‘The Shape of Water’ and ‘The Shaping of Water’ and the Oscars

Ruth HartleyDisplacement, The Shaping of Water, The Tin Heart Gold Mine, Video, War, Writing Process2 Comments

Films and books and Oscars There’s my first novel The Shaping of Water – and there’s the film – The Shape of Water  – its quite strange when the title of your book is almost, but not quite, on the shortlist of the Oscars! If only! Add to that that there is a fascinating character called Oscar in my novel […]

Mythological me – images from a memoir of childhood

Ruth HartleyColonialism, Family, Imagination, Memoir, Race, Southern Africa6 Comments

For a child, facts are fantastical and fantasy, factual Somewhere in my infancy, there is a thick green privet hedge, clipped and trimmed to right-angled perfection. It encloses a perfectly square empty space brimful of desolation. It contains no house, no people live there and it is nameless. Its eternal position is located somewhere inside the fortnight when my mythical […]

Driving back over my childhood

Ruth HartleyDisplacement, Family, Poetry, Southern Africa, Zimbabwe1 Comment

Going home to Zimbabwe Because of the unexpected changes in Zimbabwe last week I am posting two poems – one from 1980 when I returned to my father’s farm, and another from 1961 my last year at school. Ford Laser speeds up the dual highway. (Commercial break) Camera pans back to parents. Airport to homecoming – half an hour and […]

Love Stories, World Wars, Armistice Day & why I wrote The Tin Heart Gold Mine

Ruth HartleyBooks by Ruth Hartley, Migration, Politics, Southern Africa, The Tin Heart Gold Mine, War, Zambia8 Comments

Today 11.11.2017 is Armistice Day. Next year is the centenary of the end of World War One. On that day the German East African army was undefeated. It only surrendered on 25.11.1918 two weeks later. The surrender was signed in Zambia at Mbala (Abercorn),- check out the website – all those fascinating facts link to The Tin Heart Gold Mine […]

Pascale Petit’s art and poetry: The Survival of the Artist and of our World

Ruth Hartley Storytelling, Migration, Poetry, Visual Arts, Writing Process2 Comments

What connections are there between art, song, poetry, dance and all of us? Pascale Petit has generously agreed to let me put her video about her art on my post. I was moved by what she says in it and I found many thought-provoking links and connections in it to my own feelings and experiences of art, poetry and the […]