Conversations with Writers

Chris Taylor is registered manager of a residential home and a company trainer. He works with young people with attachment difficulties and delivers training on the subject to foster carers, social workers and residential childcare workers. He is the author of A Practical Guide to Caring for Children and Teenagers with Attachment Difficulties (Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2010). In this interview, Chris Taylor talks about his work: How did you first become involved in working with children and young people with attachment difficulties? I had a 15-year career in industry and, having worked through two recessions, I was feeling a bit jaded with commerce. A broken hip from a cycling accident gave me time to think about my future. My own children were young teenagers, and I believed I had something to offer adolescents, and that I would be motivated and rewarded. I found a job as a 'house a parent' (it's 20 years ago, language was different) in a therapeutic communi

Leicester-based writer and former museum curator and university lecturer, Pam Inder is the co-author of seven books. The books, which she wrote with Marion Aldis, include:   The 1844 Diary of John William Sneyd: Muskets and Mining (Churnet Valley Books of Leek, 1996);   John Sneyd's Diary 1815-1871: Thirty Pieces of Silver (Churnet Valley Books of Leek, 1998);   Finding Susanna (Churnet Valley Books of Leek, 2002); Susanna's Cookery Book: A Culinary Adventure in Staffordshire (Churnet Valley Books of Leek, 2003);   Finding Ralphy (Churnet Valley Books of Leek, 2006), and   Staffordshire Women: Nine Forgotten Histories (History Press, 2010). In this interview, Pam Inder talks about her writing: How did you decide you wanted to be a writer? I didn’t really have much choice about writing – I worked as a museum curator and writing catalogues, articles in journals etc was very much part of the job! However, the sort of writing I now do came about rather differentl

Max Gladstone lives, works, and writes in Cambridge, MA. He is the author of several novels which include Three Parts Dead , which is currently out on submission. His short stories have been featured in magazines that include Space Westerns and On The Premises as well as in the anthology, The Book of Exodi (Eposic, 2009). He also administers the blog Two Guys, Three Hundred Poems , where he publishes and comments on translations of the anthology of Tang poetry known as the 300 Tang Poems . In this interview, Max Gladstone talked about his writing: When did you start writing? I began writing before I actually knew how to put letters together -- just a bunch of scratches filling my parents' old notebooks, one line at a time -- but if you mean writing stories, it started with a very simple vampire story typed out on an old suitcase Remington in my closet at the age of five or six. From there, it was a short skip and a jump to wanting to be a published writer: I realize

Corinne Fowler is a lecturer in the School of English at the University of Leicester. Her work includes Chasing Tales: Travel Writing, Journalism and the History of Ideas about Afghanistan (Editions Rodopi B.V, 2007); Travel Writing and Ethics: Theory and Practice (Routledge, forthcoming) and Postcolonial Manchester: the literary response (Manchester University Press, forthcoming). In this video, she talks about Grassroutes: Contemporary Leicestershire Writing , an Arts Council funded project which, among other things, aims to promote transcultural Leicester writing: The reason I devised this project was because I found, in my research, that books written by London-based writers, especially if they've got a strong transcultural element, tend to enjoy much wider readerships than those written by ... than those that are transcultural novels and plays and so on, in the regions. What I wanted to do was to try and promote public awareness of the kind of scope and diversity an