The Literary Life and me

Ruth Hartley Storytelling, Books by Ruth Hartley, Cartoons, Comic Strip, Creative Writing, Creativity, Dust and Rain, Graphic Novel, Reading, Writing ProcessLeave a Comment

Posy Simmonds Posy Simmonds is a brilliant artist, acute satirist and eye-watering cartoonist who, in Literary Life Revisited, exposes authors, publishers and the book trade. Her work is currently on display in the Centre Pompidou in Paris. She has the essential gift of making you laugh at yourself. Funny Feminist Cartoons I became addicted to Posy Simmonds’s Mrs Weber’s Diary […]

What are novels for?

Ruth Hartley Storytelling, Books by Ruth Hartley, Imagination, Writing Process1 Comment

Ah – this was a fun coincidence. I was starting a post about my books when this article by Jacob Brogan appeared in The Washington Post. He writes about Joseph Epstein, an eminent American literary critic, who has written a book that asks if we need novels. Well – I need novels – good ones of course – and I […]

Chinongwa Reviewed

Ruth Hartley Storytelling, Book Launch, Colonialism, History, Reading, Writing Process, ZimbabweLeave a Comment

Chinongwa by Lucy Mushita is a timeless story. It is beautifully written and an easy fluent read. An extraordinary book This is quite a statement to make about the story of a skinny, snotty nine-year-old girl child called Chinongwa who lives in a remote village in Zimbabwe as her family become subject to colonialism in the early 1900s. Fundamentally, however, […]

Poetry and people and the place of women

Ruth Hartley Storytelling, Books by Ruth Hartley, Creative Writing, Creativity, Feminism, Imagination, Poetry, Songs, The Spiral-Bound Notebooks, Writing Process2 Comments

Poets are an elite species Where did the idea come that poets are a separate kind of human that is more aesthetically refined, sensitive, better educated and therefore part of an elite? Where did the idea come from that we can’t sing unless taught how to do it? Is this why some of us avoid trying to write poetry and […]

Goodreads, dry gardens, and a visit from Trinity

Ruth Hartley Storytelling, Children's Stories, Promotion, Writing Process, Zambia4 Comments

A delightful visitor – the best of my readers and reviewers I had an unexpected and delightful visit yesterday from Trinity. She arrived holding my book Dust and Rain. She is busy reading it and wanted to ask me some questions. Let me tell you that this is one of the best things that can happen to a writer. We […]