Hello Reader, ‘This might be the most important thing you learn about writing,’ I heard myself say. And then I laughed. This week under the water We were wrapping up our latest Creative Writing Course, which runs for an evening a week over ten weeks. We were talking about restraint, and how important it is not to ‘explain’. Your readers are clever, I told them. They’re used to picking up clues and spotting the significance in nuance. You don’t have to hit them over the head, either with your...
7 days ago • 3 min read
Hello Reader, Join me and guest writers Rick Melvill and Tim Chevallier for a free webinar on the deeply human business of getting your story onto the page. Whether you're writing memoir, a novel, or a short story, the hardest part is often not the writing itself – it's starting, and then not stopping. Rick and Tim have both navigated that journey to a completed manuscript, and they're here to tell you how they did it, what kept them going, and what they wish they'd known at the beginning....
9 days ago • 1 min read
Robert Stone introduces a minor character in his short story Helping with a single sentence: Blankenship had red hair, a brutal face, and a sneaking manner. Three details. That's all. And yet Blankenship is immediately, completely present – you know him, you distrust him, you brace for whatever he's about to do. But then Stone gives us a second line of description: He was a sponger and petty thief whom Elliot had seen a number of times before. But this sentence is almost redundant. The face...
11 days ago • 6 min read
Hello Reader, You joined our free memoir webinar, which tells us something: your story matters to you, and you're looking for a way in. We'd love to invite you to take the next step – in person, in one of the most beautiful corners of South Africa. The Art of Memoir Weekend – 8 to 10 May We still have places on our memoir weekend at the Karoo Art Hotel in Barrydale. Over two days, Joanne Hichens and I will coach you through what it takes to write memoir with skill and flair. You'll work on...
13 days ago • 2 min read
The advice came to me in a dream – which feels like exactly the wrong origin story for a post about kinetic writing. There I was, eyes closed, horizontal, delivering a masterclass on movement and energy to a dream-student. My unconscious, apparently, has no sense of irony. But the advice was sound, so here it is. This week on the water Imagine a scene: a couple at the end of their tether, finally saying the unsayable. They're in the living room. They're furious. And they're moving – pacing,...
18 days ago • 6 min read
Hello Reader, From spark to story: a two-session short story workshop with Joanne Hichens A practical, hands-on workshop designed to take you from idea to first draft – and prepare you to write a story worthy of submission to the Short.Sharp.Stories anthology. Dates: Wednesday 15 April and 22 April 2026 Time: 18:00 -19:30 SAST | 17:00 - 18:30 BST each session Format: Online via Zoom Facilitator: Joanne Hichens Cost: R600 | £30 for both sessions To book: Email Trish You have a pressing idea....
23 days ago • 3 min read
Trish and I had our first kayak of the spring a few days ago, paddling up the River Great Ouse in the low afternoon light. The weeping willows were already dressed in their pale early-season green, but everything else – every chestnut, ash, and alder – remained skeletal, bare to the bone. This week on the water We didn't make it as far as the Town Lock. A temporary bridge had been thrown across the river as part of some project or other, and we were obliged to turn back. Which, it turned out,...
25 days ago • 6 min read
Hello Reader, Thank you so much for joining us for our webinar on the art and craft of the short story. What a session it was – over 300 writers registered and the conversation between our three panellists was, we think, genuinely inspiring. Writers from across South Africa and beyond left the session feeling, in their own words, informed, inspired – and ready to write. As Richard said in his opening, Joanne Hichens' work "promoting the short story and encouraging writers to write them has...
30 days ago • 2 min read
I have been reading Sleeping Beauties, the novel Stephen King co-wrote with his son Owen, with a mixture of admiration and mild exasperation. The premise is extraordinary: a mysterious phenomenon causes every woman on earth to become encased in a cocoon of white fibrous material when she falls asleep. The Kings give this premise nearly 700 pages and an ensemble of perhaps twenty perspective characters – a feat of construction that is, by any measure, astonishing. Each has a distinct voice, an...
about 1 month ago • 7 min read