Last year I was lucky enough to facilitate a writer’s group called MARGIN which aimed to respond to the Rapid Cycling project at ATTIC, a contemporary gallery concerned with scientific, personal and cultural understandings of the mind. Over the course of six months our group examined work from different artists, discussed the relationship between creativity…
Winter Light
This week, when I walked to work in darkness, I thought about poetry. I thought about the Ciliau and the wilds of mid-Wales. But most of all, I thought about light. In our January Landscape Writing workshop, Emma and I discussed the significance of light in winter. We examined how it can magnify our experiences,…
Made in Roath
Not long ago a friend from London told me that she has never traveled to Angel – one of my favorite little parts of the world famous capital. There’s a canal there and a small bar that plays jazz. There is a tree that hangs so far over a wrought iron fence that when I…
Death Writing
My father passed away in July of this year. It was a strange experience to have someone tell me this over the phone from thousands of miles away. After I hung up I sat quietly for a while before writing “All that’s left of him is stories now” in the last page of my notebook….
Moving Stories: Made in Roath Bookmobile
When I was young I learned the hard way that I am not the most handy person. Growing up on a farm this shortcoming grew tiresome – building fences, stacking hay bales, and carrying water buckets often left me bruised, itchy, and damp. In spite of this though, I still decided to build a bookmobile…
Roath Writers
Tonight I watched a few members of my Roath Writers group read work from our very first anthology, To the pub and back again, at Waterloo Gardens Teahouse. As I sat sipping my cucumber water and listening to their poems and stories I could not help but think about how far we’ve come. I never…
On the Drover’s Road
Autumn came to Cardiff this week with brisk winds and beautiful colors. The season is changing: scarves are coming out, kettles are boiling longer and more often. It is time to say goodbye to summer. I know I speak for Emma when I say that our summer was quite a meaningful one. We ran our…
Relaxation and Reflection
Over the past few months I have been thinking a lot about what it means to relax. I have a demanding full-time job, run countless freelance projects, and juggle personal responsibilities both in Wales and abroad. Although I love my life, there are always times when things begin to unravel and when this happens, I…
MARGIN
If you’re like most people, you have probably never thought much about the word ‘margin’. It hardly comes up in everyday conversation and dictionaries simply define it as ‘the edge of a page’ or, more broadly, ‘the edge of something’. Over the past six months I have considered this word often and in ways I…
View from the Hill
Summer does not tread lightly in Wales. It swoops in unexpectedly and disappears without a trace. Given the limited time we have with this season, Emma and I were delighted to host our third Landscape Writing workshop under the bright and cleansing sun. There is nothing quite like heat in the Welsh hills. Like all…
Christina Thatcher 