I was born at the dawn of the 1960s and raised in the south-east corner of Ireland, in a loving home complicated by alcoholism, in a beautiful country complicated by patriarchal theocracy.
I survived the layers of silence and suppression—including a Catholic convent boarding-school that taught obedience above all—by taking refuge in books, rebelling a bit, and dreaming of becoming a writer.
Decades on, here I am: living the dream in crazy, creative, rebellious St Leonards on Sea, in the south-east corner of England, with The Hub, my husband of almost 40 years (so far, so fair!). Proud mother of our grown-up daughter and son, who live close by. Proud founder of the Alliance of Independent Authors. Proud author-publisher of more than twenty books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.
That’s a lot of pride—but not, I hope, of the swollen-ego kind. Creative pride doesn’t sit on high thinking it’s better than others. It knows that the material things we manifest in our lives aren’t made by us but through us.
It understands, appreciates, and works with all that has to coalesce for conscious creativity to manifest dreams in material reality, including yes, our own striving.
That’s what my books are about: the messy, painful, challenging, beautiful process of being a conscious human in a world that has always been messy, painful, challenging, and beautiful.
My indie-published books sell in more than 100 countries, have hit Amazon and media bestseller lists, won many awards, and been recommended by the likes of the Irish Times, the BBC and The Guardian—but what you really need to know about me here is that I’m a creativist. I don’t just use the creative process to write and publish. I apply it to everything I do in life.
Like my literary masters, Virginia Woolf and W.B. Yeats, I have found my belief system outside of conventional religion, in the literary tradition.
In, as Yeats put it, ‘a fardel of stories, and of personages, and of emotions inseparable from their first expression—passed on from generation to generation by poets and painters, with some help from philosophers’ (The Trembling of the Veil). The past and its great writers, whose times were so different to ours, have much to teach us about how to go beyond survival or striving into conscious creation.
At this time of AI emergence, I offer my learning from that very human tradition, alongside my latest work, on my Substack Newsletter: Learnings from Literature, where I also now house my Reader Club.
