John Baker’s Blog

A nice piece on Arthur Rimbaud from Ellis Sharp. These are extracts, but the whole article is worth your attention.
Rimbaud provides the exemplary example of a writer who packs it all in. What is even more astonishing than this case of a writer who quits is how early, in his case, it happened. Before his [...]

What phases are involved in the creation of a text?
Regarding the inspiration behind a poem, a piece of prose or a short story, for me there is no set pattern. Sometimes a line of words will come into my head, or sometimes it will be an image, a memory, an idea or even something [...]

What phases are involved in the creation of a text?
When a substantial idea occurs to me it occurs in what I call a cloud. The cloud includes a few images, a few words, a few thoughts (as different from words), even tunes of songs. Immediately I write it in my notebook that I carry [...]

Fifty people turned up in the Drill Hall for the Hay-on-Wye Writing Workshop, quite surprising when you consider that the fee was £25.00 per head for a two-hour session. Maybe billing it as a practical masterclass in the Festival Programme did the trick?
The high entrance fee also begged the question of who would turn up. [...]