My Passions

I’m passionate about words as gateways, and about what they cannot quite hold. I love leaning into the tantalising tension between how they limit us and how they free us. They can reduce and sanitise experience—and yet, in the right moment, they can crack something open. I’m also, I confess, sometimes ambivalent about words. I adore those small ink marks on the page and could spend all day smoothing the cover of a book—and yet I also meet my edges in them. They frustrate me. They fail me. And still, I return.

Mine is an ongoing exploration of how to trust more fully in the vast plain that gives rise to story itself: the living ground from which words emerge. I practise listening for that place, trusting that—if I stay close enough—it will offer the right words. Each time, I hope to write something newer, fresher, more true and, because laughter is my favourite sound in the world, something that might make you giggle.

I’m drawn to the erotic, the sacred, the deeply spiritual and psychological—as overlapping currents in lived experience. I care deeply about speaking from inside experiences that have been systemically abstracted, silenced, or tidied away. About letting voice arise from where things are still raw, alive, unresolved.

Imagination and storytelling have always been part of how I survive and thrive. They’re central to my detective novel and my shorter works too. I find myself wondering—has that been true for you, too?

I love groups—the way they help us find our voices, support one another, and remember how to play. I like bringing people together, creating spaces where something shared can emerge that none of us could reach alone.

If any of this resonates, I’d love to be in conversation with you. Not to arrive at answers, but to explore together—to listen, to question, to play, and to see what wants to speak next.

The More Formal Stuff

Writer. Editor. Psychotherapist. Meditator. 

I’m a published writer, university-level tutor and lecturer (University of Exeter and the Open University), and an arts and body-based psychotherapist. I hold an MA in the Therapeutic Uses of the Arts, and my theoretical grounding draws on Gestalt, Transactional Analysis, Psychodynamic Theory, and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. I work from a non-dual perspective and am a lay ordainee in the Tiep Hien Zen Buddhist Order of Thich Nhat Hanh, as well as a member of the Society of Friends (Quakers).

I began my professional life as an award-winning short filmmaker and screenwriter. I worked on The Full Monty and was a winner of the Sky Moviemax Short Film of the Year Award. Creativity has always been at the heart of my work, whether expressed through film, writing, teaching, or therapy.

Born into a Quaker family, I’ve been a practitioner of mindfulness meditation, yoga, and non-duality since my teenage years. This has led to a lifelong interest in comparative spirituality and religion, which continues to inform both my personal life and professional practice.

As a qualified psychotherapist and member of the United Kingdom Council of Psychotherapists, I’ve worked in private practice with clients experiencing stress, trauma, creative block, and related challenges. I’ve also worked with severe and enduring mental health issues through the charity MIND and within secure psychiatric hospitals. Witnessing the extraordinary determination of the human organism to survive—emotionally and physically, often against overwhelming odds—has profoundly shaped my worldview and underpins my detective novel Phoenix: The Delusional Detective.

At one point, I quite deliberately unchained myself from my desk and broke out of the office, choosing instead to live and write for extended periods in nature. Seeking more wildness, I moved from Devon to the mountains of the French Pyrenees. This period gave rise to Wild Words, a project through which—according to the London School of Economics—I am “revitalising traditional creative writing teaching.”

I’ve given talks and facilitated workshops across the UK, including at the London School of Economics, Penzance Literary Festival, Swindon Festival of Literature, Chipping Campden Literary Festival, Dartington Ways with Words, Swanwick Writers’ Summer School, Uppingham Summer School, and Lavenham Literary Festival.

My work has been featured in publications such as The Telegraph, The Psychotherapist, Psychologies, Writing Magazine, and Saga, among others.

At present, I’m slowly making my way around the world, reading beautiful poetry from many traditions on the very ground where it was first written or spoken. My only criteria is this: the words must transcend the everyday misuse of language that defines and reduces us. They must point toward freedom—or better still, remind us that we are already free.

Whenever I’m at home in southern France, I welcome fellow wordsmiths to the Pyrenees and happily bombard them with beautiful quotations.

More about Wild Words here.

More about the novel Phoenix: The Delusional Detective.