I loved English Literature (and Language when I came to it later), and I pursued these subjects through school and university… [But] It wasn't until I had finished with the formal study of poetry that I was able to start writing again. I use what I learned—the literature and criticism, the ideas I've been exposed to, the side-alleys I've wandered down. And it's not that I don't think seriously about what I'm doing, or how to go about it. But I'm wary of putting those thoughts together into a framework for fear of building myself a barrier, or a trap….

‘It’s seven miles long that beach, though it’s called a Strand here on the North coast of Ireland. If you stand at one end of it, you certainly won’t see the other. White, white sand, made from millions upon millions of shells, ground to almost nothing, tumbled in the wash of the waves….’

An evocative essay about loss, place, memory and the spaces of childhood.

Writing lines, walking and remembering, pondering changes: ‘I am writing this walking on Easter Day, with pencil in hand, to see what happens. The sunlight filters through the trees… I look back to when the children were young, how long and drawn out the weekends were. As a mother, those early days were lonely, the challenge of our repeated separations. As an artist, it has been freeing, channelling these feelings, finding a way to hold the moving parts of life together….’

What is the space of mourning? How are we to inhabit it? We walk into the chamber of it, this place of absence—as though into a room where someone was once—and we don’t quite know what to do. The light shifts, time moves through its cycles. Still we stay…. It seems we are unable to leave. An object on a table reminds us of the person who used to be there. We look out the window as though they may be looking back through the glass. At some point, I suppose, someone will call us from that room, someone will need us somewhere else. And then we will walk out of it, leaving the door behind us ajar…

It started as a shopping trolley, gradually evolved to picnic tables, found its own system for social distancing so as to carry on uninterrupted through the COVID-19 pandemic, and continues to fold itself away every day, disappearing into a box to be opened up the next day, again and again. There is no mandate, no agreement, no delegation of this responsibility for opening the park, for laying out the food. No risk assessment, either. The numbers that we fumble with in the dark have a minimal awkwardness….

It was 1969 when I made my way in the Berkeley hills to the house of Herbert Kohl. He had already written 36 Children, that heart-wrenching account of teaching sixth graders in Harlem, and the pamphlet Teaching the Unteachable, which the New York Review of Books distributed, and The Open Classroom: A Practical Guide to a New Way of Teaching. Kohl was even credited with coining the term “open classroom.”

Standing in line for security at the airport, I can’t stop thinking about how much this flight will help my soul. Run away, don’t face those issues that reside in that place anymore. It’s not uncommon to flee… is it? A revelation of some sort, an epiphany, or some type of awakening perhaps. But this stems from nothing but desire. A brief extinguishing of a painful craving that hardly lasts. This type of freedom never occurs on the ground or being in a place after having travelled through the air and landed again….

I think of the way my house speaks to me, the old building with years of renovation in its age rings, and of the elderly couple that lived there before us who had chairlifts on every set of stairs. It was their space before it was mine and they still remain under our new shiny wallpapers and the screws left in where we took the chairlifts off. The house drips and leaks and grumbles to me in a language of time past, and I confide in it, I whisper back with hopes of future to come.

I have rarely thought about why some productions worked well and why others didn't…. With no academic training, my approach is more intuitive. I work with a crew: cameraman, sound recordist and researcher. I parachute into different spaces, forming a connection with my subjects; I hoover up material and then return to a cutting room to make sense of this material….

… In 1917, 1941 and 1977 Post Traumatic Stress Disorder had not been identified or described; shell shock, trauma, lots of words to describe something that comes from the outside in. In the early days of PTSD it was seen as a psychiatric disorder. In my head was the question, what happens so deep inside it is indiscernible to the external observer?

In the novel Meatless Days, Sara Suleri Goodyear compares bilingualism to maintaining two homes when your body can only inhabit one at a time. To this day, it is the most fitting analogy I’ve found to describe my experience. After three autumns Scotland, English has become a mansion. Flemish still offers shelter, its brick walls are too strong to fall, even though the occasional cold breeze slips through invisible cracks….

What if memory is a problem of texture? Experienced as it is in shards, a collage of sensation kept fresh with a crunch of bone, a chill in your spine. Sound, smell, taste, evoke memories and memories evoke---what? A shudder. A heat which rises from the chest to the cheeks to the ears. A thick lump in the back of your throat. Sometimes I frustrate myself, unable to form images or words or scenes inside my head.…

Jacques Lacan theorised about the mirror stage, a stage in human development whereby an infant recognises their reflection in the mirror, triggering a sense of self-othering and a confusing of subject and object. I stare at the mirror, and through it to the clean white page or blank screen beyond. I was the story in the mirror, then on the screen and on the page….

Consider how insular we are as a species. All our thinking goes on inside; it’s what’s inside that counts; we are taking things in. Pretty selfish of us, don’t you think, to see something and have to consume it, internalise it? It’s all very intricate. Intrepid. The human condition.

That processing ability is informed by our senses—our ability to interact with the world informs our understanding of it.

I find it pleasingly ironic that a word used to urge discipline on writers should act as a distraction. It makes me lose concentration, as though I’m bumping into – and noisily knocking over – a sign saying ‘Silence’ in a library. The very thing it seeks to prohibit is summoned by the collision. Different people will, naturally, trip up and stop at different words….

A place can change you. A place get under your skin, make a home of your body. A place can challenge your sense of what it feels like to be a sensing, sense-making being.

I’m still trying to understand how Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia changed me. It’s a strange place, inconceivably remote and unrelentingly hot and I lived there for three years in my early 30s.

I make lists. To-do lists, playlists, favourites lists, recipes, wordlists, lists of details on my phone. The veneers of control. This writing began from list-making. The phone logging emerged shortly after my granny was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s – two years after my paternal gran was diagnosed with dementia…. nothing is wasted, it’s all thrown in and trailed around each and every day. Yet the practice of list-making is also the practice of attachment.

Manas Ray is a liberal studies scholar and writer. In ‘Limbo Times: Pages from the COVID days,’ Ray explores how precarity transforms the reality of our daily lives. Confined by the lockdown to his room in Kolkata, he writes that he has “indeed become addicted to the smallness of things

Bright Blue Malta… That day we managed to drag out the poolside hermits, and sun-phobics from the villa and go on a proper day trip. We rode the bus into Victoria, picked up some hot pastizzi —found in dazzling supply on every corner of Victoria—and waited for the second bus to arrive.

...the women gaze at each other through the glass and, perhaps, if they were to re-focus this gaze, their gazes, each would see themselves reflected back in them, like a mirror. Two generations of women – grandmother and granddaughter– separated and yet connected. Their worlds re-aligned in a new way.