A Body of Water

A Body of Water is an experimential piece I wrote as a breathless paragraph or as someone else pointed out, a stream of consciousness - which is even more appropriate when you read it.

I wrote it after watching Normal People and a couple of glasses of wine and with a headache that wouldn't let me sleep. I tried using the 'drunk voice' for a character and I read it and liked it and expected I wouldn't in the morning. I did and edited it and the lovely people at Reflex Fiction published it.

Rot

Rot, published by Reflex Fiction started out in a Jude Higgins workshop.

Contact Lenses

Contact Lenses found the perfect home in Reflex Fiction (the name says it all). They publish stories between 180 and 360 words - the perfect place for a story about the lenses we see through,

 'Write what you know' people say. For this story I knew something about...

• Wearing contact lenses and glasses
• Shifts in perspective both psychological and physical
• The cost of things when you're skint
• Feeling powerless
• Getting ready to go on demonstrations to protest & marching on the streets
  

I don't know everything about these subjects and that's where this story began - with something I didn't know about something I did.  

I wrote it in May 2020 when I was ill, when much of the time all I could do was empathize with and support from afar the protests in the US.

Amnesty International  Front Page

Tulips for the Homeless

Tulips for the Homeless was written as a YA flash which Reflex Fiction published as having just missed out on longlisting.

 This piece came from seeing a bunch of tulips by a sleeping bag outside Westminster Station. I set it in Cork in Ireland where Patrick's bridge had just got a makeover and took some of the themes which come with regeneration and homelessness and community.

 The tulips I saw as a symbol of hope, like spring or the sunrise of a new day.