Imagined Spaces celebrates essaying as trials, attempts and adventures in thinking in all their creative modes.

I’ve always been interested in the way that different forms of writing feed one another. The way that lines in books can become hooks for songs, and verses can become stories that are shared around the fire, sparking new ideas even within the most exhausted of minds. Different vines  of creativity entangle and spread, feeding and nourishing, connecting all of us imaginatively somehow….

In what ways do these iron-cast women [The Sisters] contain the seeds of their lives lived in flesh? Ornery women whose presences are recollected in the boatyard with voices boomeranging the open river, directing with a military precision the day-to-day business on the yard brothers, while Bert and Cyril, in cloche hats and dungarees, smoked their pipes and crafted the hulls of yachts to a smooth finish? How do they compete with their former selves from the pitted shallows of a rowing boat sequestered in the silt of the riverbed?

Bernadette Ashby reflects on her experiences as a Consultant Clinical Psychologist in the NHS, with a specialism paediatrics and health, and neuropsychology. She writes of the need to put those ‘embedded, complicated and for the large part wordless set of experiences’ she still holds within her into words. For ‘From them I had learned so much, about what can go wrong with the body including the brain. About life. About family. About what it is to be human.’