I was born on a small working family farm on the Lincolnshire Marsh in 1966. My Grandparents, who lived on another small farm at the other end of the lane, were great story-tellers. I spent many evenings listening to their local tales, including stories which used Lincolnshire dialect. Their stories went back several generations and were full of local colour and language, even snatches of song here and there.Writing stories is a great way for me to explore my experiences and to link them with this ongoing narrative thread. I started on this journey, aged five, when I began to write narrative songs. In my teens I started to get interested in performance writing, making several music theatre pieces. I continued to explore this way of making stories at Dartington College of Arts where one of my final degree pieces was a music and dance narrative piece.Songs form a lovely condensed sketch book of story ideas and are the starting point for most of my pieces. I started writing more purely text pieces in my thirties as I found it a really useful way of exploring the more complex narratives I was becoming interested in at the time.Occasionally, I make a story which I want to share more widely, so I have published a few extended pieces: Harp Wood, Muddy Lane, The House With The Round Window, and Green Twining. These all continue the thread I began when I listened to my grandparents' stories in their farmhouse front kitchen on dark evenings in front of the fire, blending my own experiences into the intergenerational stories from the Marsh.I also really enjoy taking part in collaborations. I have a few poems in A Boxful Of Ideas from Paradise Press. I am currently taking part in two different collaborative projects, one as a part of Brum LGBTQ+ Writers, and an ongoing series of short spoken word pieces for the Post Orientalist Community.Read more about this authorRead less about this author