LesleyA

Meeting Crow

Sun, 08 Mar 2026 13:27:33 -0700

Naturally I live among crows. They roost and feed in the cemetery. I see them strutting about on the open ground at the corner of the road. On early summer mornings I can hear their claws clattering on the metallic roof of the church as they seek out the best sunbathing spots, always facing away from me and towards the dawn. I greet them, as I do most animals that I pass by along my way, but they’ve never been particularly insistent on being noticed. Until now.

I was engaged in an ordinary zoom call – a monthly catch-up with a friend. We were talking books and writing, as we normally end up doing. Sat at my dining table I have a view to the front garden. Crows suddenly descended. I’m not sure how many you need for it to be a murder. Probably more than the three taking up station on my garden wall, and stomping about the lawn. They called to be noticed. Once acknowledged, they nodded and took to the wing, up and away over the roof-top.

It would be later that I wondered about the number (three) and started to think about witches. Overly influenced at a young age by Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and more so later by Pratchett’s subversion of the weird sisters, which you may know by now produced one of my favourite characters of all time, I tend to think of a coven as a threesome: the maiden, the mother, and the crone.

Before you sisters out there feel the need to contradict me, I do know that covens can be any number – although like training sessions and business meetings they become unruly once you get beyond 12+1.

Crows. And witches - who, for the record, are simply wise-women. Keepers of the stories and the knowledge. Crows and Witches both.

That was the beginning. I started to dream Crows. They emerged on the pages of books I was reading. One landed just across the water meadow, within a very short time of a friend...Read More

Looking at the Glaven & writing about Paris

Sun, 01 Mar 2026 05:08:47 -0800

We were walking back through the water meadows. It was late February and we had wandered the muddy path to Glandford ford, taking in the day with the intention of writing – writing about what we found. That is the fundamental prompt that lies behind all the more specific ones on these days.

The keystone of Creative Writing Outside^[i] is to be open to what you find on the day. There were, as always, prose prompts and poetry prompts and conversational ones, but the overriding notion is to go outside and come back with what you find. Go and notice things, and write.

Today, I wasn’t noticing. I wasn’t writing. I was thinking about the writing I had left at home, which was feeling more important. It has been dawning on me that I have strayed from the path – not the muddy one above the river – my own – the one that had brought me to Cley in the first place – the one where it was the writing that mattered and the outside was coincidental, influential perhaps but not the point or purpose.

Somewhere along the line I had fallen into the trap of thinking that we are all like-minded people when we’re not. I had fallen into the trap of thinking that just because I had unexpectedly discovered that I am a poet, that meant I had to be an eco-poet, and/or just because I loved being outside writing that meant I had to be writing about the specific outside I was in.

That is not, and never was, my space.

Later Sue would say, “I was looking at the Glaven and writing about Paris.” ^[ii] Of course she was, she had just returned from Paris (again). It is her spiritual home, and the Seine was also in flood. More importantly, she knows the thing I had lost sight of, namely that prompts are prompts...Read More

What I loved about a rainy Sunday in February

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 04:00:24 -0800

This isn’t about today. It is about last week. I say that because I changed the title in the edit. It started as “rainy Sundays in February” as if every wet Sunday were the same as any other one. That is not so. This was one Sunday, last week as I write, maybe a year ago as you read. Or longer away if my words survive that long.

I’m awake early trying to figure out why the number seven is so important and what the door meant - images from the dreamscape. Because I have no idea, I get up, despair briefly at what fruit scones have done to the numbers on the scales (while also knowing I will eat the other two today) and make coffee. I have a day, a Sunday indeed – which is a gods-given excuse to do as little as you feel like. An unplanned day. Imagine the never-ending prairie spaciousness of such a day, even though it isn’t gold and cobalt, more like pewter and gravel, it is still wide open and all my own.

No-one will visit. No-one will call. I don’t have to check the phone.

I sit in the corner of my living room, because that’s where the best light is, and listen to the feint sound of car engines, of tyres on glistening roads, of unknown lives passing by.

Watching the ripples in puddles, I wonder why it seems to rain harder on this side of the close – harder but more slowly – larger, fewer drops. Does that plum tree over there function like a sieve? Shaking and sifting rain into finer droplets?

Alternating between Natalie Goldberg and Marcus Aurelius and poets I’ve never heard of, I know I’m scavenging for the compost heap. Suddenly it feels incumbent upon me to swap my seat cushions around, and in doing so I notice the small bottle of sand from a beach in Lanzarote. Sand taken in exchange for scattered ashes.

Not by me. The ashes I...Read More

Mistley

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 03:51:35 -0800

A weekend away...

I left the half-finished novel at home. Lyra and Will in the land of the dead, and I can’t remember whether they both make it out of there – it is a quarter of a century since I last walked that path with them – and I know some children’s books are designed to make them cry, to teach them that not everyone survives. They’ll wait for me there.

I brought only poetry with me for this weekend.

On a train. The wide Anglian skies have gone AWOL. We’re rattling through rain and into mist that
might be on the opposite bank of the Styx. Water lurks on pavements and roads. Fields are full of patient lakes, waiting either for the water below to seep away and let them follow, or for the sun to return and call them back into the sky. The pavements, the roads, the muddied fields, the new-born ponds, the muddied lakes where crops once grew or cattle grazed, a purgatory of raindrops. Uncertain.

Against the uncoloured water-washed backdrop, the trees, sentinel still in winter armour, hold the lines, where hedges used to be, long-since grubbed up.

An egret perches on a fence post. Luminescent branches overhang the waters. Willows, lichened alders and birches. The stream is a weak tea with too much milk, a pale imitation of the ice-white bird and offers no reflection. Everything speaks of too much rain and the absent sky.

At Ipswich I pull on waterproof over trousers, anticipating a long walk in a downpour.

Arriving at Mistley: the walk is short…and the rain has passed over for a while.

I forget what "clockwise" means and struggle to open the simplest of locks. It takes an embarrassing phone-call to get me inside.

~
I always thought I would end up...Read More

The Gifts of Pain

Sun, 08 Feb 2026 12:01:01 -0800

I am not a masochist, let me get that out in the open right away. I do not like pain. I am very pain-averse. I am not the person who will push through. I am the person who will reach for the paracetamol or ibuprofen, because why suffer when you don’t have to? There is no gain in pain.

But pain serves a purpose. Pain is a warning sign. It is an indicator light that something is wrong. It is a ‘please stop doing that’ request. As much as my intuitive response is to use the mind to acknowledge the signal and then try to switch off the alarm – yeah, I get it, message received and understood, please cancel alert – that has limited application.

It can be helpful if, say, I have cut myself on a sharp paper edge or the brambles have scratched deeply and I have cleaned up the wound, antiseptic salved it, dressed it, done all that I can and it will be enough – that’s a good time to shut down the alarm system.

It is not helpful when the damage is internal and I can do little to redress the damage other than give the body time to heal.

I’m not talking about broken bones or serious infections or cancers where medical intervention by means of specialist drugs or surgery or even simple re-alignment and setting are clearly indicated. I’m talking about the tendons and ligaments and muscles, where even once we know what the problem is there is actually very little that can be done by intervention. I’m talking about the times when really the body has to be left to, encouraged to, supported to, heal itself.

I’m talking about me. Just recently. A shoulder injury. I’m not sure the precise nature of the damage. I know how it occurred and I knew from the outset that it would need to be allowed to heal itself with whatever support I could give it. In the meantime, it hurt! On a scale of 1 to 10...Read More

The Quiet

Sun, 01 Feb 2026 05:12:16 -0800

Another dark, wet, not-motivated-to-go-out kind of day. I don’t have to go out, so that’s ok. Pausing is good. I have no words today. It’s quiet. No birdsong.

The postman has nothing for me, but even so I enjoy seeing him walk up and down the close. There is something cheery about his bright red wet-weather gear, shining against the dullness of the street. It makes me smile.

I start to write a list of other things that make me smile. Cat videos. A vase full of roses. Lucky bamboo in a terracotta vase. Jay calling to check I’m ok. Green ink. Lucia. Penguins. Compliments – given and received. Blue skies. The sea. My bedlinen. Soft warm socks. Strangers who return a smile. The bus coming round the corner just after I have arrived at the stop. Q.I. Taskmaster.

Small things.

I am easily pleased.

Fairy lights. Glitter. White frost. Rainbows. Hot air balloons. The colour purple. Black velvet. Springsteen. Though, to be fair, he can also make me weep. Weeping is also sometimes necessary. Not today though – today is a wellness day. A be-good-to-myself day. A recuperation day.

I listen.

The clock. Distant traffic. The sound of the pen on the page, a soft brushing sound. The sounds of my own body, sniffling, coughing, breathing. A crunching in my neck. Quietness.

There would never be this degree of quiet when I was growing up. There would always be a radio playing or records or the TV. Perhaps that’s why I loved it so much as a teenager when I had the house to myself – sometimes I would play the old records or watch TV, but often I would switch everything off and it would be beautifully quiet.

I treasure this. After all the loud years, and as much as I still love music, I cherish the quiet hours.

I...Read More

Letting go of what's in the notebooks

Sun, 25 Jan 2026 05:42:13 -0800

There are those who say you should never discard any of your writing. It may be just what you’ll be looking for some other time. It may spark another idea. Both true, but I’m of the opinion that my cluttered notebooks – not the journals which are, by definition, sacred – rather the random scribble books, the field books, the workbooks, the classroom books – they are basically out-houses, garden sheds, kitchen drawers. They are full of all the stuff that might be useful one day, but probably won’t. And even it if it is, by the time we need it we won’t remember where it is, or it will have started to rot from age, begun to be unsticky or rusty or unravel, or be so wound around by spider webs that really we don’t dare go near it. I know a bit about garden sheds and out-houses and kitchen drawers.

One day, on this de-clutter journey, I’ll attack those as well: the shed (which is technically a garage), the kitchen drawers, not the outthouse because I demolished that already and gave its contents away, but for now I’m thinking about notebooks. I pick up one with a lovely textured lime green cover, embossed with leaf patterns. It’s a beautiful book. Such a shame that the writing within it is not.

I pore over the pages. I should do something with this…and this…I keep thinking, while quite definitely not doing anything with it, and listening to the loud back-brain voice telling me it is too late. That these pieces were of their time and the fact that I didn’t pick them up, that I basically forgot about them, tells me everything I need to know. They were not good enough.

Forget the received wisdom that there might be gems in there. There probably aren’t. And if there are, they came out of the same part of my brain that I will write with again some day. We don’t need to hold onto the pages that just might have good ideas written down, because the really...Read More

On not turning a joy into a job

Sun, 18 Jan 2026 09:53:01 -0800

One day this week someone asked me if I was a medical person, because of some of the things I had recently said in a group chat. All of those things came from a position of common sense, not any holding out of specialist knowledge. All of those things were about taking your recovery time seriously, don’t rush back into full-pelt, listen to your body and to the medics. All of those things were about ‘we want you back but we don’t want you setting yourself back to get here'. I was surprised by the interpretation that this in any way purported to be coming from any perspective other than a normal compassion.

This is not about that.

This is about what I said in response, and how much it surprised me. Asked if I was a medic, I replied with “Good god, no! I’m a creative. I’m a writer.”

Not the most earth-shattering statement in the history of the universe, I know, but I spent 50+ years insisting that I did not have a creative bone in my body. For me claiming it as my identity in an unthought moment, that is earth-shattering in my personal world. In a good way.

I have been working towards claiming this identity for a few years now, and sometimes I take a deep breath and admit (?!) that I’m a poet, but that was the first time that it came out unthought.

It was a surprise. It was something I thought about afterwards. Something I might have regretted saying if it wasn’t for the fact that I don’t do regret – on principle. So, there it was, and here it is. I am saying it again, purely to reinforce it for myself, so that I don’t get to backtrack.

I am a creative. I am a writer. I am a poet.

So then I have to figure out what to do with all this stuff I am...Read More

Learning to say 'no'

Sun, 11 Jan 2026 07:02:46 -0800

Overwhelm is such a tempting canyon to wander into. That’s my only excuse. Given the lack of external obligations, there is no reason I should ever end up there. The only reason I do so is because it is a fairground, a marketplace, a valley full of natural beauty and wonder. It smells delicious, like candyfloss and toffee-apples, alternating with sizzling onions and Bratwurst. It tinkles like wind-chimes, in harmony with robin song and mountain stream. It is peopled by philosophers and poets. And it keeps laying the welcome mat at my feet.

The only reason I ever end up in Overwhelm is because I’m pretty rubbish at saying No. Every day something pops up in front of me and I’m a three-year-old jumping up and down and pulling on a parent’s hand: Can I Dad? Can I?

Only I’m not three and Dad’s long dead and there’s no-one to say no on my behalf.

This isn’t about me being a people pleaser and saying yes to help other people out. This is me getting excited about opportunities, about all the things I could do for myself. Brilliant things. Helpful things. Enlightening, educating, developmental, growth things. And, ok, fun things. Things I want to do.

Because when I smell sizzling onions and sausages – even metaphorical ones – I’m a dog Pavlov would be proud of.

When a monthly newsletter from a writer-friend lands in my inbox with her latest offering of a poetry course, I have to physically delete it before I say yes. I know from experience just how fabulous her courses are. I also know that I have a tendency to get bogged down in them because I have haven’t figured out how to filter the smorgasbord she gives us. (Apology for the mixed metaphor. You know what I mean.) I also know that, right now, I do not have the time to commit to even a fraction of what she would place in front of me. My...Read More

Are you sure you want to delete these 64 items?

Sun, 04 Jan 2026 06:18:40 -0800

Are you sure you want to delete these 64 items?

No, of course I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t sure that there wasn’t something in there that I wouldn’t at some point half-remember having had and then spend hours looking for, unable to find it because today I deleted it. I was sure that I hadn’t looked at any of those things for long enough to know they were not crucial to my current happiness. That felt like a good enough reason to drop them into the ‘recycle’ bin – and then to empty the bin, without revisiting what I’d put in there. When the computer asked if I was sure, I said “Yes” – and they were gone forever.

Or not.

There’s always the chance that some of things came from the web in the first place and I could find them again if I really needed them. There’s always the chance (the certainty in at least one case) that I have myself posted them to the web and could find them again if I really needed them. There’s always the chance that they were just copies or versions of things that I have stored elsewhere.

When it comes to simplifying things my biggest most convoluted task is going to be getting my electronic storage into better order. This is going to take quite some time. I can’t even figure out whether I should delete first, or catalogue first, or try to do both in tandem.

I use the word ‘catalogue’ randomly. Not just loosely, but completely inaccurately. Virtually nothing in my electronic filing is systemised. Most of it is filed under loose categories and by date. By ‘date’ I mostly just mean ‘year’. It is no wonder I spend so much time looking for things I half-remember having had.

When I worked in an office, we had paper files and filing cabinets, we had colour coding, and date sequencing, and tabs for the important stuff. I could find any specific document from any year you asked...Read More