… and three come along at once. Well, five, if you count ‘Lovely Girls‘ and ‘No Arrests‘. In the last few days, Full of Crow have taken ‘Arthur’s Stone’ and expect to publish it in October; Read Short Fiction took ‘Baby Bird’ to put up in the Spring; and Zouche Magazine & Miscellany have picked up my essay, ‘A Tale of Two Sixties’ and scheduled it for some time in the next 5-6 weeks. All a little bit wonderful. Continue reading You wait ages …
I Don’t Like Mondays I was reminded of this by Sabrina Ogden’s piece ‘Excuse me, have you seen my shirt?‘ in Pure Slush this week. What our minds get up to when we’re not fully a-hold of the reins! I’d gone to work as usual but changed my route slightly with a view to using the outdoor parking area. So, tootling gently along and preparing to turn right at the appointed moment, I was mildly irritated to find that there was an obstruction accompanied by a degree of ill-disciplined vehicular negotiation (bad tempered spat) which conspired to prevent my egress onto the … Continue reading I Don’t Like Mondays
Out on Every Day Fiction today. Suddenly, I want to know where my council tax goes! There is actually some science behind this piece of fiction. The Google research car has travelled thousands of miles without incident (see TED talk by Sebastian Thrun), and other vehicles have been driven remotely, including one by Gadget Show presenter Jason Bradbury in a race against an F1 driver. Both cars were live on the track. This set the scene, in my fevered mind at any rate, for a virtual cab company whose ‘drivers’ operate passenger pods from call centres. Then came the idea about what … Continue reading ‘No Arrests in 2039’: you might prefer to walk home …
This three day event, bringing together the best of mental health and learning disability (intellectual disability) research and practice, opens on September 1st. I was expecting to deliver our presentation (Second Life, People with Learning Disabilities, and Capacity to Consent: Conboy-Hill, Taylor, and Hall) outlining the results of our NIHR funded study, but unfortunately, I am not able to attend for family reasons. Nicky Gregory, a courageous colleague, will be fronting it up for me, and hoping that all the technical wizardry does its job. If it does, she will be able to sit back and let it play. The videos will tell the story as well as anything; the narration should do … Continue reading IASSID MHID conference, Manchester
At the moment, I am existing in a kind of limbo; a word I take to mean a sort of ‘purgatory lite’, because I don’t imagine purgatory would allow for the fabulous or hilarious or enervating ups that keep bouncing exuberantly over the plummeting lows, without thought for their feelings. Last week, ‘Lovely Girls’ was published. It’s my first literary piece; it’s based on some truths that many of us who have worked in mental health or learning disability institutions recognise, and I’m inordinately pleased with it. Last week also, we were told, my sister and me, that Dad is terminally ill. He is 86, an RAF veteran of the Second World War, and a victim of prostate cancer. He is 300 miles away. Fortunately, he is … Continue reading Walking down the glass corridor
‘Lovely Girls‘ is not lovely at all. Described by one person as ‘wonderful, inasmuch as something so crushing can be wonderful‘, and by another as ‘richly conceived and … harrowing’, it is a fictional account of the life of one woman in an institution for ‘the mentally handicapped’. I worked in such places in the mid 1970s and early 1980s. I was part of the closure programme when people were moved from this awfulness to more humane environments, and I saw how the attitudes of both public and ex-patients changed. Service users gained skills and self-respect, our neighbours learned how to communicate with someone … Continue reading ‘Lovely Girls’: a grim tale of one woman’s life in an institution
Indie Author interview Cathryn Grant: Demise of the Soccer Moms Website: Suburban Noir http://suburbannoir.com/ Q. Cathryn, you are the first person I have ‘known’ who has taken the publishing bull by the horns and gone Indie. Others have followed, and the quality says a lot about how difficult it is to crack the traditional route. What set you off in that direction? Had you tried other routes? How did you choose the publishing platform, and what did they offer that others didn’t? What surprised you most about the process? Cathryn: About ten years ago I started submitting short stories for … Continue reading Interview with Cathryn Grant; author of ‘Demise of the Soccer Moms’
Good old Every Day Fiction, they’re taking a chance with another of my tales. ‘No Arrests in 2039’, in which a local council gets inventive about its crime stats, will be unleashed on August 9th. Disclaimer: Dear Elected Representatives – No, this is not a way forward, you hear me? Update: EDF is offline at the moment while they move house to new servers. EDF reports progress, and will be back on August 15th. Affected stories will transfer to September. 09/08/11 Continue reading ‘No Arrests in 2039’
Sussex Partnership Research & Development directorate is holding its third Spirit of enquiry conference on December 5th this year. Designed to complement our major showcase event in the Summer, this conference invites submissions from new researchers who are Trust staff and partners, Trust staff and partners supported by us to complete research towards Masters or Doctoral degrees, and Trust staff and partners who have conducted research-relevant audit. Our keynote speakers this year are Professor Val Hall (University of Brighton) on the Research Design Service, Stephanie Goubet (University of Brighton) on statistical methodologies, and Dr Nicky Petty (University of Brighton) on Professional Doctorates. Following the success of last year’s Ethics panel and discussion, there will be a similar opportunity to talk with … Continue reading Spirit of Enquiry Conference, Dec 5th 2011
I have to say more about this, and so I will shortly. Linda is right, the psychologist’s hat is as difficult to remove as the headgear of the internal editor. More so, possibly, as most of us start out as uninformed nosey parkers and graduate (literally and severally) to become professional ones. When fictional characters are properly filled out, we are satisfied by them because, flaws and all, they are authentic. The trick is to allow them to be idiosyncratic, unpredictable, and downright annoying within that consistent authenticity. That’s what Linda has done with her characters, and why it became … Continue reading Psychoanalyzing fictional characters (via Linda Cassidy Lewis)
Dr Suzanne Conboy-Hill 