thinking about doing a Creative Writing MA , I teach at City University, London with my talented colleagues and we are currently accepting applications for 26/27.

Apply and more info here

*
And if you’re just here for writing, I’ve been finishing a project and getting my mojo back. More soon! xo

G buys his auntie a bouquet of tulips and daffodils, wrapped in brown paper. It is freezing and we go to a cafè. He is hungover and I order two perfectly square slices of bread with two ovals of poached eggs, a hot cup of coffee. He tells me that he has been having visions of the devil, at church and in his car. I nod slowly, ask questions, do not act surprised. I ask him what the devil looks like. A mask, he says. A terrible mask.

My mam and I walk through the Barbican estate after my graduation, trying to find our way out. Pale January sun grazes our skin. We are trying to repair something that happened here thirteen years ago, when I stretched out into the world and was clawed back. We go for lunch and when I ask her what she wants she says, anything, I’ll have anything. I’ll have the same as you.

I meet C at a bar near my house and we sit by the window, car headlights blurred in the rain. She says that she is starting to think she might not have time to have a baby, that she can feel possibility slipping away from her.

On New Year’s Eve we dance in an old car garage until past daylight. When the strobe flashes too brightly the dark corners of the room are illuminated, piles of coats and the corrugated iron, dirt trod into the floor. Keep the veil on, A and I say to each other. Mask on.

I chat with my colleague, J and an ex-student at D’s book launch. I tell the ex-student that my family are from Ireland, and she says, did you used to be a Protestant? And I say, quickly, Catholic, widening my eyes as if I am joking. J says, you can’t ask someone if they used to be a Catholic, can you? It’s in you for life.

We get a cat and he lies on the floor with his paws outstretched, asking us to rub his belly.

J and I go to the theatre. We sit at the edge of the circle, restricted view, elbows resting on red velvet. We watch the violinists in the orchestra pit raise their bows in unison and place them gently on the strings, poised and ready to play.

My brother comes to visit and we walk along the canal. We let his dog off the lead in the park and he jumps through the fence and heads towards the water. We run after him, shouting his name in the cold pink dusk, our voices like smoke in the air.

K and W come over for dinner. K calls the novel, the millennial swan song. W doesn’t have proper walking boots. K says, you should get some, you could wear them, we could go walking, it would be good.

We sit at a table outside of a bar in Dalston in the early hours of the morning, oozing red light. A waiter comes to take our order. I ask for a lemonade and she says, no, no soft drinks, not at this time. Everyone laughs and I order a margarita instead.

I go to see Lucien Freud’s drawings at the portrait gallery. The gallery text says that he used to buy birds from a market in East London. He is quoted saying, I was always excited by birds. If you touch wild birds, it’s a marvellous feeling.

When we leave the house our cat paws at the window, butting his head against the glass, not understanding why he can’t reach us, feel our touch.

I go to a literary reading and have the overwhelming sensation that I want to run out of the door and lie down in long grass, smoking a cigarette, bare-legged.

S’s long hair blows in the wind and she says, no one talks about the regret you feel in the beginning. Now, I love him, I love him so much. But there was a moment. Her husband says, he looks so sad when we walk away, as if we have put him down in the long grass and left him.

I stroke the baby’s fragile head. The first crocuses push through soil. A new heart flickers in his body, a wild bird. What if this is the long grass, and S is barefoot inside of it? The violinists raise their bows. What will I touch? The mask slips. The millennials beat their wings. What will I let touch me? I lace up my boots and order a margarita. I hear a voice in the air like smoke, calling my name in the dusk.

I begin at the grotto in the dark. White roses, tall candles, black river rushing over old stone. A statue of the virgin, apparition in the night. Cluster of priests in pale gold. Young woman on her knees in a white lace veil. I make the sign of the cross self-consciously, tracing a corpse across my face.

Afterwards, I cross the bridge, where a woman sings Ave Maria in gold sequins. I walk past Café Jeanne d’Arc, teenagers drinking beer at streetside tables, haloed in neon green. Climb a set of stone steps into a quiet, crumbling street. Glance over my shoulder, wary of being followed, even here. White and blue tiles in the doorway spell out Redemptor Hotel. I type the code into the keysafe and let myself in.

The studio smells damp beneath synthetic plug-in air fresheners; sickly summer berries. It brings back my twenties; all those dank rooms in houseshares trussed up in fairy lights and cheap scented candles, girlishness lacquered over rot. There is no shower curtain and I angle cold water at my body, unavoidably spraying the floor. The damp spreads. Once, this way of living appealed to me; ascetic, monkish, pure. I lie on the hard fold-out bed, looking for shapes in the mould on the ceiling, hoping for a face, a sign.

In the morning, I go out into the sunlight, past the librairie catholoique, gift shops selling glass bottles in jewel colours, kitsch t-shirts emblazoned with christ’s face. I sit at a café, order a coffee. Church bells ring and the waiter sings alleluia as he puts a red cup with a matching saucer down in front of me. I take out my notebook. I am here to do research, although I don’t know what exactly I am looking for. A couple of years ago, at Newcastle airport, when it was all still so raw, I noticed a queue of pilgrims wearing red neckerchiefs. I knew they must be coming here, and the memory of it made sick to my stomach. And so now I am here, trying to inhabit that feeling, thread it between my fingers, pearlescent and wet.

On my way here, the man next to me on the plane asked, what brings you to Lourdes? I told him it was a long story, and he said, sometimes people are called to spiritual places for reasons they do not understand. He had the voice of a priest, a voice I had forgotten. A calm, measured, soulful sound, recognisable in certain kinds of spiritual people. I wondered where they learn that voice; gentle, trustworthy. I wanted to pull it from his mouth, hook it out of his throat, hold it accountable. And I wanted to sink it to it, wrapped up in his syllables, loved, protected, safe. I came here when I was sixteen, I told him. He asked if I wanted to share a taxi into town, and I trusted him; that voice, this religion, even though I know about the violence, that’s partly why I am here. We got into the taxi and the man thoughtlessly started a sentence with, when you came here as a child and that word, child, has been ringing in my ears ever since.

I look up at the mountain peaks, breathing in pine air. A feeling of height, being closer to heaven. A shop window across the street is crammed with glow-in-the-dark virgins. When I was at school, a priest told me that Mary never committed a sin in her life, which meant that her mother never had sex, and neither did she, but babies grew in their wombs anyway, without their choice, the good news delivered by angels. When we were told this at school, a girl in my class, who already knew about violence, asked, was Mary raped by a solider? The teachers exchanged glances and the girl was taken outside, to speak to the priest in private.

When I was sixteen, there was another girl at my school who was pretty and wild. She got pregnant without angels. Her family were well-respected in the catholic community and she kept the baby. We all knew that pregnancy was one of the worst things that could ever happen to us, because abortion was one of the most terrible things we could ever do. We would have to confess it to a priest at the altar. We would live in regret forever. Sex was wrought in fear, because it would lead to a baby, which meant giving up our lives, or giving up our deaths, obscuring freedom and pleasure. I felt afraid for the wild, pretty girl, and I also felt smug. She had been punished for her wildness and prettiness, perhaps by god, or maybe by all of us, the people around her, who could not stand her freedom. I could not see then, because I was a child, that her punishment was mine too.

I run my fingers over rows of virgins, tacky with sunlight and glitter. I want one, despite myself. I want someone to watch over me (who watched over those girls?), to keep me safe (who kept them safe?), to protect me from my own desire.

I walk through the morning streets past Hôtel Teresa. A priest dressed in black with a pair of square Ray-Bans rushes by. I pass Hôtel Paradiso, shops crammed with pink pearl rosary beads, silver medallions in the shapes of saints’ faces, flaming hearts, a wall of bleeding mirrors. Hôtel Christ Roi. I trace a figurine of Jesus with his palms outstretched, gold light spilling from his fingers. There are angels with feathered wings, saints wearing crowns of roses. Nuns in white dresses and tights with bright blue neckerchiefs walk along the street in pairs. Lungfuls of sky. Franciscan monks in long brown robes, wooden beads clutched in their fists.

Volunteers pull pilgrims in three-wheel carts along Rue de la Grotte. There are so many bodies in pain. Jesus bleeding on the cross, garnets dripping down his face. People in wheelchairs beneath the thudding sun, praying to walk again, to see, to speak, to live without pain; everything the bible promises.

When I was truly a child, my mother brought my little brother here. He was born deaf, and she prayed for him to be able to hear. This kind of prayer is ethically complex, but my mother was young and desperate and she believed in god. She had been given a caring role, without her choice, delivered by angels. My brother is still deaf, but he had a hole in his heart then, which closed of its own accord. When my mother recalls this now, she says, I was praying for the wrong thing.

When I came here at sixteen (when I was a child), I was in love with a boy on the pilgrimage. We sneaked off on our own (pretty, wild) to get drunk in a bar in a thunderstorm. We sat on the terrace, watching lightning flash. We kissed in our plastic chairs, wooden doves around our necks, wrists cuffed in plastic beads emblazoned with Padre Pio, the patron saint of adolescents. I felt the world rush through me as we got soaked by the rain. I was desperate to lose what I perceived to be my virginity that summer. I remember thinking the line, ‘it followed me around like a stink’ and being pleased by it, even then. The definition of sex is important here. It will come to be important later.

Later, we went to the grotto in the dark. I was still half-drunk in my cut-off denim mini-skirt. There were hundreds of candles burning in the night, so many fragile prayers. I thought of my brother with his white-blonde curls, cradled in my mother’s arms, the glow of his tiny heart. I felt all of those hurting, hopeful, desperate people around me, and I cried so hard that a priest, that priest, said, that’s enough, now. But it wasn’t enough, not really. I want to cry harder now, with that girl by the river, for the damage that was done to the people around her. We were just children, sisters, virgins, pretty, wild, smug, drunk on lager and the promise of a miracle, wet with rain and waiting to be punished.

Here at thirty-three, the same age my mother was when she brought my brother, I go into the basilica and stand in front of Bernadette’s ribs, protected by a gold gilded cage. I want to put my hands inside her ribcage, to feel something move through me (I want all of this to be real). A nun (a sister) glances at my bare shoulders and anywhere else in the world I might cover them respectfully, but not here, in my own religion (can I lay claim to it?) my own culture (can I really say that?) my own hurt (am I wrongfully taking someone else’s pain, elongating it, drawing it out?) my own shame (which at least belongs to me). When I came here at sixteen (a child), I wore shorts in the hospital; fake-tanned legs, thick calves like a puppy, diocese polo shirt knotted at the waist, exposing my belly button gem. I wasn’t yet starving myself into purity and light, but the desire was already there. A nun (a sister) looked me up and down and said, you look like you’re on your holidays. We weren’t given any training in the hospital. We were left alone to care for people who needed a lot of support. I took a woman to the toilet, supporting her heavy weight, wiping for her, taking her back to bed. I had not travelled to many places and the south of France was magical, sun-split and unreal. I was a child on my holidays, pilgrim, virgin, sister, saint.

There is holy water in abundance, dripping from taps, spilling over hands, arms, feet in sandals, poured over children’s heads. I take a pew in the heat by the baths and wait for hours as a priest recites the rosary in Italian, followed by a Notre Pio, over and over again. I imagine my mother and brother sitting here, all those years ago. My brother’s crooked front teeth, the hearing aids that did not work. My mother on her knees in the grotto, dark bob around her face, asking god to make her son hear. She was given god by my grandad, (the nuns used to hit her at school), who was given god in Ireland (the priests and nuns abused him in a children’s home), where god was in the earth, trees and water (and in the souls of people who were starved to death by the British, shot, bombed, burned alive by the British, and also the IRA), where god could be felt. I want to reach through the years and touch them, hold them close.

Eventually, it is my turn. I am led behind a green and white striped curtain into the baths. Full immersion is no longer offered, in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. Instead, two women wash my hands and face in holy water and give me some to drink. They ask me to say a Hail Mary and I panic, unable to remember the words. I feel fraudulent, touching the water, when I don’t quite believe in it (do I?) when I don’t need it (don’t I?) not in the way that other people here do (do they?). And still, I fill an empty water bottle to give to people at home, to heal them, protect them, keep them safe (from what?).

When I was here at sixteen (when I was a child), the pilgrims and volunteers from my diocese, including the girl who became pregnant shortly afterwards, stayed in a hotel together. We girls dressed the boys up in our clothes, doing their eyeshadow and lipgloss carefully, loaning them our bras and shoes. They wore the little dresses and high heels that we had brought to the pilgrimage with their glow-in-the-dark rosary beads. We had a party in our room, dancing on the beds and drinking beer from glass bottles. The priest came in, yes, that priest, and laughed at the teenage boys virgins, saints dressed in our clothes, the same teenage boys he was abusing. He looked in the wardrobes and under the beds to find the friends who were hiding there. We loved him, we made him laugh, we offered him a bottle of beer and he drank it. Now, girls, he said firmly, in his soft, dangerous voice. That’s enough.

I go to Bernadette’s house, which is now a museum, crowded with pilgrims, or maybe tourists, it is difficult to tell. Her wooden clog is in a temperature-controlled case, under a spotlight. I press my face against the glass, reassured by the solid shape of it. There was a girl called Bernadette, and this is her shoe, which stood on the rocks on the riverbank, witnessing something. That part is true.

In a monastery, I read about a nun whose body smelled of fresh lilies after her death, the odour of sanctity. The veins on her forehead spelled out the name of Jesus. There was a nun who only ever ate holy communion and a nun who prayed so hard that the carpet beneath her was scorched with flame from the force of her breath. I understand why these women were pulled to make their lives small and predictable, to feel they were part of something larger than themselves. To avoid marrying men and mothering children, to reduce the potential for danger, to be looked after by the church. (But what about the angels? What about the rush of the world in the thunderstorm, how it felt to be soaked by the rain? What about the boys in our high heels and the priest with his soft and dangerous voice? What about new year’s eve, when we got drunk in his house and danced through the church in our sequinned dresses? Who was looking after us then? Were we praying for the wrong thing?)

I take part in a candlelit procession, joining a swell of people singing Ave Maria, holding a candle in front of me. I see the woman from the bridge in the gold sequins. She is alone, holding a tall light, looking lost. There is something in her that I recognise and prefer to keep at a distance. I move away from her intensity, afraid I might breathe it in. It is impossible not to be moved by the flaming sky behind the basilica, people pushing wheelchairs, prams, hospital carts, thousands of lights cupped in palms beneath the trees. My chest expands, even as I notice the tired women with five or six children, their prim dresses, the priests in their collars speaking into microphones. They tell us about the mother of god, how she was perfect, pure, while humanity is in the dirt. Guilty thoughts grow behind my eyes. Yes, I could be a better person, yes, I have sinned, yes, I want to be pure, absolved, empty, filled with light. There is a lot to value here, in the hope it offers people, the visibility of sick and disabled bodies, the gentleness and care. But there are also the priests in their collars, laughing at the teenage boys, my friends, we were sixteen, on our holidays, blood on their lips and bodies on their tongues.

I join a mass in the grotto with the Diocese of Leeds. There is a group of teenagers in polo shirts and neckerchiefs. I recognise the girls with their highlights and mascara, the boys with gel in their hair. I watch them, awkward in their bodies, shielding their eyes from the sun. Here to care for pilgrims, to get drunk on holiday, to witness a miracle, lose their virginities, to be absolved from sin. I want to run over to them, disrupt the mass, tear down the candles, ask if they are okay. But this place gives people as much as it takes away. They push past me in their rush for communion. I join the queue, take a host and let it melt on my tongue, the way I was taught as a child.

On my way back to the Redemptor Hotel, I turn a corner, and there, in the street, are two apparitions in white, a crowd gathered round them. For a second, the air around me flickers, and I feel the rush of the thunderstorm, my long lost virginity, the hole in my brother’s heart.

I stay for a while, watching other people turn into the street and witness the vision. I see the light in their faces, hot seconds of wonder, vulnerability, faith. They are angels, redemptors, come to save us, punish us, to give me a baby against my will. They are saints, signs, gods, girls, glow-in-the-dark virgins, mothers cradling their children, teenage boys in dresses. We lunge forwards, hungry, reaching for their wings, but our hands are empty and there is nothing there.

I’m teaching a 12-week Beginners’ Fiction evening course at Faber Academy from 22nd Jan 2026.

This is aimed at anyone who is new to writing, or if you have an idea for a prose project that you have always wanted to try, but never had the time, space or self-belief to get started.

*

How do we write compelling, well-crafted, original fiction? What does it take to develop a unique writer’s voice? This accessible and friendly course led by author Jessica Andrews will provide you with the skills, confidence and enthusiasm you need to begin your writing life.

You and your fellow writers will begin reading, writing and discussing straight away, even if you’re new to the craft of fiction. You will learn essential craft techniques and there will be opportunities for exercises, workshops and structured writing time.

You should finish the course with an exciting idea for a piece of long or short-form fiction, developed characters and setting, a new awareness of your own writing voice and the skills, knowledge and self-belief you need to continue writing.

*

Here is a bit more info about what each class will look like:

Session 1

Thursday 22 January, 19:00–21:00

Why fiction?

Why do we write fiction? What are the freedoms and limitations of fictional forms? We will discuss these questions, and consider what it means to become active readers, listeners and observers of literature and the world.

Session 2

29 January, 19:00–21:00

How to have ideas

Developing ideas is one of the building blocks of fiction writing. We will consider re-tellings and stories from lived experience as potential starting points. Through a range of writing exercises, we will access our memories, fears and obsessions and think about the ways we might embed these within fiction.

Session 3

5 February, 19:00–21:00

Narrative structure

Every piece of fiction must have a solid structure. We will think about the differences between plot-driven and character-driven narratives, considering the ways in which other writers use these, and finding a structure to fit our own work.

Session 4

12 February, 19:00–21:00

Form

The links between structure, form and content are vital for a successful work of fiction. We will look at unconventional narrative structures and consider how we might apply these to our own work. We will consider the limitations of traditional western narrative structures and how these have shaped the literary canon. We will look at writers who deconstruct these ideas, blending form and genre in innovative ways.

Session 5

19 February, 19:00–21:00

World-building and setting

The setting of a piece of fiction is crucial in terms of developing your characters and plot, creating tone and atmosphere. We will consider how to make your fictional world come to life, whether you are writing realism, fantasy or anything in between.

Session 6

26 February, 19:00–21:00

Perspective and voice

A strong narrative voice is one of the key components in hooking your readers and revealing or concealing details of your world. We will think about the freedoms and limitations of different perspectives, and experiment with using them in our own work, in order to find the best fit.

NB This week will be followed by a Reading Week.

Session 7

12 March, 19:00–21:00

Characterisation and interiority

Compelling characters are important elements of any piece of fiction. We will outline character desires, motivations, needs and inner conflicts. We will think about how to use small, specific details to evoke character, and look at writers who use interiority to bring their characters to life.

Session 8

19 March, 19:00–21:00

Key themes, symbols and narrative questions

Themes and symbols work together to address key narrative questions, which help us to formulate what our works of fiction are ‘about’. Developing these skills will ensure your work is sophisticated and multi-layered, engaging with the world beyond itself.

Session 9

26 March, 19:00–21:00

Language

One of the key elements of a unique authorial voice is the use of language. We will look at examples of different writing styles, and experiment with using these in our own work. We will consider minimalism, maximalism, precision, specificity and lyricism, with an emphasis on choosing language carefully.

Session 10

2 April, 19:00–21:00

Experimentation

We will look at writers who experiment with structure, form, genre, style or language, and how this might open our eyes to new ideas or elements we have not considered before. We will examine our own work playfully, testing boundaries and possibilities, revising the links between form and content.

Session 11

9 April, 19:00–21:00

How to edit

Perhaps the most essential author’s skill is being a good editor. We will look at a range of ideas and techniques to help us edit our own work and think about the importance of reading critically, as well as navigating the ways in which our own self-doubt might hold us back, alongside strategies to overcome this.

Session 12

16 April, 19:00–21:00

Industry insight and sharing work

There will be opportunities to share our work so far and reflect on our writing journeys, setting intentions for the future. You will be given insight into the way the publishing industry works, and think about how to find time, space, motivation and support to continue your project in future.

You can find out more and book here.

Ps. I will send some new writing soon - I promise!

I’m putting the course material together at the moment and enjoying it so much. We will look at visual artists and filmmakers alongside writers of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, considering the political implications of embodied writing.

There will also be a guest workshop from the brilliant K Patrick, poet and author of Mrs S, which is one of the best books I read last year.

*

How can we render the pain, joy and expectations of our bodies in the world? How can we translate our physical experiences in language which will resonate with readers?

In this one-week intensive course, you will be guided through a series of close readings, generative exercises and discussions to reimagine how you might write about the body.

You’ll consider a diverse range of extracts from writers – such as Garth Greenwell, Eimear McBride and Carmen Maria Machado – who articulate the physicality of the body through sensory and emotional writing and experimentation with form and linguistics. You will also deeply consider the political implications of bodily writing – as well as the freedoms and limitations experienced by different bodies, as determined by society’s codes, expectations and histories.

By the end of the course you should have an effective piece of writing centred around the body, which can be used to begin a new project, or to refine or improve a project you’re already working on. You’ll also leave with the support of fellow writers keen to go and continue on the same journey of writing about the body.

Here is some more info about what each day looks like:

Session 1

Monday 28 July, 10:00–16:00

What is embodied writing?

We will look at a brief history of embodied writing and consider some of the socio-political implications of writing from and about the body.

We will read ‘In Praise of Navel-Gazing’ by Melissa Febos, and think about why the body may have been historically excluded from literature. We will also think about which kinds of bodies are deemed worthy of literature, and how we might address this in our own work.

Session 2

Tuesday 29 July, 10:00–16:00

Action and physicality

We will analyse writers such as Garth Greenwell and K Patrick, who portray the body through the use of direct action. We will think about how these writers excavate the body and emotions through precise, physical descriptions, and practise these techniques within our own work.

Session 3

Wednesday 30 July, 10:00–16:00

Senses, emotion and guest tutor, K Patrick

We will look at writers such as Ocean Vuong and Natalie Diaz, who use a variety of techniques to represent the body through sensory experience. We will think about the motivations for using different approaches to represent diverse bodily experiences, and how this might best inform our choices in our own work.

K Patrick will join the session as a guest tutor. Patrick is a writer based in Scotland. Their work has appeared in The Paris Review, Poetry Review, Granta and Five Dials, and was shortlisted for The White Review Poet’s Prize in 2021, the same year that K was also shortlisted for The White Review’s Short Story Prize. In 2023 they were shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award.

Their debut novel, Mrs S, published by Fourth Estate (UK) and Europa (US) was selected as an Observer Best Debut of the Year, and K was named a Granta Best of Young British Novelists for 2023. Their debut poetry collection, Three Births, was published by Granta Poetry. It was longlisted for the 2024 Laurel Prize and shortlisted for Scotland’s National Book Awards. Their piece ‘Walk’ was selected for the Forward Book of Poetry 2025.

Session 4

Thursday 31 July, 10:00–16:00

Formal and linguistic experimentation

We will examine writers like Eimear McBride and Carmen Maria Machado who use formal experimentation and fragmented language to represent bodily experience. We will consider the role of experimentation in expanding our horizons as writers and think about the inherent contradictions in attempting to represent corporeal experience within language.

Session 5

Friday 1 August, 10:00–16:00

Interiors, exteriors and social codes

We will look at the ways different writers juxtapose the interior and exterior realms of the body. We will discuss literary representations of the freedoms and limitations experienced by different bodies, as determined by societal codes, expectations and histories. There will also be opportunities to share your work and your reflections on the week with the group.

*

The course is open to writers across disciplines, although the week will be largely focused on prose.

You can book and find out more here.

My stage adaptation of Saint Maud by Rose Glass goes into preview next week at Live Theatre in Newcastle, directed by Jack McNamara, with a score by Gazelle Twin and movement choreographed by Roberta Jean. I’ve learned so much and found the collaborative aspects really refreshing, as well as an important exercise in relinquishing control.

Jack approached me about adapting Saint Maud after we worked together previously. We spent a few days in a rehearsal room workshopping my first novel, Saltwater, in order to see how we might adapt it for stage.

Saltwater is largely based on my lived experiences, and it was a strange experience to be in a rehearsal room in Sunderland, where I grew up, with actors playing fictionalised versions of my mother and I, walking around imaginary versions of the streets just below the window.

I was thinking a lot about what it means to belong to a place, especially as someone who has moved away, and the ways in which writing and speaking publicly about Sunderland has forever altered my relationship to it, in emotionally complex ways.

I wrote this piece after those days in workshop, and it was published last year by Somesuch Stories #7, who make vital space for new work. I thought I would post a version of it here, as it is an interesting bridge between my time with Jack in the rehearsal room, and the play I have just completed. More on the playwriting process soon!

It Felt Like Home

Prelude

Lucy is a writer. Her debut novel is a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age story, told through the lens of a mother-daughter relationship. She wrote about longing to escape her working-class childhood in Sunderland, then feeling unanchored when she left it behind. She spent years trying to outrun her origins, but the book became a rope, drawing her back to them. When her novel was published, she was invited to give newspaper interviews and to speak at universities, book shops and literary festivals. A theatre company based in Sunderland wanted to adapt her story for the stage.

         ‘These characters belong here,’ the director told her. ‘We want to bring them home.’

Scene 1

Sunderland, present day. A rehearsal room in a brand-new arts venue inside of a repurposed ropery, as part of a cultural regeneration scheme. LUCY’s play is being funded by the local council, as part of the project. She left the city to find what she needed, and now she is returning as a visitor, to claim the funding as her own.

LUCY and the DIRECTOR sit on chairs with a draft of the script in front of them.

The actors playing LUCY (ACTOR 1) and LUCY’S MOTHER (ACTOR 2) stand before them, awaiting instructions.

DIRECTOR: Okay, let’s set this up. It’s 2005: Lucy, you’re 13, and you live in a bungalow in Houghton, with your mother and your little brother, who is deaf. Your father is an alcoholic and isn’t around often. Things have been difficult over the past few years, but your mother has just started a new relationship and things are starting to feel possible again.

ACTOR 1 nods and steps forward to read from her script.

ACTOR 1: My mother was young and beautiful with a whole life behind her, but a whole possible life ahead of her, too. She was full of something special, and traces of it would linger in the air as she turned her head to give whoever she was chatting to her full attention. She met her friends in the pubs in town on Saturday afternoons, which is also where she met Gordon, her new boyfriend, who drove a Jaguar with a telly pressed into the back of the front seat.

ACTOR 2 casts a radiant smile over the audience while smoking a cigarette and running a hand through her hair.

ACTOR 1: One night, my dad cruised the streets, looking for my mother. He borrowed a friend’s car and wore a wig, so that she wouldn’t recognise him peering at her new life through the pub window.

ACTOR 2 raises a glass to her lips then sets it down quickly, looking towards the back of the auditorium in disbelief.

DIRECTOR: Alright, hold it there for a moment. I’m not sure if we need both of you onstage. We need to work out who is in control of the narrative. Is this Lucy’s story? Or is it her mother’s?

***

FLASHBACK: The day LUCY’s novel is published, she takes part in a literary event in Newcastle, focused on northern, working-class writing. She describes the contradictions of writing about Sunderland, a city rarely present in novels, plays or films. She says it was a delicate task to balance the poetry of the wide coastline and disused shipyards with the often-difficult reality of living there. She speaks about the desperate urge she felt to capture the stories of the working-class women around her, like her mother and grandmother, so their lives would not be forgotten. After the talk, she signs books at a table.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 1 reaches the front of the signing queue.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 1: You’ve lost your accent, haven’t you, pet? I would never have guessed you were from round here.

LUCY smiles but feels like a fraud as she signs the woman’s copy of her book.

The next morning, LUCY’S MOTHER drives her to the station to catch a train back to London in preparation for her book launch. They pass LUCY’s old school, her friends’ houses, the concrete bus stop she waited at every morning, dreaming of a different kind of life. AUDIENCE MEMBER 1’s words ring in LUCY’s ears and she reminds herself that she did grow up here; her teenage years embedded in these streets like muscle memory. She thinks of the long, grey afternoons she spent longing for other places and her eyes begin to burn. She glances at LUCY’S MOTHER.

LUCY: How do you feel about the book coming out?

LUCY’S MOTHER: I’m excited for you. (pause) And I feel okay about it. The mam in the book isn’t exactly like me.

LUCY: What do you mean?

LUCY’S MOTHER: I don’t know. (She glances in the rear-view mirror) She’s a bit more flippant, or something. I know the story is told from the daughter’s perspective, but during those years, I felt things that you couldn’t possibly know about.

LUCY (turns away, looking out of the window): Why are you saying this now?

LUCY’S MOTHER (shakes her head): It was important for you to write the story the way you did. I’m just saying it would be nice to tell my side of things.

LUCY rubs her eyes with the sleeve of her jumper. She wanted to capture the truth of her mother, to show her that she understood everything they had been through together.

LUCY: But why didn’t you say something earlier? Now it’s too late to change.

LUCY’S MOTHER: It’s just a story, Lucy, love. It isn’t supposed to be true.

Scene 2

Cheltenham Literary Festival, 2019.

LUCY sits onstage with INTERVIEWER 1. There is a copy of her novel on a small table in front of her and a photo of her face projected onto a screen behind them.

GOODREADS REVIEWER 1 watches from the wings.

INTERVIEWER 1: In previous interviews, you mentioned that your writing is often based on your lived experiences. How do you make a distinction between fiction and truth?

LUCY: There’s a part in the novel where Lucy’s dad drives around the pubs in Sunderland, looking for her mother, wearing a wig. My mam asked me whether that had really happened, or if I’d made it up. I thought she told me the story, but now neither of us can remember. It has become part of our story. Even if it didn’t happen, it feels like it could have. (She laughs) Does that make it true?

GOODREADS REVIEWER 1 (offstage): Yet another millennial woman writing about her own experiences. I am very tired of this trend in contemporary literature. A good novel should tell us something about the world.

Scene 3

Sunderland, present day. Rehearsal room.

LUCY, the DIRECTOR, ACTOR 1 (LUCY) and ACTOR 2 (LUCY’S MOTHER) sit in a circle of chairs, paper coffee cups on the floor beside them.

GOODREADS REVIEWER 2 stands in the wings, watching the action.

DIRECTOR: Let’s talk about the character of the father. Should we have him onstage? He is largely absent from the story, yet his absence has a presence which shapes the narrative. (To Lucy) What were your thoughts behind that?

LUCY: I wanted the focus to be on the relationships between the women. I didn’t want it to become his story.

GOODREADS REVIEWER 2 (offstage): The father character in this novel is barely described at all, which I found disappointing. This should have been picked up by an editor, so I gave the book two stars.

DIRECTOR: Lucy is very understanding of her father’s actions. He treats her badly, but she is sympathetic about the things he is struggling with, and never seems to show any anger. Do you think this is plausible? Should we introduce more tension between them?

***

FLASHBACK: LUCY’S FATHER sometimes disappears for weeks at a time, most notably at her university graduation, when he slept in a park beneath a council estate for a fortnight, and LUCY reported him to the police as a missing person. She put a version of this experience in her novel to symbolise her protagonist’s inability to escape her past.

Every time he starts drinking again, years of worry and anger well up inside of her, making it difficult to breathe. She longs for him to quit so that the tight jaws of anxiety clenched around her gut might loosen their grip, and so that they may begin to repair what is broken.

To coincide with the publication of LUCY’s novel, a broadsheet newspaper offers her £2000 and a six-page spread in their weekend magazine to write a memoir piece about her father’s addiction. They want to include childhood photographs of LUCY and her father, and stage a glossy photoshoot of LUCY as a successful adult, wearing luxurious clothes. She turns the offer down.

***

Shortly after LUCY’s novel is published, LUCY’S FATHER stops drinking to excess. He is diagnosed with a rare autoimmune condition, linked to chemical exposure in factories, where he has spent his life working as an electrician. His body begins to attack itself and he grows very weak. He can no longer work and sleeps often. His muscles waste and his fingers turn black.

LUCY walks along Roker Beach with LUCY’S FATHER. Purple storm clouds gather above dark water. They look out at the lighthouse in the distance and LUCY’S FATHER begins to tell her a story. He talks about the time he got trapped on the pier in a storm and had to escape through a secret tunnel. LUCY wrote about this event in her novel, but gladly listens to him describe it again. She is pleased that she remembered the details correctly, as if recording the truth allows her to hold onto him.

LUCY’S FATHER: I lost my jacket in that tunnel. It’s probably still there somewhere.

LUCY: I thought you lost your shoes.

LUCY’S FATHER: No, it was my jacket.

LUCY: Are you sure?

LUCY’S FATHER: I’m pretty sure. Anyway, it doesn’t matter now, does it?

LUCY: No. (pause) How are you feeling?

LUCY’S FATHER: Not great, Luce.

LUCY’S FATHER pulls off his glove and shows her his freezing fingers, mottled and bruised. LUCY wraps her hands around his, trying to warm them up. She feels the creases and calluses, brushes the home-made tattoo above his left thumb. Or perhaps it is his right.

 The illness has softened him and brought them closer, which is what she always wanted. She searches for slivers of anger inside of herself, but finds they are gone, replaced with something worse.

Scene 4

Newcastle, 2022. Waterstones book shop.

LUCY sits on a small stage with INTERVIEWER 2. There is a bookshelf behind her filled with copies of her novel. INTERVIEWER 2 opens the room up to audience questions.

LITERARY CRITIC 1 waits in the wings, watching the action.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 2: I’ve read your novel and was taken aback by your description of living with someone with alcoholism. You’re obviously young and this depth of understanding feels as if it comes from someone much older. How did you write about that? Is it something you’ve experienced yourself?

LUCY: Thank you. I chose to write a fictional novel, rather than a memoir, because I felt that fiction allowed me more freedom to reach emotional truths through the relationships between my characters.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 2: Right, I just don’t understand how you could write about this unless you’ve lived it.

LUCY: I spoke to members of my family while I was writing and asked them for their accounts of different events.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 2: But is this something that you’ve personally experienced?

LUCY (glances at INTERVIEWER 2): As I mentioned earlier, my writing often blurs fiction and autobiography. Some of it is invented, some of it is based on the experiences of others, and yes – I also use my lived experiences.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 2 nods and sits back in her chair with arms folded, apparently satisfied.

INTERVIEWER 2: When women writers use their own experiences, their work is often received as ‘personal’ or ‘domestic’, whereas when male writers use their lives as inspiration, their work is regarded as being about politics or society – as interrogating something important. How do you feel about this?

LITERARY CRITIC 1 (offstage): This novel occasionally reads like a slightly unearned, navel-gazing memoir and will do nothing to dissuade those who think millennials are too self-absorbed.

Scene 5

Sunderland, present day. Rehearsal room.

ACTOR 1 (LUCY) and ACTOR 2 (LUCY’S MOTHER) sit on chairs in the middle of the room, facing each other. LUCY and the DIRECTOR watch them.

JOURNALIST waits in the wings, observing the action.

ACTOR 1: My mother looked out the window at the squat stone houses across the street and felt her youth had drained out of her.

ACTOR 2 (desperately): I feel like I’m going to be stuck here forever.

ACTOR 1 (child-like): I want to live here forever. It’s our home.

JOURNALIST (offstage): Your characters are often looking for a sense of home. Where do you think that comes from?

***

FLASHBACK: When LUCY is a child, she dreams of becoming an author. She imagines sitting at the kitchen table in her mother’s bungalow, spreading her notebooks over the wipe-clean tablecloth and writing bestselling novels. She tells her plan to LUCY’S MOTHER, who laughs, softly.

LUCY’S MOTHER: You might want to live somewhere else when you’re older.

LUCY (shaking her head): No, I don’t think so. I want to stay here.

LUCY’S FATHER (overhearing their conversation): You should leave if you get a chance, Luce. There are much better places in the world than Sunderland.

Scene 6

Sunderland, 2022. A room above a pub.

LUCY is taking part in Sunderland Literature Festival. She sits on stage with INTERVIEWER 3. LUCY’S MOTHER and LUCY’S FATHER are in the audience.

LITERARY CRITIC 2 sits in the crowd.

INTERVIEWER 3: Why does it feel important for you to write about Sunderland?

LUCY (pause): I wanted to write about Sunderland because I had never really read about it before. When I was growing up, all the books I read and films I watched told me that I needed to go to London, where it seemed like life was happening. I didn’t feel like my life here was interesting or important.

INTERVIEWER 3: Why did you feel like that?

LUCY (carefully): I suppose it’s partly about access to art and aspiration. The kinds of people who are able to make art, due to financial or cultural privilege, often come from places where they have more access to it, which enables them to have those kinds of ambitions. They then go on to make the art which defines the ‘culture’, which often means other places are neglected.

INTERVIEWER 3: Do you think that’s changing? What advice would you give to young people living in the region today, who want to follow a creative path? Do they need to leave the north-east, like you did, in order to be successful?

LUCY (pause): I think there’s a big push for a wider diversity of voices telling stories, which is great to see. (falters) But I think that the conditions for making art are becoming increasingly difficult, especially for people who don’t have a lot of money. (pause) You shouldn’t have to leave your community to find the things you need.

INTERVIEWER 3: You live in London yourself now, don’t you? Do you think you’ll ever come back to live here?

LUCY (avoiding her parents’ gaze): Maybe, one day.

INTERVIEWER 3 asks LUCY to read a section from her novel, and she chooses a passage that is set in Sunderland. She slips back into her native accent, softening her ‘t’s’ and shortening her vowels. She doesn’t read the lines with a negative view of the north-east, because she feels uncomfortable in front of the local audience, in the place that shaped her, yet those lines still feel true.

LUCY: Washington was made up of retail parks and motorways and there didn’t seem to be anything natural or organic about it. It was split into numbered districts like a paint-by-numbers picture where someone had run out of colours and swirled everything into a greenish brownish grey.

There were lots of housing estates made up of identical houses with bricked back yards and there was a river with a couple of pubs and a working men’s club. There was a big, brutalist shopping centre where mams pushed prams in velour tracksuits and babies with snotty noses and frilly socks clutched sausage rolls like pasty pastry angels.

It was the site of the Nissan car plant, one of the North East’s biggest employers. Boys at school knew the factory was looming in their future, waiting for them to grow into the overalls. At the weekends we usually ended up at a party in a council flat rented by someone who used to go to our school. People combed the carpets for spilt drugs with their fingernails at the end of the night and fucked quickly in cold bedrooms, wasting the days away before work or school again on Monday morning.

There was a certain charm surrounding the pebble-dashed houses and the bus stops and the endless drama of our lives played out between cities on bridges and abandoned railway lines. There was a sense of camaraderie at those flat parties, the feeling that we were all in it together and just looking for a good time.

High-rise tower blocks and the despondency of stale, squat houses are aesthetically pleasing when you are removed from them. Middle-class architects with utopian ideals might be able to appreciate the solidity and the magnitude of a huge hunk of concrete with lives carved unapologetically into it, but when that becomes your reality and you have no choice and no way out, when you’re living every day under the shadow of someone else’s vision it becomes oppressive, the weight of their dreams crushing the life out of you.

LITERARY CRITIC 2 (from the crowd): This is partly a novel about disadvantage, yet we must ask ourselves: who is the author addressing her words to? Is she writing for the working-class community she claims to have left behind, or the metropolitan elite in her longed-for London?

LUCY glances up at LUCY’S MOTHER and LUCY’S FATHER, nervous about their reactions. She realises how far away from them she feels on the stage, and how small her dad looks in his chair.

***

FLASHBACK

When she’s 18, LUCY leaves Sunderland to go to university in London. She wants to escape the smallness and staleness she feels during her teenage years, to go out in the world and become someone different. She has big, difficult dreams and she wants to be in a place where things feel possible, silver skyscrapers glinting with promise.

While LUCY is at university, LUCY’S MOTHER marries GORDON and moves into his big, detached house with cream carpets and period fireplaces. LUCY’S MOTHER develops strict rules to keep it in perfect condition. She cleans obsessively, rearranging standing lamps, satin cushions and dining furniture; buying plastic drinks trays to catch any spillages and spare pairs of guest slippers.

LUCY comes to visit with new habits of her own. She turns her nose up at the jar of instant coffee, bringing her own cafetiere, which leaves thick granules in the Belfast sink. She refuses to watch the telly, reading alone in the spare room, lighting incense sticks and listening to brooding music. She is pale and no longer wears makeup. She has become very thin. She keeps forgetting the rules; putting hot drinks down without coasters, and running up and down the stairs in her outdoor shoes.

LUCY’S MOTHER: You need to mop the bathroom floor when you get out of shower. How many times do I have to tell you?

LUCY remembers their chaotic, cluttered bungalow and wonders what happened to it. She feels the sudden bruise of everything they have given away.

The doorbell rings.

LUCY’S MOTHER: It’s the postman, will you answer it? I feel awkward.

LUCY (running down the stairs): What do you mean?

LUCY’S MOTHER: I don’t know.

LUCY (stops and looks up at her mother, who is on the landing): What’s the matter?

LUCY’S MOTHER: It’s the house. I dread to think what people must think of me. I never thought someone like me could live in a place like this. I never imagined that somewhere like this could be my home.

LUCY (staring at her mother): I feel like that sometimes too.

LUCY’S MOTHER: I know it sounds stupid.

LUCY: It doesn’t.

Scene 7

Sunderland, present day. Rehearsal room.

LUCY and the DIRECTOR sit at a table together. ACTOR 1 (LUCY) and ACTOR 2 (LUCY’S MOTHER) take a break on an old leather sofa, flicking through their scripts and looking at their phones.

DIRECTOR (to LUCY): Obviously, you’ve written the book, but we need to see the play as a separate work. It shouldn’t be a direct adaptation, and we shouldn’t feel bound to the words in the novel. It’s an opportunity for you to revisit your material. Is there anything in the book you now feel is missing, or wish you could change?

LUCY: Do you think it might be interesting to have more of the mother’s perspective?

DIRECTOR (pause): I’ve been thinking about that. But I don’t really think it is her story.

LUCY: Why not?

DIRECTOR: It’s yours.

Scene 8

Zoom, 2022.

LUCY is giving an online talk as part of an event series at a library in Manchester. The video call is projected onto a screen onstage. This alternately shows LUCY, INTERVIEWER 4 and comments from online AUDIENCE MEMBERS.

INTERVIEWER 4: Why does it feel important to you to write fiction based on your own experiences?

LUCY: Fiction allows me to be the agent of my story and to gain control over things that have happened to me. It gives me power that I didn’t have at the time. It lets me hold onto people and places that I fear slipping away.

The following messages flash up one by one in the chat box on the screen.

The voice of each AUDIENCE MEMBER reads them aloud.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 3: As a Whitley Bay lass who inexplicably ended up at Cambridge, I've grappled with a lot of the same feelings, and it was validating to read your writing and feel a bit understood. I'm in London now and I'm so tired of trying to explain just how shite it is when people mock my accent. 

AUDIENCE MEMBER 4: It would be an understatement to say I related to this story. I grew up quite literally in the shadow of Teesside’s industrial estate, the chemical works and the steel works. I hadn’t realised how much those traditions, especially the masculine ‘works’ mentality dominated everything I encountered from education to relationships.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 5: I grew up in South Shields before moving to Exeter to study, and until recently my brother lived in Sunderland. I found it refreshing to read a writer that knows about Bowie devotees in working men's clubs, slapped together house parties, seaside charms, drab shopping centres and in general the beautiful bleakness of it all. Reading parts of your book felt like reading parts of my childhood, it felt like home.

LUCY’s internet connection is unsteady and her face glitches on the screen.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 6: I’m a lot older than you, but your book very much chimed with my feelings when I was around the age of your protagonist. (I was a punk from a council estate in a small Northern town, wanting so much more, but not knowing exactly what.)

AUDIENCE MEMBER 7: Like everyone, I suppose, I’ve had a share of crises and family strains. But having something to hold these against that felt very close to home made me more hopeful. I think I have an awful lot in common with Lucy, as a lot of us do.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 8: I think that when you move away from a place, you become someone different, and the place you left behind becomes different too. Whatever you had there is lost, and it will never be yours again.

INTERVIEWER 4: Are you there, Lucy? We’ve got time for one more question.

There is a short delay. LUCY smiles and nods.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 8: Do you think your novel has brought you closer to Sunderland, or taken you further away?

LUCY’s face freezes on the screen. She tries to speak, but no one can hear.

Notes

• Somesuch Stories #7 is available to buy here.

• Saint Maud runs at Live Theatre from 10th Oct-3rd Nov.

• I’m running a playwriting workshop at Sunderland Museum and Winter gardens on 12th October, and participants get access to £10 tickets to see Saint Maud.

We will examine the relationship between memory and truth through an exploration of fiction, autofiction and memoir. There will be discussion of a range of contemporary writers who blur the lines between these genres and consider which form best fits the story we want to tell. The group will examine the craft and ethics of writing from memory and lived experience. We will interrogate what it means to use the parameters of your own life to interrogate a particular question or to illuminate a truth that feels close to you.

The course runs on Sunday 5th and Sunday 12th May 2024. All sessions will take place via Zoom from 17.00-19.00 BST. You can find more info and book a place here.

I took a lot of trains this year. I moved forwards and backwards, travelling thousands of miles, yet ending up in the same places.

I helped to clear L’s mum’s attic, which was filled with his teenage artwork, diaries, old love letters, school ties. He went through it slowly and I felt frustrated. I threw away my own teenage stuff years ago. A part of me resented his history for being intact, even though I felt lighter. You’ve just got to get rid of it all, I told him. But what if I lose something important? he said.

I taught my students about non-linear narrative structures. Linear time exists within narratives because it is the best way to tell stories, they said with confidence. It is tried and tested.

L’s grandma passed away and I helped to clear her house, which was filled with a whole life of objects. Hundreds of photographs, birthday cards, letters, receipts, certificates, condolences, instructions, souvenirs. I had to decide what to keep, and what to throw away. It was a lot of responsibility.

My mother decided to sell her house. She sent me photos of old shoes and books, abandoned musical instruments. Just get rid of it all, I said to her. She sent me a message that read, I won’t throw away anything important.

I ran for a train along Tottenham Court Road, my skin damp and my bare feet blistered in my summer shoes.

We decided to sell my grandad’s house in Ireland. I cried the day the sale went through. I lived there alone during a time when I needed it, and it was the only place in my life with a degree of permanence. The house will still be there, my mother said, even if we won’t be inside of it.

Experimental work is always in dialogue with pre-existing conventions, I said to my students. These structures exist, even if your own work does not fit inside of them.

We carried L’s grandma’s ashes back from Nottingham, in a Tupperware box inside of a Sainsbury’s bag for life. The train was packed and we had to leave the bag in the luggage compartment at the end of the carriage. Is the bag still there? I said to him, after every stop. Is your grandma still inside of it? It isn’t my grandma, he said, but it was.

Our landlord put our flat up for sale and L and I looked for a new place to live. We viewed sixteen places, trying to convince ourselves that we could squeeze all of our belongings into too-small spaces, running our hands along spots of mould blooming on the walls. In one flat, brambles pushed up against the bedroom window, blocking out all of the light. You need to tell me now if you’re interested, said the estate agent. Ten people have put their names down already.

I ran for a train at night, flying through the barriers, my bag bouncing on my shoulders.

Try to let elements of your writing hang by association, I told my students. Let the reader do some of the work.

We furnished our new flat with L’s grandma’s things. We took her rattan lamps and brass candlesticks, her drop-leaf table. Her patterned rug, mid-century coffee table, wooden chest and green sofa belong to us now. I like looking around and seeing all of her things, said L. It’s like she is here.

My own nan died six months before L’s grandma. My family do things differently and I don’t have any of her possessions, couldn’t bring myself to ask for them. She was cremated, but I don’t know where her ashes are. I put up a picture of her, but it made me feel sad to look at every day, so I took it down.

Why are you writing about this? I said to my students. What exactly are you trying to say about the world?

I found my childhood house on an estate agent’s website. It had recently been re-sold and I clicked through the pictures. The people who lived there after us had knocked down walls and built an extension. I stared at the images, trying to recall where our own walls had been, painted by my mother and covered in drawings and lists of words, but it was unrecognisable. It was such a strange violence. A place I inhabited so often in my mind no longer existed.

I took a train to Paris, through banlieues scrubbed with graffiti. I caught a glimpse of myself at twenty-three, on the back of a moped, wearing red lipstick and clinging tightly to a person I did not love.

I found the deeds to my childhood house in my brother’s spare room. I pored over the map of my old street, running my fingers over the green where I spent most of my early years in my checked summer dress, streaked with grass stains. I remembered the man who kept pigeons in the corner, the dandelions and daisy chains, pink chalk on the pavement, plastic bangles filled with glitter. I knew how to ride my Barbie rollerblades the first time I laced them up; it felt natural and I didn’t have to learn. There was a man who blew his own head off with a shotgun. There were two older women with posh accents who lived together. Once, I heard someone call them lesbians and that word felt frightening and full of promise; the possibility of a different way to live.

Do you remember? I asked my brother. Do you remember when we were little? He said, why are you asking me all this stuff? I said, I want to remember.

I looked at my dad’s signature, and the occupations of the people who lived there before us: coal miner, housewife. I looked at my parents’ previous addresses, which were the houses my grandparents lived in throughout my childhood. My parents have lived in less than a handful of houses. Unlike me. There are too many rented rooms across multiple countries separating me from my childhood home; house shares, a co-op, a church, sublets, attics, a conservatory, a house in a cliff by the sea. There are too many beds, sinks, wardrobes, chairs, sets of cutlery. Once, I wanted other places, but now the floor plans of other places are obscuring my childhood memories, blocking them out.

I met my dad for a coffee in Durham. I watched him carefully, noting the texture of his skin, the flesh on his bones, his movements when he stood up to order, trying to chart the progression of his illness, as if I could hold him together with my gaze. He said, do you remember when I used to take you out on the back of my motorbike? We used to ride up and down the slag heaps in the fields behind my childhood house. The old coke works looked like the moon. That was the most polluted piece of land in Europe, he laughed. Now, there is a shiny new housing estate built on the site, but back then, it was toxic, and it belonged to us.

I watched long green fields stretch beyond the train window.

My mother said we should return the deeds to my childhood house to the current owners, but I wanted to keep them. It’s proof, I told her. She said, of what?

I stayed overnight in my brother’s house for the first time. I noticed small things that I did not pay attention to during other visits: his Molton Brown handwash, his wooden salt cellar, the cheddar cheese and orange juice in his fridge. I realised that I live far away, in another city, and he has never been to my flat. He is my brother, but he doesn’t know where I keep my salt, or what is in my fridge, or what I do with my hands each day.

My dad drove past my primary school. I sat in the passenger seat of his car and breathed in the smell of cut grass. I drank it in greedily, as if I could hold that time in my lungs, as if I could have it back.

My brother drove me to our childhood house and we sat in his car in the street outside, looking at it. My brother told me that he does this often. I asked him why. I don’t know, he replied. I caught a glimpse of myself at ten, on the back of my dad’s motorbike, my arms wrapped tightly around him. Don’t let go, my dad said, and I didn’t.

Be concise, I told my students. Is every detail necessary?

My other grandad fell ill and had to be moved into a care home, because my dad couldn’t look after him any more. My grandad’s house is falling down. There has been a hole in the bath for more than twenty years. I asked my dad what he was going to do with it. I can’t sell it, he said. That’s like saying to your grandad that he’s never coming back. I said, but he isn’t coming back. My dad said, maybe in the summer he can come and sit in the garden.

I caught an overcrowded train. There were no seats free, so I sat on the floor, next to the toilets. I couldn’t see any of the places we passed through the window. I could have been anywhere at all.

We’re reading too much into this, my students said. It feels like we’re over-analysing it.

Everything is moving too fast, I said to L. It would be nice to go to Ireland for a few days, to get away from it all. But then I remembered the house is gone, and there is nowhere to stay now. I don’t know how I would get around without my bike.

I visited my grandad in the care home. It was too hot and it smelled of urine. When my dad went out for a smoke, my grandad said, I get so lonely, pet. Since nan died.

I caught a glimpse of myself on the back of my dad’s motorbike, my arms wrapped tightly around him. Don’t let go, he said, but I couldn’t.

I went to visit my mother’s new house. Her bathroom was filled with bricks and wires, and she was using a plastic box as a sitting room table. She gave me a tiny mug with my name on it, from when I was a child. I didn’t think you had kept anything, I told her. And she said, I kept this.

I finished my second novel to a tight deadline, during the coronavirus pandemic, moving between Spain and the UK. The book is densely interior, and the writing process was very intense; I scrapped a whole draft of the novel and re-wrote it in six months. I did the deepest work during those sickly post-lockdown days, when the world began to open up and we stepped shakily into it, unfamiliar to ourselves, our skin stretched too tightly across our faces.

I was living in a new city and I didn’t know many people. Unimaginable things kept happening to people around me; breakdowns, suicide, debilitating illness with no cure. The outside world was very uncertain, so I threw myself into the work and let it consume me, blocking out the fear and loss by turning inwards, which is how I have always coped. I ignored invitations to parties, the pub and dinners with new friends.  I sat at my desk, which was also the dining table, in the living room, which was also the kitchen. I turned writing into a kind of self-punishment, and I wore some essential part of myself out.

I tried to understand my shifting relationship to my work, after publishing my debut. I wrote Saltwater living alone in Donegal, on the north-west coast of Ireland. I had the sensation that the world had been spinning very fast, for most of my life, and suddenly, it began to slow down, allowing me to see clearly. I wasn’t thinking about potential publication. I was truly alone with the work and it was private, personal and unselfconscious. I didn’t know my strengths or weaknesses as a writer, didn’t truly understand my position. I just wrote every day and cycled along the mountain roads on my rusty bike. The days were bright and gleaming and the words came easily, hot and living.

Publishing Saltwater changed my life in many positive ways, but it changed my relationship to my writing too. It gave me (some) access to an elite world, where people began to listen to what I had to say. It gave me (some) money, confidence, new friends, time and cultural capital that generations of my family (none of whom went to university) could not have possibly dreamed of. Some people said generous things about my writing, but others told me it was navel-gazing and self-absorbed, while pushing me to write about my family and my personal experiences, with little regard for my emotional well-being.

I admire writers who don’t read their own reviews, but I find myself unable to resist, partly because my value is dictated by an establishment that, historically, did not allow people like myself or many of my peers to participate. Of course I care what other people think of me; my livelihood and the precarious cultural capital that I have accrued quite literally depend on it. The part of me that chases survival wants to assimilate into this world that has deemed me worthy of access, and another part of me feels deeply uneasy, wondering whether I am compromising the place I came from and the things I believe in to do so.

Yet, I did learn how to become a better writer. I worked with highly skilled editors and developed my own editorial eye. I began to articulate elements of craft that previously felt intuitive. I spotted some of the holes in my own work and understood how to make them better. But writing also became a means to an end; to meet a deadline, earn money, add another publication to my portfolio, to promote a novel, to get a job, taking me further away from what drew me to it in the first place.

My novels are loosely semi-autobiographical, which further complicated my relationship to writing. My fictional worlds blurred with reality and it became difficult to make distinctions between them. People close to me, who shared some of the experiences I had written about, grew confused too. Did your dad really drive through the streets in a wig looking for me? my mother asked. I didn’t know you had a twin who died, said a friend. I felt like I was reading your diary and you captured something true and no, you didn’t get it right, that isn’t how it was at all. There were things I felt you couldn’t possibly know about. And do you want to go outside for a cigarette? You’re always smoking in your books.

 I worked on a stage adaptation of Saltwater and spent two days in a rehearsal room with an actor who spoke my fictionalised mother’s words. As I left the theatre, my real mother called to tell me that my real nan was dying, and I went into a real pub in Newcastle and felt like an actor myself. My hands shook theatrically as I charged my phone through a USB slot in the Guinness pump, standing at the bar. Grief stained the dark wood and floral carpets and I felt both inside and outside of my life, detached from reality.

I was searching for a framework to understand my circumstances. I spent years turning pain and anger in on myself, and my words became a rope with which to pull it out. I learned a vocabulary for the discomfort I had always felt in my own skin; in my hometown, family, friendship groups and the countless cities I moved between in my twenties, dragging a broken suitcase stuffed with second-hand clothes, desperate to outrun myself. I began to view everything through the lens of class and gender, which is real and true; these systems have shaped my life irrevocably and are present within everything I say and do. Yet, life isn’t a novel, or a memoir piece, or an academic thesis, and viewing my own experiences this way narrowed my world, reducing my capacity for nuance. I was living with a strange intensity, archiving images and sensations, truly believing that I could think my way out of my problems, that I could find the root of my sadness, if only I dug deep enough.

Understandably, my relationship to writing became very fraught. What had once been a private pleasure became a form of self-punishment, emotional avoidance, the answer to my problems, a means of accruing capital, a stake in a competitive world. I worried about the effect of my work on my personal relationships and I worried about what other writers thought of it. I woke up in the night, sweating, wishing I could take it all back.

Publishing a book requires a great deal of self-awareness. I learned to see my work from many different angles and consider all the possible ways in which my intentions might be misconstrued. In my early twenties, I lived on action and impulse. I moved restlessly from place to place, chasing sensation, running in present tense, with little regard for my safety or well-being, desperate to see my actions make ripples on the surface of the world, in order to prove my existence. By the end of that decade, after writing two novels and living through a pandemic, I had grown incredibly cautious. I began to look back on those fierce years with fear. I couldn’t imagine how I ever threw myself into cities with such abandon, forcing my way through doors that were truthfully closed to me, my bare legs mottled with bruises, hungry, determined and wild.

I developed a heightened self-consciousness, thinking carefully before I spoke, second and third-guessing my own opinions. In the past, I had always felt open to the world, but writing had become hermetic. I was caught beneath bones of memory and language, bound too tightly to past versions of myself, those desperate girls in damp house-shares, who were brave and immeasurably cruel to themselves, which is to say they were cruel to me.

I decided to push questions of, what are you working on next? away and tried to let life wash over me again, relinquishing control. I moved between houses, re-potting plants and putting up pictures, re-arranging my books on shelves. I watched trees turn red and gold beneath the window of my temporary room in London, and on the tall, wealthy streets by the university, and in my neighbour’s garden, as their cat climbed through our window. I threw myself into teaching, putting all my energy into other people’s writing, to avoid examining my relationship to my own.

I ate late-night dumplings with old friends in Chinatown and we laughed so loudly that a couple at the next table left without finishing their food. I ended up at a folk festival in Bavaria on my own, where a barman welcomed me into a lock-in and fed me vegan sausage with mustard. I got drunk in Manchester with an ex-boyfriend and we climbed on top of an electricity box in the middle of the street, smoking menthol cigarettes and suddenly I was both seventeen and thirty simultaneously. We swung our bare feet above the dirty tarmac, as the years rotted beneath us in the heat.

I went to an outdoor restaurant in Greece beneath the moon, where the wind lifted gingham tablecloths, and a band played, and people danced, and someone proposed, and everyone cheered. I jumped from the top of a boat into the green Aegean with my brother. My mother was scared to put on a snorkel for the first time, but she did it. When she resurfaced, she said, I can’t believe it. It’s amazing down there and I had no idea. I’ve gone sixty whole years without knowing.

I cleaned the flat, cleared out some books, bought tins of chickpeas at the supermarket, scrubbed stains from my favourite white blouse, took out the recycling, repaired bike punctures, ran for trains in the dark. I was careless and lost things and I felt lonely and sad and briefly beautiful; I allowed myself to live. I didn’t write about it and tried not to worry about what any of it meant, to accept that perhaps it didn’t mean anything at all. I had to learn how to be in the world again, even though it was often difficult and uncertain.

Gradually, writing has started to come back to me, in flashes of light and bursts of feeling. And so this newsletter is a space for that; a place to try out new things, push back against self-criticism, articulate this new way of living.

Much of the past few years has been about understanding the flawed belief system I developed during my teenage years and early twenties as a mode of survival, which was absolutely informed by my class and gender position. I had to understand that belief system was no longer working for me and allow myself to consider that things could be different. I have also been trying to work out how to sustain a life where I have enough money and stability to meet my needs, and still have time and space to write.

One of the big questions in my tentative new belief system is to do with pleasure and balancing a creative life under capitalism. I am often wary of the concepts pleasure, luxury and wasting time for a variety of reasons. I grew up in a working-class community and my family were not poor but understood scarcity. I also grew up Catholic, which is predicated on self-suffering and I grew into a woman during the early 2000s, when we were taught to fear and loathe our bodies. The word pleasure feels luxurious to me, and luxury is something I fear, despite believing that everyone should be allowed access to it.

I must navigate these contradictions within the literary world, which is still rooted in affluence, no matter how forcefully we might like to signal otherwise. That history runs deep, just as my own lineage, of men who built dark tunnels beneath the sea and women who gutted fish across generations, who put up with drunk husbands, who never had any money and were afraid to ask for anything for themselves, runs deep inside me.

Within the commercial publishing world, writing is a marker of status, talent, intellect, glamour; it is a measure of a person’s worth. I was not worth anything, in class status or economic terms, until I published a novel, and that worthlessness is still inside of me, and it is in my writing, which I have tried to unravel and offer back to the world. And there are readers who recognise that worthlessness within themselves and write to me to tell me that I helped them understand it better. And there is a literary culture that is bent on assessing, ranking, judging, that creates an industry of exceptionalism in which we must compete for review space in newspapers and journals, or space on a panel at literary festivals or on prize lists, pitting young writers against each other. Our accolades might win us prestige but they don’t necessarily lead to financial renumeration, or provide a way to make a sustainable living. I wrote about my life and so the sum of my experiences became a measure of my worth too. Has my life been difficult enough? Interesting enough? Working-class enough? Have I worked hard enough? Have I been humble enough? Have I earned my pleasure?

So the title of this newsletter is a provocation, to myself as much as anyone else. What exactly does it mean to write and live for pleasure? Am I still capable of that? I’m reaching towards it, because it is my best thing, the only place that has ever felt like mine.