I  write in prose, and it’s true enough that in one way or another most of what I write is telling a story. Not everything I do looks like a novel or even a short story: I would write poetry because I certainly want to be able to write lyrically, but I feel more comfortable formally in prose, where the basic unit is the sentence rather than the line.  I’ve included some occasional short pieces here. Click on any of the links below and you’ll be prompted to open or save a PDF of the full text. Despair: published in The Folkestone Anthology, a meditation on faith and lost opportunities. Shoreline: a short meditation on nature, permanence, and the bridges we try to build to each other. The Voyage: another story about faith and purpose (I’m a lapsed Catholic), imagining the journey of the Irish monk St Brendan in a coracle to Iceland. Marking Time: this is an extended piece, a hybrid lyrical narrative about the experience of depression and its circular impact on relationships. If you click on the title link above it will download a PDF version suitable for printing out. If you’d prefer to read it on a smaller screen (a tablet or ebook reader) there’s an A5 PDF which would work better. Just click here. Or you can find a completed but neglected novel Folkestone Beef right here as a PDF. I have a few other projects in hand, including Still Water, a novel I thought I’d finished but which needs more work (don’t they always). I’ll post more here when it’s done.

This image is a painting by my brother Mark, created in response to “Waiting”, the first part of Marking Time. The piece is carefully autobiographical, considering how we make sense of our lives by making stories of them, the past contained in chapters or anecdotes.