I’ve just finished a series of workshops with a wonderful group of family historians. We met fortnightly over the space of a term, and I heard some truly extraordinary stories, not only because of the particular people and events included, but also the way in which those stories have been told. This post is partly […]
How long have you been researching your family history? I find family history fascinating, although it’s something I’ve only recently returned to, after an eight-year hiatus during which I turned my attention to the courage and determined women in my book Many Hearts, One Voice: the story of the War Widows’ Guild. Fortunately, I’ve benefited from […]
My writing journey has involved traversing a long, winding path with numerous detours and roadblocks, sometimes entire landslides, but I’m slowly learning that nothing we do or experience is wasted – even discarded words and manuscripts. I really do believe that without the countless writing exercises I’ve attempted, hundreds of thousands of words scribbled in […]
Have you ever tried to find out about someone, perhaps an elusive ancestor, but found little trace of them in the history books or other official records? It’s often the case when researching family history, and it was certainly my experience when writing Many Hearts, One Voice. When I started researching the story of the War Widows’ […]
NB: This post is an edited version of a speech I gave at the launch of the anthology, Truth or Lies, for the KSP Writers’ Centre Past Tense group on 11 June 2016. I still have to pinch myself that I’m primarily an author of non-fiction – because I always dreamed of being a novelist. […]