Category: Uncategorized
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Between the cracks.
I’ve been in my sick-bed this week, but I couldn’t do nothing, so I wrote this short story, inspired by a throw-away comment about Cavendish Villas. The story is pretty grim at the start but stick with it…this is my take on Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Between the cracks by Paula J. Hillman Evening starts…
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Anthem to my hometown: A piece I wrote about Covid for my MA.
Anthem to my hometown. A pair of herring gulls wait in line outside the butcher’s shop. But the shutters are down, the green striped canopy tucked neatly away. Oily pigeons peck away at slabs of yellow limestone. One has rotted toes. A match for the man that limps by, sockless, in slapping shoes. Buttery curls…
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Memoir sample chapter: Stevie
Chapter one: Stevie, 2017. There is the patter of rain against glass, a pewter afternoon. My work weighs on me like the taste of a hated food. I want to spit it out. Then the classroom door flies open. Short and seething, there she stands. Head of all she surveys, my boss. ‘You’ll have…
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Writing characters.
Regarding Stoney and Jill, the main characters in Seaview House, they very much grew out of the landscape I created. Stoney’s character is firmly grounded in my own knowledge of nineteen-seventies schoolboys living on Walney Island; he smokes, uses lots of expletives and colloquialisms, and is bonded to the landscape in a way that has…
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Big news…
Well…big news! I passed my MA with DISTINCTION! Thanks to the friends and family who have taken an interest and supported me, and a big shout-out to Lancaster University Creative Writing department…they were wonderful. I enjoyed every minute of the MA, and those who know me know where I’m heading next!! If you’re interested in…
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Seaview House: the journey of my first novel
Stories are compasses and architecture; we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of a world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice. Rebecca Solnit. My head has long been full of…
Paula Hillman, author 