This Cloistered Time (Remembering Selly Oak Hospital Birmingham, NHS & Military – 2007) I’ve been remembering the time my youngest son lay there in A&E with flattened face, the blood, just trickling from one ear. I’m sorry, Mom, he’d said. That cardboard bowl I took from off the nurse, that careful nurse. Looking back, she understood the simmering, the nerves, [read more…]
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Snow Angel
Jasbinder Bilan
Lockdown has given me time to think of loss and for me that word always takes me to one of the closest and most wonderful relationships, the one between my grandmother and myself and here I write for the first time about the journey we made from India to the UK. I must have been told the story many times [read more…]
June’s Pick of The Month – Editorial
Christina Sanders
We were overwhelmed by your responses to our call out for stories written from isolation or by those experiencing marginalisation. Every entry we published was beautifully crafted, original, insightful and offered a unique window into the experience of social isolation. Not surprisingly perhaps, the largest number of submissions came under the category of Writers at Home and [read more…]
Dialect
JLM Morton
dialect /ˈdʌɪəlɛkt/ noun 1. a particular form of a language which is peculiar to a specific region or social group. “the Gloucestershire dialect seemed like a foreign language” There’s long been a big gap to fall through for writers living on the margins and Dialect hopes to close it. Dialect will do this by providing exciting, great quality learning, [read more…]
From: Germinal Floréal
Alasdair Paterson
Primrose They say pandemic. They say lockdown. They say set the calendar to autopurge, unwrite your future life, reset the month: germs, germination, another revolutionary Germinal. Yesterday I realised things will never be the same. A philosopher might say: from one day to another, they never are. And furthermore, from one day to another, you never are. But still. [read more…]
Doctor
Winston Plowes
Doctor (Palliative Care) For Rachel She’s working in the shallow end of life taking care not to splash as she walks the corridors holding doors open for people to talk about life. And all of those letters she’s gathered at the end of her name, right now just spell out the word P.E.A.C.E. And for some, she’s holding the hands [read more…]
LOCKDOWN
Rob Keeley
The Stay-at-Home! Festival was an online festival that ran in Spring 2020. It was developed by bestselling author and poet CJ Cooke, with Paper Nations as a partner. The festival celebrated the power of writing and reading in preventing loneliness and championed connectivity and community amidst social distancing. As part of the festival, Paper Nations also supported [read more…]
Has Dorothy Died?
Grace Palmer
The four of us on the Mum rota travelled across counties to help her reach her frame as she wobbled to the commode. After weeks of taking it in turns to sleep on her bedroom floor we chose her care home in two days. During those nights she had talked to her long dead sisters about watercress picking, singing ‘it’s [read more…]
100 Days of The Daily Haiku
The Daily Haiku Writers - Led by Amanda White
100 Days of The Daily Haiku Biography Amanda White is a writer and creative practitioner whose published work includes poetry collections by Flambard Press, children’s books with Barefoot Books, travel guides with Time Out and short film scripts with director Andrew Gillman. About The Daily Haiku: As a writer and creative practitioner specialising in arts for health, at [read more…]
The Space Between Us
Judith Glover
The Space Between Us The space between us grows ever wider with each passing second of every passing day. The hands of time, which I cannot still are pulling me further and further away from you. I want them to stop, just for a moment, to catch a breath and remember, and feel that it was real, you were here, [read more…]