Author: Alice Ewens

This week I’m trying my best to avoid answering that old chestnut of “where do I get my ideas?”. Artists of all kinds are asked this but especially writers. Neil Gaiman calls it the Question That Shall Not Be Asked (like Voldemort, or Hamlet…). And yet, asked it gets.  I’m not sure whether people ask this because they think this is the sort of question you are meant to ask a writer, or if they are genuinely looking for an answer. Either way, you’re going to be left feeling unsatisfied, because there’s not a satisfactory answer...because no-one (not even writers) knows. No one can tell you where their ideas come from; not really. Not in a nice, easily digestible prescriptive formula (you don’t just offer up your first-born, or sign…

For this week’s blog, I thought I’d try and tackle the question of “Why I Write and What I Get Out Of It”. It’s a question lots of writers, many more accomplished and erudite than I, have tackled over the years, but one I thought I’d throw my oar into anyway. In a nutshell, I suppose, I write because I have something to say, and a narcissistic streak that wants people to pay attention… but there’s also this need in me to be understood and to use writing as a way to understand. I’m going to try and explain, no doubt in my usual clumsy hamfisted way exactly why writing, and writing poetry, is a thing I feel like I have no choice but to do. Grab a coffee and…

After 10 years being employed as a transport planning consultant, I quit my job. It was, in some ways, the hardest decision I have ever had to make, and in others, the easiest decision, because by the time I handed in my notice, it sort of felt like there wasn’t much of a choice. Stay and continue stretching myself out so thinly that I would almost certainly disappear, or leave and breathe. That’s how it felt - that I’d stopped breathing, or at least was only taking the barest sips of air before being submerged again. At the end, my anxiety was at a peak I’d not felt for over a decade; a high chord stringing out too long, but I need you to understand that my anxiety wasn’t why…