Category: writing

Cats, a love story by Margaret Atwood

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/oct/31/margaret-atwood-on-cats-an-anthology

A painful silence

All on my own in Lockdownland, I can’t recreate the sound that I and my fellow choristers make on Maundy Thursday when we begin Duruflé’s sinuous and reflective setting of the Tantum Ergo; or when we lean together into the achingly plangent suspensions of ‘Jerusalem desolata est’ in Byrd’s Civitas Sancti Tui

Birth Day: trauma and gratitude

Today it is my darlingest daughter’s 7th birthday. I don’t think I could ever love someone more than I love her. 

Most years I find myself staying on high alert throughout the night before her birthday in a kind of post-traumatic vigil, a retrospective anticipation of her birth. The body holds trauma in such a way that it can’t tell past from present, and an anniversary or a reminder can whisk one back to the event itself which seems still to be happening, or to a replaying of the narrative.

The Dancing Bear

The Dancing Bear

The following story was published in the Walker Book of Bedtime Stories in October 2013 The Dancing Bear by Suzy Robinson, illustrated by Gemma O’Callaghan ISBN-10: 1406347175 ISBN-13: 978-1406347173 https://cargocollective.com/gemma-ocallaghan http://www.walker.co.uk/contributors/Gemma-O-Callaghan-13547.aspx