I’ve started this blog to encourage myself to really get writing on the project I started researching two years ago. I haven’t wasted that time, I’ve written lots of other stuff and had some of that published in various journals and anthologies.
Studying with a set of really good professional writers and biographers at the University of East Anglia has taught me more than I had dreamt there was to learn about life writing. I owe a debt of gratitude to Kathryn Hughes, Michele Roberts, Helen Smith and Giles Foden for all their advice and support. The visiting writers who came to our seminars to talk about their own writing and research practice were no less influential. Richard Holmes in particular, seemed to speak for the part of me that wanted to write about the lives of other people. And I paraphrase here, though I think he would recognise his sentiments, “The dead are like owls, calling to us out of the darkness, asking to be heard and understood.” I want to help the people I intend to write about to be heard and understood, and when the darkness surrounding their lives seems particular impenetrable I hope to shine a light which will illuminate their actions and the events which shaped them.
If my own life, or my interactions with and reactions to my subjects intrudes into my writing, I accept that the light will be shone into the corners of my own life, and I hope that won’t intrude too far into the far more important matter of my subject.
