About

In the beginning…

I began writing as a student in the early 1990s, with arts reviews in London-based Aussie magazines, TNT and Rasp!

Since then, my writing has followed a rather eclectic route, which encompasses my passion for words and the arts and my own journey into living with faith and all that entails, from The Big Issue to The Church of England Newspaper, The Hinckley Times to Woman Alive.

I joined Tearfund’s editorial team from the mid-1990s until 2001, and subsequently created written materials on a freelance basis for the Baptist Mission Society and Mission Aviation Fellowship.

Short stories

In the early 2000s, I began to explore fiction seriously, starting with the solid testing ground of the UK’s women’s magazine market. My stories appeared in Take A Break, Best and Yours. A shift in style in the mid-2000s saw my stories appear in Writing Magazine and Graffiti, as well as on the Flash 500 website.

My love of short stories continues, and my first collection, Blank For Your Own Message, published by Lioness in the Autumn of 2019.

My collection Short Christians: Exploring Faith Through Fiction was published by Lioness in 2017, and is proving a useful tool to get church families talking openly about the challenges of life with faith.

Ghost writing

I worked with the sermons from pastor Tom Shaw, who was based at the City Church, Canterbury but who now lives in San Fransisco, to produce his book, The Comfort Delusion , published by Lioness.

Working with people with dementia

In 2014 I was introduced to Keith Oliver, an Alzheimer’s Ambassador, who wanted to run a life writing group for people with a diagnosis of dementia. He himself has Alzheimer’s, and so we planned together how a group could practically work to address the issues people with dementia face, and how we could create an environment that empowered these people and enabled them to express themselves through the written word. The group was a great success, and resulted in the book Welcome To Our World.

Since then, I’ve gone on to run other groups for people with dementia, and have seen time and again how, given a creative, supportive environment, these people can thrive.

Creating scripts for churches

If you’re reading this and you go to a church, you’ll know that churches make great use of the skills their members have. This is how I became involved in the Xmas Factor at The City Church, Canterbury. We picked up the legacy from a team who’d begun this tradition of a family Christmas puppet musical, and I wrote scripts for four years, which were then produced by a really talented group of people from the City Church. This experience has changed the words my kids and I sing to a whole bunch of familiar pop songs forever, from ELO to Zara Larsson.

The Xmas Factor gave me a great practice ground for scriptwriting, and I’ve got a good selection of short and short-ish screenplays in a drawer, waiting for me to take the next steps on them. It’s an area of writing that I love, but the producing side is currently outside my skill set. I was really fortunate to get a place on a BFI film hub day this year, but I’m still feeling my way forward slowly with the process.

The writing life

Writing has so far proven to be an adventure, both wonderful and hard going. At times it feels like unrequited love; I’ve written hundreds of stories, scripts, novels and articles that never got anywhere. But along the way I’ve discovered a rich inner life, an outlet of creative expression and a passion that is joyful to share.

To me, heaven will be a café and a notebook and pen, or a group in a warm room, ready to write and revel in each other’s company.