Sophie Haydock, "Madame Matisse"

Sophie Haydock is an author, editor and journalist based in Folkestone, Kent. She is also curator of Folkestone Book Festival. Her debut novel, The Flames, was published in 2022. Her second novel, Madame Matisse, about the women who were integral to the life of the French artist Henri Matisse, was published by Doubleday in March 2025.

Sophie will be giving a guest talk, "Madame Matisse: The Women Who Made the Artist," at the University of Leicester on Wednesday 30 April 2025 at 5.30pm. With Harry Whitehead, she will be discussing the women who shaped the life of the artist Henri Matisse, and the process of turning history into fiction. You can see more details about the event and book a place here. 

About Madame Matisse, by Sophie Haydock
Madame Matisse is an fictionalised exploration of the women who played pivotal yet often overlooked roles in the life of the iconic artist Henri Matisse. Through the lives of three extraordinary women, Sophie Haydock paints an emotional portrait of art, love and sacrifice.

At the heart of the story is Amélie, Matisse's wife, whose quiet devotion to her husband's genius leaves her own dreams to wither in the shadows. Her unwavering support is the foundation of Matisse’s career, but it comes at a steep personal cost.

Then there is Lydia Delectorskaya, the dazzling Russian émigrée who becomes Matisse’s muse and confidante. With her fierce independence and enigmatic past, Lydia’s relationship with Matisse is as passionate as it is fraught, as she grapples with her own identity and her complex role in his creative world. 

When his wife, after forty years of marriage, delivers a desperate ultimatum, a question is born: who will Matisse choose? And what explosions lie ahead?

Finally, Marguerite, Matisse's daughter, emerges as a voice of resistance, forging her own path and confronting the turbulent undercurrents of her family dynamic. As she struggles to define herself outside her father’s shadow, Marguerite challenges the boundaries of art, family and love.

Set against the vibrant canvas of 1930s France, Madame Matisse is a tale of ambition, betrayal and the indelible impact these women had on Matisse’s artistic legacy. Their stories of resilience and sacrifice offer a powerful reflection on the often-unseen forces behind the creation of greatness.

You can read more about Madame Matisse here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the novel. 

From Madame Matisse
Make no mistake: Lydia doesn’t care for beauty, certainly doesn’t chase after it as currency, though she understands the privileges it affords her, as a woman about to turn twenty-nine, with pale skin, ice-blonde hair and blue eyes. She has caught the eyes of enough men in her time, usually the wrong kind. But Lydia knows such beauty is not a thing to build a life upon; it will not last for more than a handful of years, nor would she want it to.

She’s sitting alone in the dark with the cool instrument clasped to her breast, lost in a meditative daze, when she hears Monsieur Matisse calling for her. There’s a shift in his tone.

Lydia returns the gun to her father’s briefcase and checks the clasps are locked securely, pushing her thumbs up against them to test for weaknesses, to see if Amélie’s meddling has inflicted permanent damage. Then she conceals the case once more, hidden until the time comes.

Once it is safely put away, she passes from her room, down the stairs, to the studio where Monsieur Matisse spends his days. Birds call from their cages, wings darting. The artist has his back to her as he tops up their seed. She notices the slope of his shoulders, pulling at the centre of his taupe jacket, the material tight between his shoulder blades. He feels her eyes on him and turns expectantly. Her gaze roams to the fireplace. She looks at a pair of pressed violets, long past their best, their colours faded after many years trapped behind a pane of glass.

"There you are, Lydia. It’s not like you to keep me waiting," he says gently.

There’s a seriousness to his features, and Lydia knows something has changed.

"Your wife was looking for you. Did she find you?" she asks.

He nods, and gestures that she take a seat.

He inhales. Pauses. Her body tenses as she waits for him to continue, her heart pounding. She waits for the words she knows are coming.

"I’m afraid my wife has given me an ultimatum," he says slowly.

Peter Thabit Jones, "The Fathomless Tides of the Heart: Carolyn Mary Kleefeld, American Poet and Artist"

Carolyn Mary Kleefeld and Peter Thabit Jones

Peter Thabit Jones has authored sixteen books. He has participated in festivals and conferences in America and Europe and is an annual writer-in-residence in Big Sur, California. A recipient of many awards, including the Eric Gregory Award for Poetry (The Society of Authors, London) and the Homer: European Medal of Poetry and Art, two of his dramas for the stage have premiered in America. His opera libretti for Luxembourg composer Albena Petrovic Vratchanska have premiered at the Philarmonie Luxembourg, the National Opera House Stara Zagora, Bulgaria, and Theatre National Du Luxembourg. The Land of Dreams, a new opera, will premiere at the Sofia Opera and Ballet Theatre, Bulgaria, in in June this year. His biography of Carolyn Mary Kleefeld, The Fathomless Tides of the Heart, is published in 2023 by The Seventh Quarry Press. Further information about Peter's work is on his website here. 

About Fathomless Tides of the Heart: Carolyn Mary Kleefeld, American Poet and Artist: A Biography, by Peter Thabit Jones

Carolyn Mary Kleefeld’s story is one from a talented young girl to the poet and artist she is today. It is a journey against overwhelming social pressures to fit in to a privileged life, a journey of a young Beverly Hills socialite to a reclusive lifestyle in Big Sur. Carolyn is a woman answering a creative calling from childhood, and is someone who has deservedly and impressively achieved publication, recognition and admiration for her poems and paintings around the world. 

It’s a fascinating biography and it references iconic figures of the literary world, Hollywood, and the counter-culture of the Sixties, including Jane Fonda, Rod Steiger, Anaïs Nin, Allen Ginsberg, Dr. Timothy Leary, and John C. Lilly, Jacques Cousteau and Laura Huxley, the wife of Aldous Huxley.

“It is no small matter to write the development of a poet, artist, and thinker of Carolyn Mary Kleefeld’s stature, yet Peter Thabit Jones’s biography rises to the challenge, offering insight not only into her voice and vision, but into the dynamics of creativity itself – its tensions, complexities, mysteries.” —Arthur Williamson.  

You can see more information about the book on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the biography.

From The Fathomless Tides of the Heart, by Peter Thabit Jones

Carolyn’s home in Big Sur to is situated on an isolated steep cliff, which slants its long way down to the mesmerizing swell of the Pacific Ocean. The property, 500 feet above the sea, has a 300-degree view from every angle. Her “dragon’s crown,” as she lovingly calls her part of the mountain, depending on nature’s mood, offers the silence of paradise and the aggressive and wild music of the sea and ferocious winds. Fog can descend at any time and like the chilled breath of a god, submerge all in its cloud of damp and eerie smoke. In the summer, when the fog does lift, it can get as hot as a desert rock and one goes about one’s day in a sluggish and uncomfortable manner. During the winter and even earlier, the anger of the winds is amplified and accelerated and they bully the whole place relentlessly. As Carolyn would write in her poem "The Squall," published in her book Vagabond Dawns: 

The icy grip of winter

wounds the hallowed air.

And the wind wails like a baby 

Abandoned in the squall ...

The wind, though, can brutally claim any month of the year. This is Carolyn’s observation from a June journal entry, focused in its exact sense-impressions, “The garden is quivering. The storm moves its pulse, trembling, rushing in the squall. My soul is in this compelled rush—a sense of quickened current—to the unknown. The air is icy and blowing carelessly all that is in the beast, the wake of the tempest. The seas are like a receptive, needy beast—await[ing] heaven’s blood humbly, vast, and eternal. The moonstone veils drape the mountain range, softening in this touch. The tiniest daisy bares its petals to the rippling, bristling blasts." 

Sue Hubbard, "Radium Dreams"

Sue Hubbard is an award-winning poet, novelist, broadcaster and art critic. She has won numerous prizes and, as The Poetry Society’s only Public Art Poet, created London’s largest public art poem, Eurydice, at Waterloo station, which has now been carved in Portland stone and permanently placed in the crypt of St. John’s, Waterloo.

Her poems have appeared in The Irish Times, The Observer, The London Magazine and many leading poetry magazines and anthologies. They have been read on Radio 3,  Radio 4 and RTE, and recorded for The Poetry Sound Archive.  Twice a Hawthornden Fellow and twice awarded bursaries to Yaddo, US, she has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia and in 1999 was awarded a major Arts Council Award. She has published four previous collections of poetry, Everything Begins with the Skin (Enitharmon), Ghost Station and The Forgetting and Remembering of Air (Salt), Swimming to Albania (Salmon Poetry). God’s Little Artist, on the life of Gwen John, is due later in 2023 from Seren.

She has also published a collection of short stories, Rothko’s Red (Salt) and three novels, Depth of Field (Dewi Lewis), Girl in White (Pushkin Press), Rainsongs (Duckworth, Overlook Press, US, Mercure de France and Yilin Press, China). Her fourth novel, Flatlands, is due from Pushkin Press UK and US, and Mercure de France in late spring 2023.

As an art critic she has been a regular contributor to The Independent, Time Out, The New Statesman, The London Magazine, and published a book of essays on art, Adventures in Art (Other Criteria). Her website is here. 

 

About Radium Dreams, by Sue Hubbard

For Radium Dreams I invited the artist Eileen Cooper RA to team up with me to pay homage to one of the world’s greatest female scientists, Marie Curie. Our poems, drawings and collages form an exhibition at the Women’s Art Collection, Murray Edwards College, Cambridge, along with an accompanying book, that follow her through her Polish childhood, her studies and research in Paris, her marriage and very public affair, giving texture and depth to her extraordinary life. It is more than eighty years since her death, but her story remains as compelling as ever.

My poems, accompanied by Eileen Cooper’s drawings and collages, conjure Curie’s life through closely observed moments of struggle, tenderness and joy. Both exhibition and book explore the theme of creative support: between Marie Curie and her sister, and between the scientist and her husband, Pierre Curie. This is reflected in the collaboration between a female poet and artist and resonates with The Women’s Art Collection at Murray Edwards, which was created by women as a college dedicated to educating academically outstanding young women.

Marie Curie’s own feminism was always demonstrated by her actions rather than by theories or words. She believed that progress in science would benefit the world and broke down barriers to pursue new ideas and theories, never allowing herself to be defined by the standards of beauty of her day or the behaviour conventionally expected from a woman. When she got married, she chose to do so in a plain dark gown that she could later use in the lab. Would she have described herself as a feminist? Whilst she was concerned with the education of young women, her abiding interest was always science and the truths it revealed. Stubborn and determined, she believed that knowledge equalled freedom. The men in her life, her husband Pierre, and her lover Paul Langevin, were colleagues with whom she shared her intellectual passions, giving weight to the words of the American writer, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, that “There is no female mind. The brain is not an organ of sex. Might as well speak of a female liver.” Marie Curie was a woman of conviction and courage. Radium Dreams presents her not only as brilliant, intense and uncompromising but also as passionate, flawed and compellingly human.

You can see more information about the exhibition and the collection on the Women's Art Collection website here. Below, you can read two sample poems from Radium Dreams. 

 

From Radium Dreams

Sorbonne
 
She sets up the kitchen chair,
her petroleum lamp,
a porcelain washbasin
 
printed with a rose
in the attic room of Rue Flatters.
Lives a monastic existence
 
patching and mending
her shiny, old-fashioned dress.
Doesn’t even know
 
how to make soup,
survives on buttered bread and tea,
faints in the tiny boxroom.
 
The laboratory is home,
its brass instruments, bell jars,
and test tubes with their brew of elements.
 
If only she can move them
close enough, she knows
that hydrogen atoms will fuse.
 
Standing in her linen smock
among the men, she rehearses
who she’s about to become,
 
steps forwards,
burette and Bunsen burner in hand.
She’ll not be found wanting.

 
Uranic Rays
 
Once they’d have called her
an alchemist for her pains.
 
Now, moving through the laboratory
among glass wash bottles,
 
Bunsen burners, the brass microscope,
quiet as an inhale of breath,
 
a wooden chemistry bench to her left,
the ionization chamber and electrometer
 
on her right,
she follows Becquerel’s experiments
 
to expose uranium salts to sunlight,
to see if radiation -
 
discovered one cloudy day by chance -
can be spontaneously emanated,
 
pass through metal foil to print,
ghost-like, on a photographic plate,
 
She wants to discover the cause
of this force, which seems
 
to violate Carnot’s law
that energy can be transformed,
 
(though like Time or God 
never be created or destroyed).
 
Now, lying beside her sleeping Pierre,
she dreams of particle waves,
 
an invisible necklace of opaline ash,
illuminating her bleached skin.
   

The Sound of Music: Ekphrastic Review Contest

By Lorette C. Luzajic, editor, The Ekphrastic Review

The Ekphrastic Review is pleased to announce a new flash fiction and poetry contest called The Sound of Music. Explore our curated collection of music-themed artworks, and use them to inspire your stories and poems. 

The judge is Jonathan Taylor, from the University of Leicester. 

The deadline is March 25, 2023.

Selected works will be published in The Ekphrastic Review. First place wins $100 CAD.

Entry is $10 CAD for five poems and/or stories. You can read the rules in full for the competition here. 

You can read more about The Ekphrastic Review on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

F. C. Malby, "Dead Drop"

F. C.Malby graduated with a first-class joint honours degree in Geography and Education. She has travelled widely and taught in the Czech Republic, the Philippines and London. She writes novels, short stories and poetry. Her debut novel, Take Me to the Castle, won The People’s Book Awards. Her debut short story collection, My Brother Was a Kangaroo, includes award-winning stories published in literary journals and magazines worldwide. She is a contributor to anthologies including In Defence of Pseudoscience: Reflex Fiction Volume Five (Reflex Press), Unthology 8 (Unthank Books), and Hearing Voices: The Litro Anthology of New Fiction (Kingston University Press) alongside Pulitzer prize winner, Anthony Doerr. Her website is here.

About Dead Drop

Liesl is an art thief and an exceptionally good one. She steals priceless paintings from Vienna’s art galleries and delivers them to wealthy private collectors. This life of anonymous notes and meticulous planning, of adrenaline-fuelled dead drops and dramatic escapes, suits her restless spirit and desire for solitude and anonymity. But when Leisl finds a body on Stephansplatz underground steps instead of the expected note, she understands that she’s involved in a deadly game and that her own life is in danger. This fast-paced, intelligent thriller exposes the undercover world of art heists and takes us on a journey through Vienna’s galleries and museums until Leisl comes up against a truth that makes her question everything she knows.

You can read more about Dead Drop on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the novel. 

From Dead Drop, by F. C. Malby

I hear the roll and clunk of the train’s wheels on the steel tracks below, feel its vibrations in my toes and through my thighs as it leaves the platform. The wind rushes into the tunnel from Stephansplatz, its caress warm as it whips down the steps to the underground platform and fills the void. 

The Vienna spring brings with it cherry blossom and azure skies, the blues becoming celestial in the late afternoon light. Most count the short, hot summer months. I count the winter months until spring, and then when the leaves turn to a deep, burnt amber, I begin again. 

As I reach the top step, a body lies on the pavement, feet contorted, laces undone, socks pushing through holes in the soles. A red, woollen hat rests on the concrete slab by his head, hands clutch an empty bottle of Kaiser beer. Not a soul stops to look. A body littering the pavement is a familiar sight on this part of the underground. It’s not always clear whether the person is alive or dead. 

I am here for the note. Stepping closer to avoid the people coming up the steps behind me, I spot a corner of paper in his top jacket pocket and pull it free. Without reading the words, I slide it into my jacket. Checking the pocket on the other side of his jacket, I feel something hard and rough and pull out a brooch shaped like a star. I count the spokes, ten of them, and run my fingers across its surface. It lacks the pearls, but at a guess it would have been handcrafted by Hapsburg jeweller, Rozet and Fischmeister. I slip it into my pocket. An unexpected treasure. Reaching down and taking his wrist, I feel for a pulse. I should have checked it first but this is new territory for me. All signs of life have drained away and death was recent. A touch of heat still lingers on the skin, rough and calloused. I pull the hat down over his face. The beer bottle, I suspect, will have been planted to make this look like a natural event. He should have been alive when I reached him. 

The Ekphrastic Review and Lorette C. Luzajic

Lorette C. Luzajic is a writer and mixed media artist from Toronto, Canada. She studied for a Bachelor of Arts in journalism at Ryerson University, but always gravitated towards more creative pursuits, especially painting, art history and poetry. She has four independently published books of poetry: The Astronaut's Wife, Solace, The Lords of George Street, and Aspartame, and her poems have appeared widely in online and print publications like Rattle, The Fiddlehead, Grain, Geez, Peacock Journal, Taxicab, KYSO Flash, Cultural Weekly, Art Ascent, and more. Her award-winning visual art has been collected and exhibited worldwide, including Mexico and Tunisia, and has appeared in galleries, museums, banks, hotels, laundromats, nightclubs, billboards, a luxury jewellery company ad campaign, and numerous literary journals and poetry book covers. In 2015, Lorette founded The Ekphrastic Review, an online journal devoted entirely to literature inspired by art.

Lorette C. Luzajic, Wonder Woman for President

About The Ekphrastic Review
By Lorette C. Luzajic

The Ekphrastic Review is a rare literary journal dedicated wholly to ekphrastic writing. "Ekphrastic" is a Greek word that simply means "to explain." Along the way, it came to mean writing that specifically described a work of art. In contemporary times, it usually means "writing inspired by art." 

It's a very old form of writing that Homer, Plato, and Socrates used or talked about. Ekphrastic poetry was essential to the Romantics and the most famous example is probably John Keats' "Ode to a Grecian Urn." William Carlos Williams, Rainer Maria Rilke, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Charles Simic are just a few famous poets known for their ekphrastic writing.

When I started the journal, it was really meant to be a hobby blog where I collected and shared interesting paintings and poems for my own enjoyment. My own artwork is often inspired by poetry or literature, and my most satisfying writing is about art, so ekphrasis was the natural intersection for me between my major life passions. I really didn't anticipate becoming an important archive of ekphrastic literature or having a devoted readership. The blog started as "Ekphrastic: writing on art, and art on writing." I posted paintings I liked that featured text or people reading, and occasionally shared a poem about art. But we began to attract an audience of serious writers rather quickly, and so I changed the name accordingly to denote the importance of the genre to its fans. We become The Ekphrastic Review.

I believe very strongly that contemplation and writing is the most important way we can approach art and art history. Whether we study only the surface of an artwork, or delve into its backstory and the artist's biography, our experience of art is enriched. It's an intimate process of learning to look at art, to find new ways in. The process of ekphrastic writing deepens a writer's own practice, too - we learn new ways of thinking, reflecting, and asking questions. Our imagination is fired in unexpected directions. Memories surface, connections form. We are led by curiosity into different worlds, different stories.

We have been blessed to feature over 800 writers from all over the world. (We keep an alphabetical list of writers for easy reference- interested readers can see it here). 

Until now, we have focused on ekphrastic writing, but as we continue to evolve we want to feature essays or articles that are about the craft of ekphrastic writing, ekphrastic book reviews, interviews with writers about ekphrases, and also translations of ekphrastic poetry from other languages. Submissions of these categories is especially encouraged moving forward. We also accept poetry, prose and fiction submissions that meet our ekphrastic guidelines. See: http://www.ekphrastic.net/submit.html

We are especially pleased to have recently formed a prize nomination committee, so that we will able to nominate our amazing writers for Best of the Net and Pushcart awards from now on. We are also going to have our own annual best Ekphrastic nominations.

Finally, we have biweekly prompts - look for our challenges every other Friday. The art varies widely in order to inspire a range of work.

Here is a poem from our archives, inspired by Gas, a painting by Edward Hopper (USA, 1940):

Gas, 1940

Pegasus, a faded red, about to fly off
into the sky, which stretches above the dark 
pines, the rural road running by, a river,
all curves and meanders. The white paint’s
flaked off the wooden shingles,
and the Drink Coca-Cola! sign is stained
with rust, but the light in the window
casts a yellow glow on the cement.

I think my parents are about to cruise up
in their Buick, a big gray boat of a car,
the one that was up on blocks during the war,
and they have no idea what darkness lies
up ahead. She’s happy, leaning back 
on the plush seat, the night air riffling 
her page boy; he leans his arm out the window,
the ash of his cigarette eddying to the ground.

The lone attendant fills their tank, checks the oil,
wipes both windshields until they gleam, then returns
to his metal chair, his solitary vigil, keeper 
of the lighthouse, pilot of the night.

Barbara Crooker

This poem was previously published in Barbara Crooker's book, More (C&R Press, 2010). 

"After I Bumped My Head on a Children's Slide," by Meng Wang

Meng Wang (Chinese pen name: Pear Du) is a bilingual writer and poet, born in 1992, from Beijing, China, who enjoys writing love poems. She loves animals, and at home has two injured azure-winged magpies, a lovely squirrel, a chubby cat, a little turtle, and is engaged in fighting for animal rights. She gained her Master's degree in Modern Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Leicester. You can find her Chinese short novels and stories in various magazines and anthologies, including Hua Cheng, Shan Ye, China Southern Airlines, Shanxi Literature, Changjiang Literature and 2017 Youth Literature. Her first short story collection is To Our Favorite Little Butter Biscuits (published 2018).

In the following short memoir piece, Meng Wang reflects on her recent art residency in Spain, and the strange effects and side-effects of a head injury, in relation to creativity. 

After I Bumped My Head on a Children's Slide, by Meng Wang

If you don’t come to Barcelona now, it will be too late, and the water will get colder ....

In late August 2018, I came to Spain for my art residency at Can Serrat International Art Centre, El Bruc - first re-visiting Barcelona for a few days. 

During those amazing and difficult five days, I had endless quarrels with my boyfriend. He wanted to sleep in the airport on the last night, which was totally insane. The rows epitomised our relationship in the first half of 2018. It exhausted both of us, and I even developed an arrhythmia because of it. 

Therefore, the residency in Spain was like a escape for me, where I thought I would have a rest, some head space to focus on my art work and writings. So after we said goodbye, he went back to Beijing to his work, and I left for El Bruc for my art residency.

September! Finally! I had a great time with different artists and writers from all over the world and made some good friends. We celebrated my birthday on Mexico's official independence day (what a coincidence), and Australian writer Laura and Canadian writer Marin made me a flower chocolate cake. A talented Hongkong visual artist called Antoine had become my soulmate, and asked me to fry spicy potato slices every day; and a French visual artist Chloé and I were designing an experimental literature art book in our respective languages.

Apart from social activities, I also wrote three short stories discussing urban anxiety in China and drew a series of paintings relating the human nude and the animal. I also picked up my childhood hobby, carving and sculptures. I did some print making by using a mechanical machine. 

It was all going so well. Happy times are always short. A turning point came …

"Wake me up when September ends" is no joke - for, on the penultimate day of September, I bumped my head heavily on a bar above a children's slide. It sent me into a kind of sleep, and a kind of waking. 

Dizziness accompanies me all the time since the accident. I feel like I’m drunk every day. This reminds me of one of our ancient celebrities - Ran Ji, who drank for sixty days to avoid his Emperor's call. 

I went to two hospitals - the first was a clinic in Esparreguera, where the doctor sent me away without a brain scan, telling me to drink Coca Cola and take Betahistina every eight hours. After a few days, however, I got even worse, so our Columbian female writer Paola took me to Accident and Emergency in  De Igualada hospital. There, the automatic coffee machine dispensed - like a present just for me - a beautiful cartoon paper coffee cup, which had a Chinese girl in a red dress with a cute panda. This somehow provided me a little relief - a kitsch reminder of home. The doctor I saw afterwards didn’t scan my brain either; after a basic examination, he just said that the first doctor had given me the wrong medicine, which was hardly a big surprise. Then he sent me away: "Ta ta!". 

Now I take Ibuprofen and gelocatil every eight hours. I'm preparing to have a full brain examination and MRI when I return to Beijing at end of this month. 

As we left the hospital and waited on the bench for the car to get us back to Can Serrat, Paola suddenly started crying on my shoulder. There was some family trauma, which made me feel sorry for her, and she wrote something in Spanish to memoralise that moment:

Nothing comes back to me dijo ella mientras yo lloraba en su hombre. Vinimos a urgencias por ella y ahora soy yo quien necesita cuidado. Nothing comes back y justo por eso estoy llorando ella no sabe que hacer, me muestra memes en chino y me dice que traducen. Ya estamos afuera ella solo tiene mareos que le van a durar dos semanas a lo sumo. A mi esta pena de que nada vuelve me va a durar mucho mas.

The story is a bitter-sweet symphony, though: strangely enough, since I got injured and started taking painkillers, I've become really productive, artistically speaking. In all my dizziness, I write and create even faster than before. There's good and also bad news: I can’t drink anymore, because it can make my brain feel like it's exploding, and I have to write by hand to avoid the discomfort of a computer screen. Funnily enough, handwriting seems to work even faster than typing - very old school.

Anyway, now I have at least five different projects on the go: a series of paintings of human nudes and animals; a new full-length novel Beijing Wave, so far written on discarded bits of paper; experimental art books, including carvings and print-making, written in various languages; a new short story collection; memoir writing about my Can Serrat residency and experiences (like this piece!) ....

These ideas force themselves out of my mind every day - so much so that all the artists in our Centre thought that I had made a trade with the devil. Perhaps the devil is my head injury. Now I keep working from the moment I wake up till midnight - only stopping occasionally to contact my boyfriend, who always used to hurt me with his moody attitude, but whose moodiness now compels me to return to my work. 

I've also learned my lesson that perhaps I'm a bit too old for children's playgrounds. I’m not a child anymore.