Collected: December 2024
Using translation to develop one's voice, nonsense rhyming with Edward Lear and counting writerly milestones.
Translating and Writing
Jamie Lee Searle on how her career as a literary translator helped develop her writerly voice.
“If deadlines didn’t exist, there would be no final versions; just works-in-progress that writers carry around with them, polishing them in their minds and notebooks for eternity.”
Read the full article here.
Serious Nonsense
Poet
on the uplifting power of poetic nonsense, including Lewis Carroll, John Taylor and Edward Lear's ‘The Jumblies’.“As a child, my pleasure in poetry was bound up with nonsense. My mum and I played rhyming games, generating gibberish — my mum loves to recount how I used to call marmalade cats ‘jam hams’.”
Read the full article here.
Writing milestones
“The worst rejections are the ones made of silence. A peculiarly ironic form of literary ghosting. Rejection, in truth, is everywhere and is largely unspoken. It exists in carefully curated circles that fence off and fence out…But rejection sometimes helps you to understand the writer you are.” Guinevere Glasfurd
Rebecca Watts, Jeremy Treglown, Jini Reddy, Guinevere Glasfurd and Rebecca Colby on the milestones in their writing lives.
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