Sinead Keegan

The exciting news this week is that my fab co-editor, Lisa Davison , and I will be talking writing and all the sins at the Kingston Writing School reading series . We're looking forward to talking with readers and writers and to sharing the stage with the wonderful, Vicky Newham. Hope to see some of you out there! Wednesday 22 March 2017 6.30pm doors - 7pm start  JG0001  Kingston University Penrhyn Road Kingston-Upon-Thames KT1 2EE

A few weeks ago I had the great fortune to encounter this little gem on Twitter: Future Library . It's a fascinating artwork-in-progress by Katie Paterson which involves a forest in Norway, books and 100 years. Oh, and Margaret Atwood. Ah, yes, now we see why Si néa d is so excited. I presume that she calls this an 'artwork' rather than 'work of art' or 'installation' because the Future Library is an ongoing, developing happening that seems to me to really touch the beauty of literature and our relationship with it and our world. A forest has been planted in Norway and every year a writer will be selected to write a piece to go into this future library. No one except the writer will know what this piece of writing is until the 100 years are up. At that point, the forest will be cut down and used to make the books on which all the writing will be printed. Future Library, Katie Paterson from Katie Paterson on Vimeo . The hippy in me is, of course,...

On this Mother's Day I thought I would devote a reading-y post to my mom. Mom and I are very different in some ways - she would hate to have to write creatively for a living and organisation is second nature to her - but we share one very important thing. One thing for which I owe her an eternal, capital lettered THANK YOU: We share a love, nay, a passion for reading and this is truly one of the greatest gifts I've ever received. I read in the neighbourhood of 40-60 novels, plays and collections of poetry and short stories every year. And that doesn't include the stories that I listen to on The New Yorker Fiction Podcast or the poems from the Poetry Foundation's Poem of the Day podcast or the work that I read in literary magazines, online and from my students and colleagues. That adds up to hundred s of new world, ideas, images, plays on and with language and hours of joy. Now I spend my days reading and writing and teaching writing. I cannot think of a bette...

This post was first published on www.NoDeadWhiteMen.wordpress.com on 01 September 2013. In the true spirit of blogging, I am going to make a confession. It will perhaps come as no surprise that I have always loved reading. I devoured all the assigned books when I was in school. I loved many of them, disliked some of them but read all of them. While my classmates bought Cliff’s Notes for Crime and Punishment , I wrapped myself in Dostoyevsky’s language. When they watched the film of  Great Expectations , I sought out more of Dickens’s novels. I read anything and everything I put my hand to and never quit. Real readers don’t quit. So, for many years now I have lived with the great shame of not having finished Gulliver’s Travels . I was sixteen when it was assigned to me and I hated it. I read Lilliput and just thought it was unbelievably dull. This, from a teenager who counted The Return of the Native among her favourite books. Until just this year it was the only b...

  This post was first published on www.NoDeadWhiteMen.wordpress.com, 15 June 2013. When I tell people that I edit a blog for which other people write and that does fairly well in terms of hits-per-day, I usually get a look that says, "Oh, so you're not one of those 'writers' who says she writes, but really just mucks around in her pajamas all day."  But the minute I say that I use Facebook and Twitter I can see them picturing me back in my red, snowflake, flannel pajamas clutching a cup of coffee, surfing the internet for cat videos and calling it "writing". This is, unfortunately perhaps, untrue on several fronts. First, my snowflake pajamas aren't flannel and I wear pink or blue tracksuit bottoms when I'm working from home. Second, I don't drink coffee. And third, I don't while away time on the internet. That is not to say I don't waste time. I do. I, like all self-respecting writers, am a connoisseur of procrastinat...