March 2025 newsletter
Where has Alinah been and what has she been up to recently?
Hello and welcome to all new subscribers, thankyou so much for your active interest in my work …! I am aware it may look like I have gone to ground over the past 6 weeks, after landing back from Thailand and our epic journey, which I wrote about in early January here. I have been going slow, navigating ongoing health issues, all within winter rest-mode. I was away for a week cat-sitting (my shortcut to solo-writing-retreat access!) and began to review the audio material recorded out in Phuket and thinking about / experimenting with how that chapter of my long grieving cycle around my mother, which has taken 20 years to complete, fits with the manuscript I have been working on for 7 years.
I have also been considering other forms this experience might take, but more on that later down the line. Thankyou for those who support me, those who have reached out, stopped me on the street to ask how it was… and all the interest around what might come next on that front, early shoots will begin to emerge later in the Spring!
As part of this process and as it gets brighter and warmer outside, I have started walking out along the coast here again, and was up at Seaford Head last week – I also checked to see if our We Hear You Now Listening Posts are still intact, following the racist attack on the project last summer. There is always a certain nervousness when I approach the posts in case something else has happened to them. Although 9 months has past since the attack, I realise it still has a difficult resonance for me – as it does for the other writers - and I imparted this, together with fellow writer Razia Aziz (and her partner Jess Taylor) of the EA consultancy in my storytelling / our questions back to the audience, at a brilliant event this week ‘An exploration of culture sector responses to racism in public spaces’. Partly organised in response to what happened to our work and other public artworks targeted last year, it was held by Culture East Sussex, a consortium of arts organisations and freelancers across our region, East Sussex Council and hosted at Sussex University. Over 100 people came together to listen and try to find practical ways forward to ensure that they are prepared when attacks on public culture works happen, which they inevitably will given the current political climate we are in. Prof Divya Tollia-Kelly gave a powerful contextual talk about her powerful 30 year research into Landscape, Race and Cultural Heritage, showing the room how we have always had have to contend with erasure and cultural violence within the environmental sector and how what happened to us is part of a continuum…
There were seeds of hope and a real listening in the room focused afterwards on change and it felt like another form of solidarity we can draw on going forward when writing and amplifying new work, especially across the landscape. There is much more to say on all this, but this is supposed to be a brief update, so onwards!
I have also started as Associate Lecturer (Creative Writing) at Chichester University working alongside the wonderful Prof Suzanne Joinson on the Short Contemporary Fiction module. After my Thai odyssey and focus on memoir- based writing, prepping for this course has helped me re-immerse back into the world of fiction, especially speculative fiction which is still my favourite genre. I found myself in one of those out of body moments when speaking about the fast-moving dystopia-in-motion situation in the US and Speculative Fiction as a form of prophecy, drawing attention to Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale (1985) and the use of Make America Great Again and the Trump-like figure / Christian Fundamentalist crusades in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Talents (1998). It seems they have taken it as their inspiration..Yet always there is a seed of hope in these novels, and both these maestras of the genre offer that to us…go read!
On the note of the power of women’s writing and especially by those of us moving into elderhood, I am excited to be part of the first Forthwrite Women’s Festival of Writing this month. I love the themes of resilience and perseverance community and solidarity! Check out the panel discussions, workshops, showcases and keynote by the inspirational Kit de Waal – who features in a Guardian article this week on the Festival. It takes place in Brighton on March 15th and Crawley on March 30th where I will be running a Memoir writing workshop on Mother’s Day/ Sunday morning 10am at the Hawth, Crawley. Join us if you are local! Book here (£5).
Meanwhile, satisfying to see my speculative fiction story Up from Paradise set up on the future site of Towner Seven Sisters – imagining it through the eyes and ears of a young girl and commissioned by them last year – being used as inspiration for art project days with young people. I was sent this image below yesterday from Liz Corkhill …and stay tuned for a new commission with Towner in the landscape which will go public in late Spring!!
And finally! This weekend I will be lifting the paywall on all my podcasts , including last year’s Listen-and-Write mini podcasts here, so whatever level of subscription you have you can now listen – or walk, listen and write if you like as many are outdoors, find them under .. Paid subscribers / founding members will be getting a different kind of offer from later in the Spring, more on that to come!
In the meantime, enjoy all new shoots that may be rising despite these dark and challenging times…
Alinah x