No I do not tango

I recorded another poem for the #internationalpoetrycircle, "No, I Do Not Tango", from my Nine Arches Press collection, "Terms & Conditions".

 "I have stepped off
that dance floor, and I am
relieved. Every part of me
is mine..."

 #LiveAloneAndLikeIt

Online 8-week flash fiction course

I am delighted that I'm going to be teaching an 8-week online flash fiction writing course through the excellent London Lit Lab - it's open to both new and experienced writers, anywhere in the world. The course will start on July 23rd. Places are limited, and there are two subsidized places available. More details here - come flash with us!

5 day Short Story Challenge

In April the Arvon Foundation ran a 5-Day Short Story Challenge using daily prompts that I’d written to guide you through the drafting of a new short story. Over two thousand people took part, and there were such enthusiastic responses, it was a joy to see! If you missed it the first time – or if you did it already but would like another week of daily writing nudges – here’s your chance! I’m running it again myself, using the same prompts, from Monday May 11 – Friday May 15. Every day you will get an email with a writing prompt and reading material to kickstart your imagination. 


The cost to sign up is £5 – half of which is to provide me with a small amount of income, and half I will donate to Refuge, a charity which helps women and children experiencing domestic violence, something which has only increased during this lockdown. (I am also offering several free places, see below.)

Click here for more details and to sign up!

Zoom online flash fiction workshop

How about a flash fiction online workshop to get the juices flowing? I'm running a 2-hour online flash fiction workshop for Arvon on May 28th, 11am - 1pm. It's open to all, no experience necessary, you'll end up with at least 3 new story drafts, so come and play! Booking details here:  https://www.arvon.org/writing-courses/courses-retreats/arvon-at-home-masterclass-flash-fiction/

Zooming in

I have a piece today on Marina Benjamin's excellent new blog, 'Zooming In', about what I'm reading & noticing now that I'm staying so much closer to home. Here's a taster:

Barak and I had five days’ hard riding northwards since then, the roads in a bad state after that wet summer of 1541.

                     

 Since the start of the lockdown, I have read three, and just started my fourth C J Sansom novel. The quote above is taken from the third, Sovereign. They’re set in the 16th century, and they’re crime thrillers featuring his trusty lawyer, Matthew Shardlake, and, in this book and the next, Shardlake’s assistant, Jack Barak. This is not, as anyone who knows me will tell you, my usual preferred reading material. What is it about the situation we find ourselves in that has drawn me to it? ...

Read the full piece here >> 

Poetry Video: Play

I thought I'd read you another poem, and this time I figured out how to do it without having to hold the phone! Here's a little reminder of something we all need to do: 'Play', from my

Live Canon pamphlet, 'How High Did She Fly'. #InternationalPoetryCircle

Stay-at-home Festival

I hope you are all safe and well. As all events in the outside world are being cancelled, I'm delighted to be taking part in the Stay At Home Online Festival: I'm doing an online reading from my new books at 2pm on Monday April 6th, and taking part in a panel on the creative process at 12pm on Thurs April 9th, and there are loads of other brilliant events already happening. Details here!  Come join in!

What do we do when the water rises

I thought I'd read you 'What do we do when the water rises', a poem from my collection, Terms & Conditions, which takes inspiration from the fire ant in times of crisis. #InternationalPoetryCircle

Publication day!

Happy publication day to 'and what if we were all allowed to disappear', my hybrid book of poetry/prose/fiction/non-fiction, with the gold cover! Published today by Guillemot Press, and inspired by particle physics, it asks: ‘What does it mean to be in pieces? What might it mean to be whole?’

To find out more and buy a copy of the limited edition, click here: https://www.guillemotpress.co.uk/poetry/tania-hershman

And in a lovely coincidence, here I am reading a letter to my younger self, on the same day my 8th book is published! "The biggest thing I've learned: create community. Lift others. You may be lifted as a consequence, but don't make that your plan." You can listen here: https://www.rlf.org.uk/showcase/tania-hershman-lys/

My stories on Stinging Fly Podcast

I was astonished to discover today that the wonderful Irish writer Cathy Sweeney is reading and discussing two of my short stories on the Stinging Fly literary magazine podcast. What an honour. And Cathy has a great conversation with the Stinging Fly's editor about genre boundaries, as well as reading one of her own fabulous stories. You can listen here if you'd like!

And what if we were all allowed to disappear

‪I never dreamed I'd have a book with a gold cover! The amazing Guillemot Press have made my particle-physics-inspired hybrid book, 'and what if we were all allowed to disappear', into this gorgeous sparkly object! It's a limited edition - for more info about the book and to pre-order, click here 

How High Did She Fly - new pamphlet!

My brand new pamphlet, How High Did She Fly, joint winner of the 2019 Live Canon Poetry Pamphlet Competition, is now available! It contains 24 poems: half are inspired by Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, a play which had a powerful effect on me at 16; 30 years later, I decided to take another look and respond to some of its themes: women, voices, silence, love, sex and flight. Woven in between these are poems written at different times which are, I hope, create a conversation through and across the book. You can read two of the poems below, if you buy a copy from me before Jan 1st I will donate £1 from each sale to Samaritans

How High Did She Fly

UK £8.00 GBP Rest of World £9.50 GBP

I'm also offering a discounted bundle of How High Did She Fly + Terms and Conditions - with £1 donated to Samaritans from every purchase before Jan 1st.

How High Did She Fly + Terms and Conditions Discount Bundle

UK £15.00 GBP Rest of World £17.50 GBP

Who will call me beloved - Radio 4

The day has arrived! The arts documentary that Faith Lawrence and I have made about me being writer-in-residence in a cemetery and contemplating the language of memorials and how I - as a single woman with no children - might want to be remembered, will be broadcast on Radio 4 at 4pm, and will be available online after that: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000b4r1

If you're outside the UK the programme is going out on the World Service on Friday Nov 15th, in their Heart and Soul slot! https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3ct03by

I'd love to hear what you think - I've never done anything like this before! The Radio Times has it as a featured selection, in which they call me "something that baffles much of society: the deliberately single woman ", and a review on New Statesman said I sound "unpompous" and "untortured", all of which makes me laugh!

Live Canon Poetry Pamphlet Comp win!

Some very delightful news indeed - I am one of four winners of Live Canon's inaugural poetry pamphlet competition! My pamphlet is called How High Did She Fly, the title is a quote from Arthur Miller's The Crucible, a play that I saw when I was a teenager which had a huge impact on me. Half the poems in the pamphlet are inspired by the women in The Crucible and riff on the themes of women, women's voices, magic... and flying! Congrats to my fellow winners, Katie Griffiths, Miranda Peake and Robin Houghton, our pamphlets will be published some time in November, and there will be a launch party, so stay tuned!

New poem, The Aunts

I was lucky enough, as writer in residence at Manchester Southern Cemetery, to have a poem commissioned by the Manchester Poetry Library for the Radość Pisania: Manchester Polish Poetry Festival 2018. They asked me to respond to the work of Maria Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska, the “Polish Sappho” (born in Kraków 1891, died in Manchester 1945), who is buried in the cemetery, and it was such a joy to discover her work, and then take inspiration from it. I read the poem at her grave during the festival, it felt immensely special. Here's a teaser:

The Aunts

Goodness and badness, stray from them
equally, say the aunts, robust
as hens and tough as millet seeds. Some
look through the window, others

are solving puzzles in a corner, one
is painting my ceiling. Good
and bad? I say. The aunts shake
and nod their heads. Outside...


You can read the full poem here.

Bumper week of publications

I'm not sure in my 15 or so years of writing that I've ever had a week like this - three pieces (in different genres) published in seven days: an audio poem, a science-inspired flash story and my second ever published piece of creative non-fiction! Here are the links if you'd like to listen to/read them.

Spendid, First Draft Manchester



How You Are, science-inspired flash fiction in Synaesthesia magazine

Rewatching Grey's Anatomy, creative non-fiction in The Real Story


I also have three poems in the new issue of print mag Golden Handcuffs Review - details here if you'd like to purchase a copy.

3 writing workshops in June in the North

Come write with me, no previous writing experience necessary! I'm running three writing workshop in June:

June 1 A science-inspired flash workshop as part of the Northern Short Story Festival in Leeds. More details here.

June 8 A place-themed flash fiction workshop as part of the inaugural Victoria Baths Weekend of Words, in the Victoria Baths in Manchester. Details here.

June 23 A very special tour of Manchester's Southern Cemetery  & cross-genre writing workshop together with fabulous tour guide Emma Fox as part of the Didsbury Arts Festival. Details here.

Bringing Myself With Me

My first piece of narrative non-fiction, Bringing Myself With Me, inspired by the large amount of TV I've been watching while I've not been very well, has just been published by the excellent Syndicated magazine:

For once I’d like to watch TV without me. I’d like to leave myself in the other room, happily chatting on Twitter, writing a poem, or tidying up and just sit and stare at the screen. Why do I need to bring myself into everything I see, from Grey’s Anatomy and all the doctors falling for one another and saving lives and screwing up, to the young woman on Shrill finding her feet, to Vera, the older police inspector who solves crimes and then goes home alone? It’s a constant in my head, asking, “Am I like that?” “Is that me?” “Would I do what she did?” “Have I been there?” “Would I like to be?”

You can read the full piece here - I'm off to watch more telly! (I have another piece of narrative non-fiction on TV-watching forthcoming in The Real Story - watch this space.)

Blagging your way into a writing residency

I've been writer-in-residence in a biochemistry lab... and I am now writer-in-residence in a cemetery. How did these things come about? I'm glad you asked, because I've written about it over at RLF Collected! Here's a snippet:

I used to be a journalist and the joy of that job was the access it gave me. You say, ‘Hello, I’d like to write an article about you/your company’, and, most of the time, the door is opened wide. I met fascinating people and learned about worlds hidden to everyone except those who work there. When I moved to writing fiction, it seemed as though my life would involve a lot of alone time, which was fine: I like solitude. But I have a science background, and after my first story collection was published – which contains stories inspired by science articles – and I moved to Bristol, I decided I wanted to spend time with the scientists themselves. I had an undergraduate degree in science but I had no idea what it was like to do science on a daily basis. I didn’t wait for an invitation, or for a position to be advertised. I approached the Dean of the Faculty of Science and said, ‘Can I be your writer-in-residence?’...

Read the rest of the article here >>

Groceries - flash fiction prize

I've only recently started writing flash fiction again after a few years off, mostly writing poems. It's a joy to get back to characters, to making things up - and a true delight that one of my new flash stories recently won the Writers' HQ LGBTQ Flash Fiction contest! You can read the story, Groceries, here, if you'd like to. Thanks so much to the judges, Paul McVeigh and Kirsty Logan and the fab folk at Writers HQ.