How we spend our days, by Annie Dillard

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and…

August, by Tove Jansson

Every year, the bright Scandinavian summer nights fade away without anyone noticing. One evening in August you have an errand…

‘I need to get away.’ ‘But there’s work to be done,’ says the book. ‘A holiday. That’s what I need.’…

The only real difference between people is not health or illness but the way each holds onto a sense of…

‘Do you miss it?’ the book says. ‘Miss what?’ I say. ‘Having cancer,’ the book says. ‘Is this a joke?’…

It is necessary to write a book in which there will be a little less of the first person singular,…

‘What are you doing?’ the book says. ‘What’s it look like?’ I say. ‘Running a bath,’ the book says. ‘Genius,’…

‘What will you miss most?’ the book says. ‘About what?’ I say. ‘Me,’ says the book. ‘I didn’t know you…

In the last year, another government initiative has created a compulsory part of the curriculum: learning poetry by heart…

Recently I have featured prose writing by various writers, reshaping them in the form of found poems. Annie Dillard on…

If every head of state and every government official spent an hour a day reading poetry we’d live in…

Sometimes poems aren’t literal representations of anything. Sometimes a poem just exists as something else in the universe that you…

‘What drives you?’ ‘I’ve only just woken up!’ I say to the book. ‘Don’t care. It’s morning. Work to be…

‘You know what your main problem is,’ the book says. ‘Needing to be liked.’ ‘That’s a good thing, isn’t it?’…

The more I talk about writing with students, teachers, colleagues and other writers, the less I am sure that we…

We need to re-think marketing as a story that either does or does not resonate with us. Do…

‘Aren’t you going get the phone?’ I say. ‘It won’t be for me.’ With a little groan the book…

Here is how it happens. The vision is, sub specie aeternitatis, a set of mental relationships, a coherent series of…