Is White Writing Black, Right Writing or Wrong Writing?

Ruth Hartley Storytelling, Politics, Race, Southern Africa, The Tin Heart Gold Mine8 Comments

Writing black and white people, men and women, good and bad. This is a rewrite of post on Marginal Scribbling that contains some complicated ideas that need thrashing out with other writers and readers. I intended to repost this anyway but it seemed more relevant after the launch of my novel The Tin Heart Gold Mine because I was asked […]

Writing and selling The Tin Heart Gold Mine

Ruth HartleyBook Launch, Promotion, Southern Africa, The Tin Heart Gold Mine4 Comments

Writers need to sell books Writers write – rather than talk about what they write – but the current publishing market forces us to become Independent Authors and acquire self-promotional skills entirely different from writing. The idea of a book launch for The Tin Heart Gold Mine gave me sleepless nights, but, nevertheless, we decided to hold the event at […]

See you at The Tin Heart Gold Mine book launch!

Ruth Hartley Storytelling, Book Launch, Reading, Southern Africa, The Tin Heart Gold Mine, Writing ProcessLeave a Comment

Excitement is building for The Tin Heart Gold Mine official book launch, to be held at the Café du Centre, Maubourguet, at 19:00 on 24th March 2017. I’m looking forward to enjoying a glass of wine and some snacks with interested readers and friends. As well as reading some excerpts from the book, I will answer questions about it and […]

Tomorrow Mountain and the writing of Today’s Stories

Ruth HartleyEducation, Politics, Southern Africa, The Tin Heart Gold Mine21 Comments

Tomorrow Mountain today There were debts to be paid. I knew that. I hope that I’ve made a small repayment in The Tin Heart Gold Mine. When I was a girl of 16 I lived with my mother and stepfather one day’s walk from Tomorrow Mountain. It stood out against the sky, a long shape humped at both ends like […]

Paris, Africa and Otto Dix’s war paintings

Ruth HartleyBook Launch, Graphic Novel, Southern Africa, The Tin Heart Gold Mine, Visual Arts4 Comments

I have just returned from two nights in Paris where I visited a museum exhibition about Africa, saw paintings, and was reminded of Otto Dix’s war paintings — and his paintings of war injuries in particular. We travelled there by train, which gave me many lovely hours of dozily dreaming and reading. It was a foggy, misty day so staring […]