Zoë Marriott's Blog, page 3

Thursday Pick & Mix (#10)

Hello Dear Readers! Welcome back to An Eddying Flight, and to Thursday Pick & Mix, the low-stress high-fun creativity kickstart designed to reconnect writers of all kinds to their creative joy.

The Rules:

You own the next ten minutes. This is You Time. No guilt, no pressure, no anxiety, just fun. Set your timer, pick up your pen or open up your word processing programme, and look at the inviting blank page with anticipation.

Pick a prompt, any prompt - or two, or three - or, if something else occurs to you, go with that instead. Whatever makes you want to write. Whatever helps you to experience that spark of creative joy.

Don't waste your creative spark on second-guessing yourself. Put a piece of paper over the lines as you write them, or set your font to the same colour as the page so that it's invisible. Who cares about spelling, grammar, awkward phrases, punctuation or typos?

When you've finished, and walk away. You don't need to rush to re-read this writing, assess it, or fix it. That's not what it's for. It's about joy, not results.

The Prompts:

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MUSIC

WORDS

Buttery, stinging-bright, inexhaustible and pouring...

Ready? Steady... WRITE! I wish you joy.

'My Reading Habits' - Bitesize Audio

Hello, Dear Readers - welcome back to An Eddying Flight! Today I have another bite-sized podcast for you, courtesy of the RLF's Vox series, this time on the topic of My Reading Habits.

I recorded this a while ago, and it's surprising, listening to it now, how much it makes me reflect. If you cut me in half, you would find the leaves of books intertwined in thin papery ribbons all through me; I am a person whose love of reading has informed their whole life, from the food I eat, to the people I've chosen as friends, to my hobbies, to my career, to the names I give my pets. But this recording is a reminder that even the most integral parts of us will continually change and evolve - at least, as long as we still do. And the fact is that my reading habits have changed a lot since this Vox audio was recorded (quite apart from the fact that I now spend untold hours reading academic journal papers).

For a start, I no longer have the luxury of only reading non-fiction or old favourites while I am actively writing something new. Reading (lots and lots of) new things and absorbing what they have to teach me, then translating those lessons into my own writing is a huge part of the work of an academic. I've struggled with this, but have ultimately found changing that habit to be really beneficial and refreshing (for my take on how to keep on top of this, you can read this post). I also think that after I found out I had won my PhD place, it gave me a kind of joyous impetus to explore some kinds of books that I perhaps felt were too clever and too academic for me before. I read a lot more new and experimental poetry now rather than I ever did before (huge thanks to my friend Sheena for sending me two stuffed jiffy bags of poetry pamphlets when I wanted recommendations), and lots more new literary books - in addition to, of course, lots more academic works.

This has made me feel a bit nostalgic for some of my old favourites though. Maybe I'll take a weekend soon to do a bit of purely self-indulgent re-reading...

Let me know what books are on your e-reader, your nightstand, or in your backpack in the comments or on Twitter or Facebook, Dear Readers! I promise I will be fascinated to know.

Thursday Pick & Mix (#9)

Hello, and welcome back to Pick & Mix, the low pressure, low stress creativity kickstart designed to help writers reconnect with their joy.

The world is on fire right now, and every time we think that they've started to get the blaze under control - it flares up again, worse, somewhere else. It is tough to feel creative or joyful under these circumstances, especially if you also have pressures in your own life (which most of us do, since we're human). Just for example, I've got surgery coming up for myself, some really worrying health issues in the family member that I care for, and upgrade approaching like the road runner in a cloud of thundering dust. Sometimes even wanting to feel joyful is enough to make me sink in guilt. "I've got so much to do!" I wail. "There's so much happening! I can't be selfish right now!"

Here's the thing: no one else's situation was ever actually improved by you feeling intensely miserable about it. However your situation will always be improved by allowing yourself to experience joy.

I know. What a revelation.

So the more you are now worrying that you just can't make the time, the more likely that you need to take ten minutes for yourself urgently. And I promise you, you won't regret taking part.

So! What are the rules? There are only four, and you can break 'em if you want - I'm not your mum - but it's more fun if you play along.

The First! Use any mixture of the prompts that you like. One, two, all three - even none, if something else occurs to you. Write for ten minutes. No more, no less. If you're the type who anxiously watches the clock or checks her watch, set a timer and put it out of sight so it won't bother you. Don't edit while you are writing. Is worrying about typos joyful? I don't think so. If writing longhand, put a piece of paper over the lines as you scribble. If writing onscreen, set the font to the same colour as the page so that it's invisible. Once your ten minutes are up, walk away still buzzing. Don't read what you've written straight away. Leave it long enough that you might remember it with a little smile surprise and pleasure later on, and go back to it in a spirit of happy interest. You don't need to judge it, evaluate it for it's worth and try to 'fix' it. It was just for fun!

Got it? Good! Now, ready, steady... PROMPT!

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WORDS

"Laura stretch’d her gleaming neck Like a rush-imbedded swan, Like a lily from the beck, Like a moonlit poplar branch, Like a vessel at the launch When its last restraint is gone."

Happy writing - I wish you joy.

Flailing in the Dark: Getting a Grip as an Early Stage PhD Student

Welcome back to An Eddying Flight, Dear Readers (and apologies in advance, as always, for Wix's formatting insanity - I've done my best!).

If you're currently in the early stages of a PhD (or an MA, or any kind of extended research-heavy project) and you've met up with friends from your department or your writing group for a Zoom chat or a coffee, or even just that ten minutes before the meeting or training session starts, you will almost certainly have heard someone utter the words:

"At this point I just feel like I'm flailing about in the dark..."

Maybe you were the one who said it; I was. And then everyone else makes a kind of low-pitched 'Hmmmm' of sympathy which translates to 'Yeah, me too'.

You're reading All the Things. You're highlighting pages like mad. You're talking about your research, and you're writing. But it's all chaotic, even random - none of it really seems to be connecting to anything else in your head. Half the time you've forgotten what you highlighted by the time you cap the pen, and if anyone asked you to summarise what it was about, you'd need a brown paper bag and a quiet corner to sit in, STAT.

If you bring this feeling of uncomfortable confusion and helplessness up with supervisors or other people further along in the process, they'll very sensibly tell you that this flailing stage is pretty much standard - all a part of the rich tapestry of undertaking a post-graduate research based degree. In fact, it's a vital and important part. The sense of lostness and confusion is your brain opening up to accept all the vast amounts of information that it will need, later on, in order to make sense of everything. That sensation of flailing around in the dark is a good thing. It means you're aware of how far you have to go and you're ready to learn. Really!

I accept this; it doesn't mean I'm a fan of feeling this way. So I tried to figure out some stategies for making it a bit more comfortable to open up my brain to accept vast amounts of new information (etc.), tricks to help me feel in control of the process. Perhaps the first step would be to download some referencing software? I went to Twitter for recommendations. I downloaded. And I discovered that this did not work for me. I tried with Zotero and Mandeley, I really did. I did the online tutorials and everything. But I hate them. I feel they are unnecessarily, even intentionally over-complicated to use, that they don't actually do what you want or expect them to do, and that even if you can get them to do the things they are supposed to do, they don't do them well.

I spoke to two lovely friends who are now bona fide doctors in the English and CW area, and both of them told me that they too had given up on referencing software. They just wrote their references down by hand in their notebooks. Everytime they picked up a new book or journal or paper, they popped the citation at the top of the page, made the notes they wanted, handwrote any references. Simple, effective. Genius. Not for me, though, unfortunately. Some Type A part of my brain just could not accept that my references would be organised by date of reading, not author name, and that if I read a second or third book/paper by the same author later on it would be pages away or even in a different journal. I also kept forgetting, in my enthusiasm to get through my reading, to actually write down the references, then running out of room, or realising that I'd ever-so-slightly mis-written them... It doesn't help that I have no less than five notebooks on the go at the moment, living in various rooms of my house. This method wasn't working either; it just made me feel more stressed.

At this point I was cosmically lucky. I stumbled across the most amazing resource, which I am about to share with you - the vlogs of Professor Tara Brabazon, who is the Dean of Graduate Research at Flinders University (an Oz institution who have a branch here in the UK) and who has devoted what must be hundreds of hours to basically answering almost any question that has ever caused any Post-Grad Researcher to wake up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night. I've barely managed to dent Prof. Brabazon's back catalogue, but I already worship her like the academic Goddess on Earth that she is. Her videos are brilliant. And this one in particular made a lightbulb go off over my confused and flailing little head:

https://youtu.be/WFlZ3tW5XbQ

I realised that I needed to find something half-way between the informal notebook scribblings and the rigid, non-intuitive referencing software. And I already knew what that was. It just hadn't occurred to me to use it that way previously: the answer was OneNote.

Now, I'm not trying to sell OneNote to anyone here. Other digital note-taking/journal style software is available and may even be superior! But it comes bundled with other MS Office applications and if you, like me, have a university computer, it's almost certainly on there, even if you haven't stumbled over it before. If you don't have a uni computer, you should still be able to download it for free using your university's MS Office licence if you're a registered PGR student with a uni email.

So how does OneNote (or another digital journal software with equivalent functionality) help with feeling lost, confused, and as if you're flailing about in the dark? It helps because it's incredibly simple and straightforward to use. The set-up is basically idiot-proof, and I can say that because I'm the idiot who tested it. But it also gives you the ability to divide your notes by topic - as suggested by Prof. Brabazon - as well as alphabetizing everything by author, AND allowing you to move things around, insert new references/authors if you need to without having to disorganise the existing notes you have. I'm going to try and show you how, below, with the aid of a few screenshots.

This is my OneNote set-up - a digital 'notebook' which I have saved under the generic title PhD Notes:

At the top, you can see that I've divided the notebook into sections based on my current, basic research areas - 'Time', 'Narrative', etc. - plus a catch-all 'Misc' section. I know that by the end of my PhD there will probably be a dozen additional, more specialised sections here, but that is no problem, because you can use that little '+' symbol at the end of the list of section tabs to add new ones easily whenever you want, and you can also delete them, rename them, and move them around too.

Your new notebook will look like this:

Trust me, I know it's depressing as heck. But you'll be astonished how quickly it fills up. First of all, decide on a few basic areas that you know you're definitely going to be dwelling on heavily in your research, and give each one a tab to create a section in the notebook. Change the tab called 'Quick Notes' by clicking on it and renaming it, then add some more. Don't overthink the tabs too much - you can change them later, and there will be no need to scribble anything out or use Tippex (she says, giving her age away)! That's the beauty of doing this digitally.

Next, within each section you're going to want at least a couple of individually named pages so that you can alphabetize your reading. I've done that by author surname - pretty standard - but you can obviously use whatever system you're comfy with. I've started out, as you can see in the very first screenshot above, by giving myself two pages, authors A-J and K-W. If I later find that I need to divide this further to save myself from wading through 200 authors on each page, I can easily make a new Authors E-I or J-L page and then copy and paste all the corresponding references into that.

You can also use the 'View' function to give your 'pages' rule lines of different kinds (narrow ruled, college and so on) and change the colours of the 'paper' to make it easier to keep track when you flick between sections.

Each time you make a new entry, that author/book/paper will get their own little text bubble on the page, which you can move if you need to. For example, if I read something new by an author called 'Dankles' I click in the space above 'Dengi' and begin to type. A new bubble will form and the Dengi one will automatically move down, along with all the others below that. It's good idea to leave a chunk of space at the top of the page and between each reference for this reason; if you end up manually dragging the bubble around it can end up overlapping with the one below, so you have to move that one, and so on. However, if you forget to do this, you can always go to the place on the page where you want to add your new reference and 'Add Space' from the 'Insert' menu; it's just less faffing about if you don't need to.

Now, everytime that I sit down to read, I make sure that I have OneNote pulled up and synced. If I'm reading a real book or something I've printed out, I have OneNote open on my laptop or my tablet (I've even managed to get it installed on my phone, for desperate times). If I'm reading a PDF or webpage on my tablet, then I have it on the laptop. What I'm saying is, separate the screen you're going to be updating OneNote on from the screen where you're reading. This is a really good way of mentally separating reading from writing while doing both at more-or-less the same time. It also means that you don't have to toggle between applications to type up your references; that's frustrating and time-consuming (unless you're able to copy and paste from the source, of course - lucky you, if so!). If you've downloaded your paper or book from a website and need to include the link, you just copy and paste it into OneNote exactly as you would your Reference List or Bibliography.

You could even choose to use a OneNote notebook or a series of them as your informal Reference List/Bibliography and, provided you kept everything up to date and ensured your referencing style was the one required by your university, simply copy and paste all the references (minus the quotes, of course) into your preferred word-processing software to make the formal one at the end of the process of writing your thesis up. For a lot of people I know that this would save a great time of both time and effort!

Here you can see my K-W page in the 'Time' section, where the Morten, Kate references end and the Winterson, Jeanette references begin. Hopefully several more writers will eventually live between them, as my reading moves on:

I like to set my author names and titles in a larger font to make them easier to find when scrolling. I also think it's a really, really good idea to put any typed quotes in bold (or a different font, or colour, whatever you like) so that it's completely impossible to mix up a quote with any paraphrasing, thoughts, or reactions you're moved to add on the page.

I've deliberately screenshotted a bit of the page where you can only see basic notes and references here (I'm shy), but most of my bubbles also have large chunks of paraphrasing and rambling reactions to the references too - and this is really helping me to connect the reading I'm doing to my wider work and to each other thing I've read or plan to read. It's quick, hassle-free and completely intuitive to add those notes in that way, instead of being a grinding faff (like with referencing software) or a panicked search (like with physical paper notebooks) and it makes a habit of sustained thought and combined reading/writing so much easier to develop. My thoughts about what I'm learning are just more organised and clearer to me with this system, and I've only been using it for a few weeks.

I hope that you, too, will discover that once you're set up, the sensation of flailing about aimlessly in the dark fades gently away like a forgotten nightmare. Let me know in comments or in a Tweet/FB comment how you get on!

Thursday Pick & Mix (#8)

Hello, and welcome back to An Eddying Flight, Dear Readers! It's time for Thursday Pick & Mix - ten minutes of low-pressure, playful creativity that I hope will help you to reconnect to your writing joy.

Do it on the bus or train, do it in your office, do it at the kitchen table or waiting at the soft play centre. It doesn't matter. All that matters is that you find ten minutes to do it, and enjoy them. Then you can claim your free t-shirt, printed with the words 'WRITERS DO IT ANYWHERE' (just kidding, I can't afford merchandise).

The Rules

Write for ten minutes. No more, no less. But please don't make this a source of stress. If you're an anxious watch-checker like me, then take off your watch, set a timer and put the timer out of sight (but in earshot). Don't waste your energy editing. This one takes a bit of getting used to, but try it and you'll find it helps to make your writing more about the process, the joy of just creating something, rather than the outcome. If writing longhand, put your palm or a piece of paper over the lines as you scribble them. If writing onscreen, set the font to the same colour as the page so that it's invisible. There's no typo or grammar error or spelling mistake that needs to be fixed right this second, is there? Just keep going. Once your ten minutes are up, give yourself the precious gift of walking away. Don't read what you've written. Leave it as long as you can - long enough that you might remember it later on with a little blink of surprise and pleasure. Go back to it, when you do, in a spirit of curiosity and interest, but without the expectation that you must judge it, evaluate it for it's worth and try to 'fix' it. Give yourself permission never to re-read this if you don't feel the urge. If no one ever reads your ten minute scribbles, it doesn't matter one tiny single bit.

Onto the prompts!

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WORDS

"Ink loops on page, words pulsing and bright,

eyes tracing the rhythm until it ignites:

There’s a silence that follows me home at night...

Wind shushes my footsteps, ragged and light,

and dark birds shadow the moon’s face in flight,

in the silence that follows me home at night."

Onwards, writers! I wish you joy.

'How I Write' - Bite-Sized Audio

Hello and welcome back to An Eddying Flight, Dear Readers.

Today I have a little treat for you courtesy of the wonderful folks over at the Royal Literary Fund, for whom I worked as a Fellow at York St. John University for two years. Their website is a wonderful place; i encourage you to poke about a bit if you have the time, and take this opportunity to bookmark it, especially if you've not heard of them before. They offer all kinds of opportunities and assistance to writers.

This is from a series that they call 'Vox' - a bitesize recording from an author discussing some aspect of their art or craft. I'm there today pondering that perennially tricky yet fascinating topic: How I Write. I hope you find it interesting!

Away with the Fairies...

When you hear a person described as ‘Away with the fairies’, you imagine someone a bit useless. Someone chronically distracted, with a short attention span and no common sense. Someone – if we’re not being polite – a bit batty. It’s a description that’s been attached to me all my life: my mother’s standard explanation for inexplicable behaviour.

‘Never mind Zoë! She’s just away with the fairies again.’

From the time I could toddle, I could get lost anywhere — halfway down the perilous steps of Warwick Tower, halfway through walking the dog, in the middle of a dentist’s appointment, in the middle of the Natural History museum. Even trips to the supermarket were an adventure; I inevitably came adrift from the caravan of parents and siblings somewhere between the cheese counter and the bread aisle and ended up summoned to the customer service desk by a tannoy announcement, where I would have to try to explain myself to my harrassed, annoyed father and the judgemental supermarket staff, who had been forced to perform the same tannoy service on a nearly weekly basis since I was a toddler. My parents started rotating to different shops each week to avoid the repeat embarrassment.

Getting lost was the least of it, though. I misplaced gloves, coats, my lunch, my glasses and my homework at such a rate that it was less a family joke, more a curse. I walked into telegraph poles, tripped over curbs, and fell down holes, hillsides and stairs with depressing regularity. When left with instructions to remove the corned beef stew intended to feed my hard-working family from the oven at precisely four, it was a sure bet that said family would return to find billows of smoke issuing from the kitchen window, the fire alarm shrilling, and the youngest daughter unable to offer any convincing excuse.

Relatives attempted to offer comfort to my frazzled parents: ‘She's young! Maybe she’ll grow out of it?’

(Narrator: The girl I did not grow out of it)

By the time my teens rolled around I hated the term ‘Away with the fairies,’ with a kind of frustrated viciousness. But I had no weapon with which to fight it — I’d brought the label on myself, and I couldn’t seem to shake the behaviour that caused it to stick. What was wrong with me? Why was I so profoundly different, so weird? Why was it so impossible for me to keep my attention on the things that other people found important?

It took me a few years to realise – or rather, to unearth – the answer. It was hidden deep, part of the rich, loamy compost formed of childhood memories and influences from which my personality had sprung.

It turns out...I’m away with the fairies.

There is another meaning for that expression, after all.

‘Come away, O human child!’

When does it happen? When exactly does the extraordinary enchantment begin? Is it all at once, in a flash of transmutation that leaves the child so changed they don’t even remember how they were before?

‘To the waters and the wild’

Or does it creep up on you over years, stealthily transforming each nerve and fibre until nothing is left of that mortal, stolen child?

‘With a faery, hand in hand,’

I don’t know exactly when I first went away with the fairies (or faeries, since I’m quoting Yeats). It probably happened before I can even remember, like so many events which leave an indelible mark. But I can offer up a handful of what those of us in this particular predicament – creative folk, career dreamers, storytellers – are wont to call ‘inciting incidents’.

'For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.'

The earliest memory is of a big, heavy volume with a dull, old gold cover. After lunchtime at nursery school we were allowed to choose one book from the bookcase in the main room to look at for a quiet half an hour. It was mainly filled with picture and alphabet books, because we were a bit young for anything more advanced. But somehow this massive, gleaming golden tome ended up on the shelves and one day, my arms sagging under the weight, I drew it down.

I couldn’t read it. But I could look at the pictures.

I now believe the illustrations that so captured my imagination were Rackham’s, although I’ve never found a copy of it again, so I can’t be sure. I stared, rapt, slowly turning the pages and soaking in the menacing, jewel-like images of faeries, princesses, goblins, dragons, castles, witches. One image, of a group of ogres in various shades of olive, grey and moss, with knotted limbs, tangled hair and bulging bellies, struck me so hard that I felt the impact like a shock to my brain. When it was time to stop ‘reading’, I would hide the book so that no one else – either teacher or fellow pupil – could discover it and take it away. But inevitably, one day when I went to the book’s hiding place it had gone, probably whisked off to its proper shelf in the school library. Its loss left me bereft, forced to mentally retrace my memories of the pictures so that I wouldn’t forget them, or the way they'd made me feel (result — lost in the supermarket again).

Then there was the night my mother decided to read Oscar Wilde’s poignant ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’ to me. She didn’t realise until too late that it was a tragedy because she thought of Wilde as a comedic writer. But although I did cry over the fate of the nightingale, I also realised that it had to end that way, and puzzled over my feeling of certainty for days as I tried to work out why (result — leaving my coat behind in the cloakroom at school).

Another path to Faeryland was offered by legendary Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki, in his beautiful and strange film Laputa, aired on a rainy Sunday afternoon and assumed ‘safe’ by my parents because it was a cartoon. The story had such an effect on me that a lifelong interest in the culture and mythos of Japan was born (result — fell down the stairs while trying to re-enact one of the vital scenes from the climax).

The moment of no return might have been when I was about ten and got my hands on a volume of world folklore and mythology. This contained many wonders, including my first, fiery taste of Beowulf. Although eventually interlibrary loan called the precious book away, Beowulf had impressed itself so perfectly in my brain that when, a year or so later, a secondary school teacher for some bizarre reason handed me a copy of it in the original Middle English and told me to try to read it aloud in front of the class, I fell on it with a glad cry and was able to read it aloud; I already knew what all the words should mean (result — made an enemy of every other child in the class, most of whom became convinced that I was some hellish combination of a witch and a teacher’s pet).

If these sorts of insistent nudgings from Fate, the Cosmos, or the faeries themselves were meant to yield any other result than that of a perpetually dreaming storyteller, I don’t know what it was. Having been called away to other realms so often, how was I ever supposed to fully return?

Large chunks of my conscious and subconscious mind are always occupied Somewhere Else. I shouldn’t think it’s a surprise to anyone reading this that I went on to write books for children and young adults, or that all my work draws strongly on world folklore, mythology and fairy tales. I find satisfaction in retelling or reimagining such familiar stories; part of what makes readers love fantasy is the sense of inevitability, the well-worn archetypes which allow such tales to belong to everyone and no one at the same time.

But what really fascinates me is the liminal spaces within our shared mythos. The unanswered questions, the whys and wherefores that most fairy tales never acknowledge. To be a writer is to be an explorer of the uncharted parts of Faeryland.

Who was the wicked stepmother before she arrived to destroy the lives of her stepchildren, and what forces motivate her to act this way?

Does Beauty truly come to love the Beast, or is her behaviour motivated by pity, or social pressure — or something darker still?

Are Cinderella’s obedience and passivity really the virtues the traditional tale would have us believe?

Who is the monster in the cave? Is he a monster at all, or simply a reflection of our own fears?

Such are the questions which, these days, cause me to walk head first into a telegraph pole, or leave the corned beef stew to burn. The difference is that I’m no longer ashamed to have gone away with the faeries. A little embarrassed from time to time — but these misadventures make good stories in their own right, once the bruises have faded and an emergency pizza dinner has been ordered.

More importantly, I’ve learned that faeryland isn’t some far away fantasy realm after all.

It is, to borrow from Yeats's The Stolen Child again, ‘Where the wave of moonlight glosses […]’ our own ‘unquiet dreams,’ the imaginative landscape which anyone may access with a simple twist in perception. The realm of untold stories and forgotten voices, the narratives which lurk in the shadows cast by the light of heroes.

Faeryland is the complex, evolving and often incomprehensible workings of the human soul and psyche, which allow all of us to take on, in turn, the role of hero or monster within our own story. When we go there we are not escaping from reality but creating new ways of understanding it — and ourselves.

Other people will probably always believe that I’m away with the faeries. And that’s fine. But I – and my fellow writers – will know the truth. I’ve not gone anywhere; I don’t have to. The faeries are here with us, and always have been. You just have to be willing to see them, and follow them, when they're standing right in front of you.

Away with the Fairies?

When you hear a person described with the expression ‘Away with the fairies’, you imagine someone rather useless. Someone chronically distracted, with a short attention span and no common sense. Someone – if we’re not being polite – a bit batty. It’s a description that’s been attached to me all my life: my mother’s standard explanation for inexplicable behaviour.

‘Never mind Zoë! She’s just away with the fairies again.’

From the time I could toddle, I could get lost anywhere — halfway down the perilous steps of Warwick Tower, halfway through walking the dog, in the middle of a dentist’s appointment, in the middle of the Natural History museum. Even trips to the supermarket were an adventure; I inevitably came adrift from the caravan of parents and siblings somewhere between the cheese counter and the bread aisle and ended up summoned to the customer service desk by a tannoy announcement, where I would have to try to explain myself to my harrassed, annoyed father and the judgemental supermarket staff, who had been forced to perform the same tannoy service on a nearly weekly basis since I was a toddler. My parents started rotating to different shops each week to avoid the repeat embarrassment.

Getting lost was the least of it, though. I misplaced gloves, coats, my lunch, my glasses and my homework at such a rate that it was less a family joke, more a curse. I walked into telegraph poles, tripped over curbs, and fell down holes, hillsides and stairs with depressing regularity. When left with instructions to remove the corned beef stew intended to feed my hard-working family from the oven at precisely four, it was a sure bet that said family would return to find billows of smoke issuing from the kitchen window, the fire alarm shrilling, and the youngest daughter unable to offer any convincing excuse.

Relatives attempted to offer comfort to my frazzled parents: ‘She's young! Maybe she’ll grow out of it?’

(Narrator: The girl I did not grow out of it)

By the time my teens rolled around I hated the term ‘Away with the fairies,’ with a kind of frustrated viciousness. But I had no weapon with which to fight it — I’d brought the label on myself, and I couldn’t seem to shake the behaviour that caused it to stick. What was wrong with me? Why was I so profoundly different, so weird? Why was it so impossible for me to keep my attention on the things that other people found important?

It took me a few years to realise – or rather, to unearth – the answer. It was hidden deep, part of the rich, loamy compost formed of childhood memories and influences from which my personality had sprung.

It turns out...I’m away with the fairies.

There is another meaning for that expression, after all.

‘Come away, O human child!’

When does it happen? When exactly does the extraordinary enchantment begin? Is it all at once, in a flash of transmutation that leaves the child so changed they don’t even remember how they were before?

‘To the waters and the wild’

Or does it creep up on you over years, stealthily transforming each nerve and fibre until nothing is left of that mortal, stolen child?

‘With a faery, hand in hand,’

I don’t know exactly when I first went away with the fairies (or faeries, since I’m quoting Yeats). It probably happened before I can even remember, like so many events which leave an indelible mark. But I can offer up a handful of what those of us in this particular predicament – creative folk, career dreamers, storytellers – are wont to call ‘inciting incidents’.

'For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.'

The earliest memory is of a big, heavy volume with a dull, old gold cover. After lunchtime at nursery school we were allowed to choose one book from the bookcase in the main room to look at for a quiet half an hour. It was mainly filled with picture and alphabet books, because we were a bit young for anything more advanced. But somehow this massive, gleaming golden tome ended up on the shelves and one day, my arms sagging under the weight, I drew it down.

I couldn’t read it. But I could look at the pictures.

I now believe the illustrations that so captured my imagination were Rackham’s, although I’ve never found a copy of it again, so I can’t be sure. I stared, rapt, slowly turning the pages and soaking in the menacing, jewel-like images of faeries, princesses, goblins, dragons, castles, witches. One image, of a group of ogres in various shades of olive, grey and moss, with knotted limbs, tangled hair and bulging bellies, struck me so hard that I felt the impact like a shock to my brain. When it was time to stop ‘reading’, I would hide the book so that no one else – either teacher or fellow pupil – could discover it and take it away. But inevitably, one day when I went to the book’s hiding place it had gone, probably whisked off to its proper shelf in the school library. Its loss left me bereft, forced to mentally retrace my memories of the pictures so that I wouldn’t forget them, or the way they'd made me feel (result — lost in the supermarket again).

Then there was the night my mother decided to read Oscar Wilde’s poignant ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’ to me. She didn’t realise until too late that it was a tragedy because she thought of Wilde as a comedic writer. But although I did cry over the fate of the nightingale, I also realised that it had to end that way, and puzzled over my feeling of certainty for days as I tried to work out why (result — leaving my coat behind in the cloakroom at school).

Another path to Faeryland was offered by legendary Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki, in his beautiful and strange film Laputa, aired on a rainy Sunday afternoon and assumed ‘safe’ by my parents because it was a cartoon. The story had such an effect on me that a lifelong interest in the culture and mythos of Japan was born (result — fell down the stairs while trying to re-enact one of the vital scenes from the climax).

The moment of no return might have been when I was about ten and got my hands on a volume of world folklore and mythology. This contained many wonders, including my first, fiery taste of Beowulf. Although eventually interlibrary loan called the precious book away, Beowulf had impressed itself so perfectly in my brain that when, a year or so later, a secondary school teacher for some bizarre reason handed me a copy of it in the original Middle English and told me to try to read it aloud in front of the class, I fell on it with a glad cry and was able to read it aloud; I already knew what all the words should mean (result — made an enemy of every other child in the class, most of whom became convinced that I was some hellish combination of a witch and a teacher’s pet).

If these sorts of insistent nudgings from Fate, the Cosmos, or the faeries themselves were meant to yield any other result than that of a perpetually dreaming storyteller, I don’t know what it was. Having been called away to other realms so often, how was I ever supposed to fully return?

Large chunks of my conscious and subconscious mind are always occupied Somewhere Else. I shouldn’t think it’s a surprise to anyone reading this that I went on to write books for children and young adults, or that all my work draws strongly on world folklore, mythology and fairy tales. I find satisfaction in retelling or reimagining such familiar stories; part of what makes readers love fantasy is the sense of inevitability, the well-worn archetypes which allow such tales to belong to everyone and no one at the same time.

But what really fascinates me is the liminal spaces within our shared mythos. The unanswered questions, the whys and wherefores that most fairy tales never acknowledge. To be a writer is to be an explorer of the uncharted parts of Faeryland.

Who was the wicked stepmother before she arrived to destroy the lives of her stepchildren, and what forces motivate her to act this way?

Does Beauty truly come to love the Beast, or is her behaviour motivated by pity, or social pressure — or something darker still?

Are Cinderella’s obedience and passivity really the virtues the traditional tale would have us believe?

Who is the monster in the cave? Is he a monster at all, or simply a reflection of our own fears?

Such are the questions which, these days, cause me to walk head first into a telegraph pole, or leave the corned beef stew to burn. The difference is that I’m no longer ashamed to have gone away with the faeries. A little embarrassed from time to time — but these misadventures make good stories in their own right, once the bruises have faded and an emergency pizza dinner has been ordered.

More importantly, I’ve learned that faeryland isn’t some far away fantasy realm after all.

It is, to borrow from Yeats's The Stolen Child again, ‘Where the wave of moonlight glosses […]’ our own ‘unquiet dreams,’ the imaginative landscape which anyone may access with a simple twist in perception. The realm of untold stories and forgotten voices, the narratives which lurk in the shadows cast by the light of heroes.

Faeryland is the complex, evolving and often incomprehensible workings of the human soul and psyche, which allow all of us to take on, in turn, the role of hero or monster within our own story. When we go there we are not escaping from reality but creating new ways of understanding it — and ourselves.

Other people will probably always believe that I’m away with the faeries. And that’s fine. But I – and my fellow writers – will know the truth. I’ve not gone anywhere; I don’t have to. The faeries are here with us, and always have been. You just have to be willing to see them, and follow them, when they're standing right in front of you.

In Pursuit of a PhD & Doctoral Funding (Part 2)

Hello, and welcome back to An Eddying Flight, Dear Readers. Today we're going to get into some specifics about funding, and I'll be sharing a template of an introductory email to a potential supervisor which is based on my own.

Disclaimers: I'm in the Arts & Humanities and I proposed my own independent research project to the university, as opposed to joining anyone else's existing research project. If you are based in a different research area or you're looking to join a lab, my advice may be of limited use to you; have your pinch of salt at the ready and apply it at will.

With that out of the way... let's talk about money. And hold onto your hats here, kiddos, because this is a deep dive. You need to know this information, but there's a lot of it.

One of the biggest sources of funding for research - and especially PhD research - here in the UK is the UK Research and Innovation body. But they don't fund students' doctoral research directly - there's no point trying to apply to them for that - rather, they pour a lot of money into these smaller, more discipline specific groups called the Research Councils. As you can see, and as I said in my last post, there's councils focused on (among others) medical research, natural and environmental research, engineering and physical sciences, business, and arts and humanities.

The bad news here is that, as you might already have noticed, out of nine research councils, there's one - count 'em, just one - for arts and humanities. If you're a STEM PhD candidate you can often take it for granted that you will be fully funded to do your doctorate, and many STEM candidates are advised that it's not worth doing a PhD at all if they can't get funding (it'll actually make them look bad on their future job applications). But there is sadly, and in my view unjustly, only one pretty small pot of money for those of us in arts or humanities based subjects, and the vast, vast majority of A&H students do self-fund. It's not considered a career disadvantage to do so, like for STEM students - but it's still a right pain.

How do you get money from the AHRC (Arts & Humanities Research Council) to help you do a PhD? Once again, you can't apply directly. The AHRC allots their money for doctoral research to a group of even smaller bodies called Doctoral Training Partnerships. These are regional funding bodies generally made up of several universities and other research bodies or partner institutions, who have joined together to bid to the AHRC for pots of money to recruit and support the best PhD candidates. To make life a little easier, here's a list of all the AHRC DTPs in the UK (there's also lists of DTPs for all the different research councils focused on science, medical, business etc. there on the UKRI/research council webpages if you want to look for them). If a uni isn't on this list, there's no DTP funding from the AHRC at their disposal.

My PhD research is funded by the Open-Oxford-Cambridge DTP - which is made up of, you guessed it, the Open University and Oxford and Cambridge Universities. You can see here on the OU's 'funding' page that they mention this and also other DTP's and funding bodies that they belong to, which fund different kinds of research. In addition to offering funding for students who want to do their own independent research project for their PhD, like me, many DTPs also offer something called Collaborative Doctoral Awards, where they team up with partner institutions to do research on a topic that the partner institution specialises in (fabric conservation at the V&A, maritime history at the Royal Maritime Museum). Students who are interested in (and have experience and/or qualifications related to) the research project can apply for studentships if they are willing to base their PhD research on these pre-existing research topics and questions.

The pros of AHRC funding are:

It's financially generous, especially in comparison to other funding for Arts & Humanities. A studentship for a UK student will cover your fees, a living stipend at a rate set by the UKRI (£15609 per annum for the current academic year, and set to increase each year) and many research expenses, such as travel and accommodation for fieldwork, archival research, and conference attendance. The DTP will offer extra training, and opportunites to take up special placements, attend events, and network. They usually pay for these, too. It's prestigious. Once you've graduated, having a full AHRC studentship on your CV broadcasts that you were among the best and brightest of your cohort of students. It may offer a leg up in getting jobs in the future.

The cons of AHRC funding are:

Applying is complex process with a lot of additional work involved. Often you will need to revise your thesis proposal - your beloved research questions! - to make your research fit the particular goals of the DTP that you apply to. For instance, TECHNE places a lot of emphasis on the development of new and innovative research methods/processes rather than outputs, so that has to be a part of your proposal. SWW2 wants you to do research which can utilise joint supervision/expertise from two of the partner unis and again, you have to make this an integral part of the work you propose. If you do get the funding, there may be further hoops to jump through. One example is WroCAH, which places a lot of emphasis on mandatory inter-cohort activities for their funded students, requiring international travel. You need to research enough to know what you're committing to before you apply. It's competitive. This is why it's prestigious. My supervisors at the OU were kind, encouraging and positive to me every step of the way. They also had to make it clear to me every step of the way that there was just no guarantee, no matter how strong my CV, application and proposal were, that I'd make it. And every time that I did make it through one more hoop and get to the next stage of the process, they were elated and overjoyed on my behalf. This is especially true in Pandemic times; at my induction I was told that applications for PhD places and funding had increased FOUR-FOLD since 2019 - and there were already something like twenty applications for each funding place BEFORE THAT. It's enough to make my head spin. Out of what were possibily thousands of applications, a mere seventy-four students were offered OOC DTP funding in 2021 - of those, only six were from the Open University. I was one. I know how lucky I am. You have to remember that each uni within the DTP can only refer so many students to the DTP for each funding period, and each department in the uni will get an share of that number - so each department may only be able to put forward one or two candidates. They will therefore want to chose the ones whom they believe have the absolute strongest overall application. Even if your potential supervisors love you and your work, it might not be you.

Let's be positive, though. If you are a good candidate and have made your need for funding clear then your supervisor/s will work with you to make sure your thesis proposal and application to the funding body are as targeted and strong as possible. It's usual to have an interview (either face to face, or these days, online) with the university for your PhD place, which will usually involve your potential supervisor/supervisors, the head of the department, and other interested parties. These guys will then look at all your paperwork and decide a) if you'll be offered a place and b) if you are one of the chosen few who will be passed onto the funding body as a candidate. You may possibly need to have a separate interview with them, too, or provide additional evidence, or fill in even more forms. And then... you wait.

Let's say that your uni is not part of a DTP or your potential supervisor doesn't think your research could be made into a good fit for the DTP they are part of. This isn't necessarily the end of the world. There's also 'faculty funding' - a catch-all term I'm using here for all the different bits of money a uni department may have at their deposal in order to fund PhDs. Some of this will be endowments left by wealthy alumni of the university, come from charities, may be from other governmental or business-sources, and some will be money allotted by the university itself from its budget. Some of it may come as part of existing research projects run by members of staff at the university and, as with a Collaborative Doctoral Award, a student or students will be offered PhD studentships in order to do doctoral research that will contribute to this larger research.

This is the faculty funding page for the Open University. You'll notice that, once again, much of it is not available to arts/humanities students! But there is usually some arts and humanities funding available in places that have funding at all. If universities have this kind of money available they will often have their own funding page, or a funding wizard you can use to find it. Some universities, especially older ones with a very strong research profile, have a lot of this kind of funding. Others have practically none. Some advertise these studentships and publicise them (and one way to catch them is by signing up to jobs.ac.uk and setting a job alert for studentships) and other places are weirdly hush-hush and don't like to even be asked what's in place. I had a friend who interviewed for a PhD place expecting to self-fund and who was asked by the interviewers, quite casually, if she would like her fees waived. Not being born the day before, she said yes - and that was that.

The thing about faculty funding is that it can be almost anything. Some studentships are as generous, if not more generous, than AHRC studentships. Some cover fees only and have no stipend attached (these are often referred to as fee waivers) and some are for living costs but not tuition fees. Some cover the full period of the PhD and some are for one year only, or have to be re-applied for at the end of each year. The only way to know is to either find the information yourself on a user-friendly university website, or ask a potential supervisor. But if you do need funding, sending emails to places that don't mention funding at all on their websites may seem like a waste of time, and you might choose to stick to departments which are a bit clearer and more upfront. We can't all be as fortuituous as my friend!

Some faculty scholarships come with their own strings attached, such as needing to be willing to do internships at particular institutions, conduct research in a particular archive, or base your research on certain topics. Because faculty funding is usually administered and awarded by the uni itself you may only be interviewed once for both the PhD place and the funding together - or you might get two interviews. And you may be interviewed for both at once, and then offered a place... but without the funding. This happened to me twice while I was working on my MA. It was agonising; I had to turn them down, without any guarantee I'd ever get another chance.

A brief note here on Graduate Teaching Assistants. I don't have any personal experience of being one, but I did have a long email conversation with a lecturer about applying once (sadly, I ended up not being qualified because, once again, my MA was in progress). This is a kind of scheme run by some universities where you, the student, work as a teaching assistant to the lecturers within your discipline at the university - running seminars, doing marking, even delivering lectures - for a certain amount of hours each week while also doing your PhD there for free. You get paid for the work you do and this is often at about the same rate as a UKRI stipend (sometimes more, sometimes less). Attitudes to this vary, with some feeling that getting teaching experience is actually a massive plus, while others would say it's volunteering to be a dogsbody for the university for far too little money. How you feel is up to you.

Presuming that you're not so bamboozled by all this that you're put off altogether (hopefully that feeling will pass with a little time if you breathe slowly and deeply) next I'm going to share a basic template for your initial email of introduction to your pick/s for a potential supervisor. This based on my own email, and obviously needs to be tweaked and tailored not only for you but also for each individual lecturer you may approach.

Dear Dr. [Name],

How are you? I hope this email finds you well. I am writing to discover if you would have the time and interest to supervise my PhD project. I am hoping to apply for a place on the [Creative Writing PhD programme name] at [University name] for [date], and a [Name of funding] studentship.

I'm [brief summary of current or previous work experience relevant to research or the discipline you want to do a PhD in, including any honours, awards or notable achievements]. I have [list of qualifications, especially those relevant to potential PhD, and another academic prizes or honours].

I've chosen to approach you as a potential supervisor because [mention of their research, especially any papers or books of theirs you may have read, emphasizing areas that coincide with your proposed research]. My doctoral research would be [brief run-down – no more than three lines! - of the main points of the research you want to do, again emphasizing areas of common interest].

My research proposal and CV and [a sample of or link to creative work, if you’re seeking to do an arts based degree] are attached below. I would be delighted to discuss these with you, and would appreciate any advice that you might have to offer on how to proceed from this point. If there’s any further information you’d like, do let me know.

Thank you for your time.

Best Wishes,

[Your Name]

Once again, this is ostensibly based on your wishing to propose your own research - but you can easily rearrange the template to be useful even if you're seeking to join an existing project, lab, or want a Collaborative Doctoral Award. Just make sure that all the information about you is there.

If you're emailing an administrator or central contact for the department, you'll want to state that you're approaching them because you like the department itself, and mention why. If you're emailing an individual to ask them directly about supervision, note that it's considered really bad manners to approach more than one lecturer or professor in the same faculty at once, even if your emails to each are tailored to them. You have to pick one staff member, approach, and wait for their reply. If it's a no, then you can pick another in that university to approach. Yes, this does take time. However, there's nothing stopping you from emailing several different universities at once.

I really hope this has been useful, Dear Readers, and that you can now avoid at least some of the disheartening confusion I experienced at the start of my journey. If anyone has any further questions about any of this information, don't hesitate to comment, email, or send me a Tweet.

Thursday Pick & Mix (#7)

Welcome back, Dear Readers! Has this week has treated you well? Whether it's been a head-down-keep-moving-slog or a delightful dance, I hope you're ready to write today, write just for yourself, just for the joy of it.

If you're not ready - if you're already checking your watch or phone, feeling that stressed clutch in the tummy that says: 'You don't have time!' - that's a sign you need to make time.

I don't know you, but I can make you this promise: the roof will cave in because you took ten minutes for yourself today. You are allowed to take ten minutes for yourself. You are allowed to experience ten minutes of pure joy. This is your official permission slip, if you need one: you are allowed this.

The Rules:

You own the next ten minutes. Set your timer but don't put it somewhere that you can see it or stress out over it. Pick up your pen, open up your word processing programme. View the waiting blank page as a friend you are about to get to know better.

Pick a prompt. Any prompt. Mix two, or three - or, if something else occurs to you, go with that instead. We are not the prompt police. Do what makes you happy.

Remember not to waste your ten minutes or your imaginative energy editing or revising. Put a piece of paper over the lines as you write them, set your font to the same colour as the page so that it's invisible. We don't care about spelling, grammar, awkward phrases, punctuation or typos. We don't know her.

When you've finished, save your work, close your notebook - and walk away. You don't need to re-read this writing, assess it, fix it. That's not what it's for. It's about joy, not results. If/when you do read it again, make sure that you do so in a spirit of curiosity and interest, but without expectation. Then, if it turns out to be a deathless piece of prose, that's a lovely bonus.

Onto today's prompts!

IMAGE

MUSIC

WORDS

"The grey cat's eyes flashed, golden in the flickering candlelight..."

I wish you good paper, smoothly running ink, and a non-cramping hand - but above all, Dear Readers, I wish you joy.