Joanna BradshawThis article first appeared in I Hope You Like Feminist Rants – a very excellent magazine by Abigail Tarttelin. I went to a Girls Into Engineering day once, more than twenty years ago. It was depressing. We made rape alarms and machine-etched drinks coasters. Was this what female engineers did? It seemed bleakly staged, a […]
When I was five and had just moved to a new infant school, I remember not being brave enough to put up my hand and ask to go to the loo. I remember the warmth and shame, and the stretchy nylon knickers—navy blue with red and white—they sent me home in. I kept them. When […]
I was reading the end of a novel a few weeks ago. As a reward for finishing the first draft of my own book, I’d thrown myself into this new world and my heart was crashing and swelling all at once. The book’s called A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara. My daughter went to go […]
Okay, I get it. You want to be a writer, you’ve always dreamed of writing, and you know you have a novel or a story or an epic dystopian fiction set in terza rima just bursting to get out of you like an alien in that terrifying film Alien. So you sit down at the […]
There’s a meta-movement going on at the moment on the internet. My email inbox is a petri dish spawning daily, weekly and crescendoing entreaties to add my voice to the online conversation. To get writing, blogging, sharing my no doubt profound experience with the world. That I, too, will be able to find my niche […]
Marcus Romer shared a tweet which, in one day, got retweeted over 7000 times. I think it struck a chord. It goes like this: The Creative Process: 1. This is awesome 2. This is tricky 3. This is shit 4. I am shit 5. This might be ok 6. This is awesome. This cycle is so familiar […]
Exams were over. I’d graduated with a first class degree in Nothing Really and I’d a cushy job offer at a tech firm in London. It was all Yellow. At least, it was on the radio at my temp job: I was matching, batching and coding invoices at Virgin Media HQ, where Coldplay held sway. Returning from […]
At primary school I was shy. I didn’t exactly fit in. I was. In. The chess club. I had a handful of good friends to hang around and write terrible comedy skits with. Put me in a big group of kids I didn’t know, though, and I became She Who Never Spoke. I mean, I […]
It’s Monday, although where I’m sitting it’s close to being Tuesday. I write these playful prompts on Mondays, usually. I send an image or colouring-in to my mailing list and ask you to play with them. With me. I was about to do that this morning at about half past ten, when the irony struck […]
“A child has no trouble believing the unbelievable, nor does the genius or the madman. It’s only you and I, with our big brains and our tiny hearts, who doubt and overthink and hesitate.” ― Steven Pressfield, Do the Work I got an email newsletter the other day from someone I’d consider a peer in my industry. […]