Pea Arts About

Given the machinations of social media, the ways many of us attribute value have become contingent on how many likes, shares, comments and plays a piece of content gets. My outputs attract relatively few of these. While I appreciate those few engagements immensely and am humbled that anyone is watching/reading/listening at all, I often have to catch myself on when I get annoyed that my hard work isn't reaching more. That's when I have to question my motivations for making work and putting it out there at all. What it ultimately comes down to is a feeling that my chance to deliver top-class arts & humanities education and research was taken away from me, and - realistically - I was in a toxic profession (academia) that is unrecognizable from external perceptions of it anyway. The ideal so many of us had going in and were rarely, if ever, corrected about, simply doesn't exist. And I didn't want all those years of graft, training and knowledge to go to waste. I was jus...

For a week bookended by International Women’s Day and Mother’s Day, it was a stressful one. Instances of the public abuse of Meghan Markle came to a head and a young woman was abducted and murdered, it seems, by someone who vowed to serve and protect. With the timelines on every social media platform flooded with experiences of abuse, it’s all been overwhelming, even when hanging out on the podcast accounts in a vain attempt to build community.  It’s an atrocity that should never happen. We should all feel safe to head home at any time and not have to be wary that the unthinkable will happen. But we are because it does. The conversation around this becomes polarised when men who’ve experienced abuse or been attacked ask, ‘what about me?’ only to be told, ‘this is about us; go and start your own thread.’ I empathise with both positions here, and with trans and non-binary victims who fall through the gaps. I think I lean most to the question of who gets to be part of ‘us’.  The ...

The following response to the book contains significant plot details. There’s nothing like doing an English literature degree for dampening your love of reading novels. And nothing like doing a PhD and the subsequent years of futile academic jobhunting to stamp it out altogether. (That’s how it was in my circumstances, anyway, and I commend anyone who refuses to let that happen.) Having said goodbye to that career path and clawed back my health, I’ve been slowly and with difficulty overcoming the guilt of not working every minute of every day and am reading the books that have for years been silently screaming for me to wipe off the dust and give them a good going through. One of those books is Sarah Waters’s The Little Stranger (Virago, 2009), which I’m excited to have learned is being adapted as a feature film directed by Lenny Abrahamson – whose work I greatly admire – due out later in 2018. What a gripping, carefully-written tale it is. And what an underlying scathing exami...