I recently felt compelled to learn how to make paper by hand. I wasn’t sure why I wanted to do this, but I’m so glad I booked myself onto a course. And now, thinking back over last weekend at West Dean College, I have a slightly readjusted sense of who I am. My father was…
Category: Life Writing
The Missing List – three years on
“…a powerful and riveting memoir. The Missing List is an important, essential text in the context of the #MeToo movement; it is also an essential text for women’s studies courses. As Best demonstrates, sharing these stories is the first step towards paving a way forward.” My memoir The Missing List was published and launched in…
Timepiece
My relationship with time (never a straightforward one, since I don’t really subscribe to linear time) becomes complex as I accrue within my memory and my body more and more evidence that time does, indeed, accumulate and pass. But as well as passing, time returns. Trees bud their leaves year by year, birthdays (of the…
Motherhood, time and sandwiches
Our grown-up son is, for the moment, living alongside us in a small Studio that we converted from a garage a few months ago. The arrangement suits us all. He cycles to and from his two local jobs, he’s learning to drive, and as a musician he can make all the music he likes without…
‘My mother with sweet peas’ – a poem for Baby Loss Awareness Week 2018
In the summer of 1952 my mother’s second son, Michael, died after contracting a gastro-intestinal infection. He was thirteen months old. All her life my mother carried that grief, virtually unable to speak it except to me. I am posting this poem for Baby Loss Awareness Week (9-15 October), in memory of Michael and in…
The art of unpacking
Synchronicity can be powerful. At the moment I’m unpacking after four moves in three years, and simultaneously I’m preparing to release my memoir The Missing List into the world on September 18th, with Linen Press. The Missing List, which has taken me years to write, tells the story of how I packed away my childhood and…
‘The Missing List’ to be published by Linen Press
I’m delighted to share the news that my memoir The Missing List will be published by Linen Press. Lynn Michell, founder and publisher at Linen Press, has announced our collaboration here. I started writing this memoir almost fifteen years ago, in small patches, having no clear idea what it might become. I wrote the patches…
Interview for BMJ Medical Humanities Blog
Many thanks to Louise Kenward for interviewing me for a piece published today on the BMJ Medical Humanities Blog in which we talk about the new extended version of Breastless (published at Life Writing Projects) and about creativity when facing surgery. Louise Kenward is a visual artist based in East Sussex. She was awarded an MA with…
‘Life Writing Projects’, harvests and dreams
It’s past mid-September. Summer is a mirage behind us. Back there – over my shoulder – are silvery skies, long walks by the sea and light evenings with family and friends. Autumn brings harvests, and fresh starts. Earlier this year I wrote two reflective essays about breast cancer in my family and about becoming breastless,…
Illustrated talk for University of Kent symposium on Artists’ Books and the Medical Humanities on 21st April 2016
http://www.kent.ac.uk/english/research/conferences/artistsbooks.html This talk/article has also been posted on the BMJ Medical Humanities blog. I had been so looking forward to this wonderful symposium devised, designed and immaculately planned by Stella Bolaki, and to seeing the exhibition of Martha Hall’s and other book artists’ work – which is still on until 14 August (Prescriptions Beaney House of…
Clare Best 