Pond Dipping

For my novel and linked short fiction collection (the ridiculous project I’ve been wrangling with for three years already and which is threatening to take up all my creative energies for a least another thirty-three more!!), I’ve been contemplating ekphrasis and hybridity from various different angles. How might fiction connect with poetry, art, music, sculpture, cooking, theatre, photography, dance?

Part of my project involves setting up a virtual museum to mimic the real museum that the main character from my novel brings to life. This museum is a “museum of meaning” featuring a collection of short fiction that interrogates well-known (and less well-known) proverbs and sayings and prods at the truth contained within them. The character is also contemplating other artforms, so I’m doing that too.

And what I’m finding is that dipping my toes in the deep ponds of other artforms reflects back on my writing in interesting ways. I set out to write the stories first and to create the connected artwork / music / sculpture / hip-hop dance routine afterwards. But what I’m finding is that sometimes I find an inspiration in the artform that makes me want to re-examine and deepen my story. I’m also finding that I’m learning things about writing I hadn’t expected to learn.

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WHAT’S GOING ON IN MY WORLD

The Welkin Micro Workshops

1. The Scales of Juxtaposition. The power of placing one thing next to another - microfiction in which time, place, emotion and scenario are juxtaposed in interesting ways. Thursday 7th May 2026 (19:00-20:00 BST)

2. Breathless Wonders. The rush of a story told within the space of a single breath - microfiction that unspools through a single, flowing sentence. Thursday 14th May 2026 (19:00-20:00 BST)

3. The Humorous Touch. Pieces that make us laugh - microfiction that uses humour to describe a ever-building chain of events. Thursday 21st May 2026 (19:00-20:00 BST)

4. The Backwards Gaze. The emotional burden of the past - microfiction that builds itself around a character reflecting on prior events. Thursday 28th May 2026 (19:00-20:00 BST)

5. Stand-out Oddities. Leaning into the weird, the unsettling and the surreal - microfiction that uses speculative elements to hold a mirror up to the world. Thursday 4th June 2026 (19:00-20:00 BST)

6. Unforgettable Voices. Crafting microfiction that puts tone of voice centre stage - evoking and tempering voices that soar off the page. Thursday 11th June 2026 (19:00-20:00 BST)

The Yorkshire Writing Retreat

***NEW DATES / JUST TWO PLACES LEFT***

Monday 14th - Sunday 20th September 2026 in Thurlstone (Holme Valley)

Join us in the idyllic landscape of the Holme Valley for a six-night writing retreat where you’ll learn from two widely experienced creative writing teachers through a series of workshops, feedback sessions and one-to-one chats. You’ll also have plenty of unstructured time dedicated to putting new words on the page.

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Summer Workshop Series

A Snow Globe on an Iceberg: World-building in short fiction

With so little space to play with, how do we effectively bring a story’s world to life? How do we best evoke place, time, and wider context without it overwhelming the story?

Tuesday 7th July 2026 (19:00-20:30 BST) OR Saturday 11th July 2026 (09:00-10:30 BST)

What is Learnt in the Cradle: How our childhoods affect our adult selves

How do a character’s early influences affect who they become in later life? What do they inherit? What do they learn? And how do we use all of this within our writing to create character depth?

Tuesday 4th August 2026 (19:00-20:30 BST) OR Saturday 8th August 2026 (09:00-10:30 BST)

-20:30 BST) OR Saturday 8th August 2026 (09:00-10:30 BST)

Write Beyond The Lightbulb

Glorious Words

How do we choose the right words to sharpen up our prose? How do we make our writing unique without it becoming obscure? Is the road to hell really paved with adverbs? This flash fiction course explores language in all its guts and glory, focussing on unique images, concision versus specificity and how to create original tone.

3rd - 16th August

What are ekphrasis and hybridity?

There doesn’t seem to be a fixed definition to either of these two terms and neither of them really sums up what I’m doing in this project. Ekphrasis is using the written word to describe or explore the artistic. Hybridity is creating an artistic work that blurs the boundaries between artforms. Whereas I’m mostly creating two “works”—a story or prose poem and an artistic, musical or other composition—that echo each other around a particular theme. Since I’m going in the reverse direction to how ekphrasis usually works, maybe “reverse-ekphrasis” would be more apt? Or maybe something like “cross-artform parallelism” might be a better term? On a lot of days, CR.A.P feels like the perfect acronym for what I end up with!!

And what do I end up with exactly? Sometimes, it’s that reverse-ekphrasis. I write a piece. I create an artwork or a piece of music that reflects on that. For example, I published a piece last year called “Strange fish” (trampset) and this is the artwork I made to go with it:

Sometimes what I end up with is more of a blurring. I’m closer to hybridity. The two works aren’t just mirroring each other, they’re part of the same thing. Here’s a piece I’ve been working on, for example:

Gravity

What have I learned from dipping my toe in other artforms?

I often talk about the universe of possibilities when it comes to the options available to us as writers in terms of form, approach, voice and genre, but that universe of writing isn’t the only universe that exists. There are parallel universes for each different artform. Music has a universe. Visual art has a universe. Photography has a universe. And while they’re mostly separate, there are places where the separation is much thinner than in others—the place where rap music and dramatic monologue overlap, for example, or the place where art and photograph are combined to interesting effect.

Perhaps you might think of these as bridges between parallel worlds, how you might cross these bridges, how you might go on a trip, how you might bring back some sort of souvenir, something that’s unique to the place you’ve visited, something you’ve learnt, something you’ve felt, something you’ve experienced.

Visual Art

This is the artform I’ve so far spent longest pondering. It’s perhaps the most obvious in terms of bringing a story to life and the most easily accessible. Most of us have an implement with which we can draw or paint. Most of us have a canvas onto which we might create some art. Even if we’re no good at it (I’m far from being an expert!!), it gets us thinking about proportions and perspective, it gets us thinking about light and shade, it gets us thinking about realism and surrealism, it gets us thinking about foreground details and background details. And these are all things that are equally important in writing. We want our stories to have a nice sense of proportion. We mostly want our stories to have a consistent perspective. We want to create a certain tone or colour palette at the level of words. We want to pick out the important details over the less important ones.

Music

Music was my first artistic love and while I can’t play the piano anywhere near as well as I did in the past, I still love to sit down and have a tinkle as often as I can. I was never really much of a composer, but it’s been fascinating to have a go at this. Of course, most of you won’t have easy access to a piano, but that doesn’t mean you can’t improvise. Drum out some “drum beats” with your hands on a hard surface. Sing to yourself. Make up a melody. Dabbling with music can reflect back on our writing in terms of getting us to think about rhythm and tempo. It makes us think about volume which is such a useful thing to bear in mind when it comes to the emotional layer of our stories (a subtle pianissimo or a shouty-shouty sforzando).

Cooking

I have a weird relationship with cooking. As someone whose chronic illness very much revolves around food and my body’s inability to process pretty much anything that isn’t plain white rice, I’m unable to eat far, far more than what I am able to eat. No sugar, dairy or fruit for starters. Gluten is complicated. My body doesn’t do well with processed stuff or nuts, seeds, spices... the list is long! But I still, conversely, enjoy cooking. And cooking in a way that’s creative means I can enjoy the experience and pass the food onto someone else to see if the taste matches the visual.

What we learn from cooking is most closely associated with the sense of taste, but cooking is really tied to the whole sensory experience. There’s smell, sight, touch, temperature, sound involved as well. Food has an emotional aspect. It’s tied to relationships and memory. Another thing we can learn from experimenting in the kitchen is about the number of ingredients we want to add to the mixing pot and how those ingredients combine. In my editing work, I often come across stories where a writer has tried to throw in too many ingredients (narrative elements) or where the ingredients don’t seem to go together.

Performative art

My sister is a wonderful actor. I am not. I’ve no idea how she has the confidence to stand up on a stage and do what she does. She also sings. She also dances. While I’ve joked about making up a hip-hop dance routine in my introduction, the idea of that frankly horrifies me!! But in the privacy of my own company, I’ve allowed myself to dabble. Dance teaches us about balance and movement. So does drama. How a person moves is so specific to them. A great thing I’ve tried is to simply walk around like a character from one of my stories. Or to stand like they would. Or to act as they would on receiving surprising news. Both acting and dance also have so much to teach about implication. Whereas in writing we can tell a reader exactly what’s going on, in dance especially, the audience is asked to read between the movements.

Having a go at cross-art parallelism for yourself

Perhaps you think I’m completely off-my-rocker. I probably am by this point. But I also think that the more we explore different artforms, the richer our writing can become. So, I’d encourage you to have a go yourself. Don’t go into it thinking you’re going to be the best artist / composer / salsa dancer the world has ever seen or be worried by your talent / ability / knowledge; simply go into it wanting to experiment and experience, to gain those souvenirs from other artistic universes that you can take back with you to the writing universe. Maybe you have a go at cross-art parallelism or reverse-ekphrasis (or whatever you want to call it)? Or maybe you simply do a bit of doodling or have a bit of a boogie that has nothing to do with a particular story you’re writing? Whatever you do, I hope you find something that reflects backwards onto the written word. Maybe you’ll have a lightbulb moment you wouldn’t have expected when you set out.

Join our gang!

Given my experimentation with other artforms and how they cross over with our writing, perhaps it’s not surprising that I’ve wanted to seek out others who are also practising multiple crafts. As such, I’ve recently set up a new online monthly session where writers can drop in and chat about writing craft while doing another craft entirely. It’s called “Do Craft, Talk Craft” and it’s going to happen at 3pm GMT / BST on the first Saturday of every month.

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Recent publication

The man with a squatter in his belly dreams (Centaur Lit)

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