Solstice and Soil

July 3, 2024July 3, 2024 By ysellasims Life Writing / Writing

‘When we moved to the village, to our funny house, with all its quirks and corners, steps and riddles, it was the garden that got me.’

Katy Evans-Bush on poetry and writing

April 28, 2024July 3, 2024 By ysellasims Poetry Blog / Writing

“The function of poetry is the function of being human. Of every civilisation we’ve uncovered, the earliest things we detect are not their governments or their money, it’s the things they made, and wrote.”

Growing notes from the shed

April 22, 2024July 3, 2024 By ysellasims Life Writing / Writing

‘Yesterday blue fought through the cloud and the sun came out. In the walled garden, the birds sang, a hundred tiny voices making a chorus of good news.’

A Blackthorn Winter

April 5, 2024April 5, 2024 By ysellasims Life Writing / Writing

‘In the last week of March the blackthorn flowered. Rosettes as white as snowburied fields burst from stems black with witchcraft, from between the thorns of fairy tale and folklore; thorns whose vicious stab cast Sleeping Beauty into a hundred year sleep.’

On the body

January 31, 2024January 31, 2024 By ysellasims Life Writing / Writing

Winter brings reflection on the nature of exhaustion and the connection between mind and body and each other.

On the green

November 12, 2023November 12, 2023 By ysellasims Life Writing / Writing

Striding across the meadow looking as if he’s stepped out of Hardy’s fictional Wessex landscape, Steven McCulloch is wearing a wide-brimmed white hat, a billowing

Writing my way home

September 16, 2023September 16, 2023 By ysellasims Life Writing / Writing

I bought a keyring a lifetime ago, from Roskilly Farm’s gift shop in Cornwall. It’s a round ball of smooth, turned walnut, fissured with black

A back step and a two step

August 30, 2023July 3, 2024 By ysellasims Life Writing / Writing

““I’m not a happy camper or festival goer”, I hear myself say over again in the run up to the festival. But as a kid I went to festivals and camped a lot, so maybe that’s not strictly true. Maybe I’d just forgotten how to do it.”

Flutterings

July 22, 2023July 3, 2024 By ysellasims Life Writing / Writing

“…it can feel as though we have no control over the climate or our environment, that nothing we do matters; whereas in truth, everything does.”

Writing notes

May 31, 2023September 16, 2023 By ysellasims Writing

‘…capitalism can make you feel that unless you’re producing something brilliant, shiny and saleable, then you’re not an artist.’

Growing notes

May 31, 2023July 3, 2024 By ysellasims Life Writing / Writing

“Gardening, the act of putting my hands into the soil, saves me time and again.”

Watershed

April 14, 2023April 14, 2023 By ysellasims Life Writing / Writing

“So my mind is full of what home means, whether it’s a place, a person, or a feeling, when the train pulls into the station and I climb aboard, looking for Dad.”

Hibernation

January 7, 2023September 16, 2023 By ysellasims Life Writing / Writing

“I feel more and more as though I belong to the before times – the 1970s and 80s, the watery technicolour of Crackerjack, disaster movies and flares, of kids under coats in seatbeltless cars, of drunk drivers and questionable personal politics.”

Autumn

October 5, 2022June 7, 2024 By ysellasims Life Writing / Writing

I begin to find that the observations I have heard my mothers and mothers-in-law make over the years are now my own – I too have had enough of cooking and Christmases.

Poetry Profile – John McCullough

September 1, 2022January 7, 2023 By ysellasims Poetry Blog

John McCullough is an award winning poet, writer and teacher. His poems often blend the physical with the surreal, the sublime with the everyday, never

Birdlife

July 15, 2022July 17, 2022 By ysellasims Life Writing / Writing

“It was brutal, but wasn’t that what nature was, what we were, made brutal by our drive to survive?”

Late Light

June 18, 2022June 7, 2024 By ysellasims Fiction / Writing

“Paolo felt for each step like a child in the dark. There was a rattle coming from his insides, like a shaken bag of scrabble letters; clink, clink, clink.”

Poems to grow by

March 3, 2022June 7, 2024 By ysellasims Poetry Blog / Writing

“We clamoured to be told the stories she had told us a thousand times before”

Tramp

February 10, 2022February 18, 2022 By ysellasims Life Writing / Writing

“Once we’ve parted ways and I’ve set off around the fields, trying not to notice the stakes hammered in around the perimeters of both fields, I feel the jolt of reality. To walk here wouldn’t be possible for much longer – once the fence was up, it was up. It wouldn’t be coming down again. Each fence post suddenly feels like a line drawn in the sand.”

Running

February 4, 2022February 4, 2022 By ysellasims Life Writing / Writing

‘As an adult I’ve always likened running to ironing – it’s just showing off. I’ve looked at runners and thought, but what are they actually running away from?’

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