"I wake up dreaming of libraries..."
Listen to my love letter on the RLF's latest podcast to two of Manchester's glorious libraries for National Libraries week: Manchester's Central Library and The Portico, it's privately-owned sister just a few minutes' walk away. rlf.org.uk/showcase/wa_ep #LoveLibraries #LibrariesWeek
'The first writing course I ever went on was actually a reading course. The library was my church as a child, but I'd never stopped to look at the page as a writer might'
TD: What gives micros their power? Language? Silence? Structure?
TH: As with any piece of great writing, this is hard to pin down, and I am an avoider of general pronouncements. I read around 1000 short and very short stories and poems, and non-fictions, every year, and I demand no less from a great piece of writing than to feel like I have been punched in the gut. Every piece that does that to me seems to do it in its own way, each writer makes it their own, which is the way it should be. I have a great love for a freshness of language, cliché turns me off, laziness of language will stop me in my tracks. Voice is what grabs me as a reader, the voice of a character or the narrator, in any piece of any length. The story itself, the plot, maybe be tiny and quiet, I never ask for enormous events to happen, there is great power in the small moments.
I am also very proud to have a new story in the Geek Girls issue of
Canada's ROOM magazine, in print - that gorgeous thing to your left - which you can also read online, as a
teaser to the issue, here. I am most definitely and unashamedly a geek and it is delightful to be recognised as such, and to celebrate geekness in all its guises!
