Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been tagged as “Susan Sellers”
Sebastian Faulks once remarked that transposing a novel to another medium is like trying to turn a painting into sculpture. It’s an image I’ve been thinking about this summer as I’ve watched Vanessa and Virginia transform into a stage play. What first struck me on reading Elizabeth Wright’s script was the drastic scissoring away of words. Anything not absolutely essential …
There’s a fascinating discussion going on at She Writes about what constitutes the perfect writing day. Here’s mine. I wake up having had enough sleep. This is important – if I’ve had one of those nights where it feels as if the world’s traffic has been using my brain as a concourse I can forget about writing. The …
Why is it so difficult to start a piece of writing? This week I cleared space to begin working on a new novel but for some reason I have managed to fritter away the time, persuading myself that I really should send that reference/keep on top of my inbox/clean out the fridge/take that picture I’ve had since Christmas to the …
After a talk to the Arts Society at Newnham College in Cambridge last night I had an interesting discussion about the differences between literary criticism and creative writing. The talk was to launch a new journal Women and the Arts, celebrating Virginia Woolf’s lecture to the Society in 1928. Woolf later reworked her lecture as her seminal essay A Room …
Earlier this month I visited the Gobelins in Paris, where tapestries and carpets are still made by hand using techniques that have hardly changed over centuries. After the history-for-tourists preamble by our guide we were taken on a tour of the workshops. There was something mesmeric about the row of weavers working with only the simplest of tools: a shuttle …
There’s an interesting debate going on in British universities at the moment about the teaching of creative writing. Some argue it can’t be taught – that the best writing derives from a slow process of trial and error conducted alone at one’s desk. Others point out it involves a good deal of craft and insist that just as a painter …
Kettles Yard was the Cambridge home of Jim Ede, a man who put a great deal of thought into his surroundings. He was passionate about art and collected paintings and sculpture – his house is full of extraordinary works by such diverse artists as Pablo Picasso, Barbara Hepworth, the Cornish painter Alfred Wallis, and Ede’s grandchildren. Ede argued that ‘the …
I first read Juliet Mitchell in the early 1980s alongside other feminist writers such as Germaine Greer, Kate Millett and Alice Walker. I can still recall the growing sense of entitlement their work gave me: to choose what kind of relationships I wanted to be involved in, what work I wanted to do. Earlier this month I attended a one-day …