The writing life is ultimately the pursuit of a creativity that won’t leave us alone. When our writing and our values come together; when the stories we live and the stories we write (including poems and nonfiction) are congruent, then we find our flow and rhythm; we know what to do with our precious lives.
I’ve been an editor for over 20 years. Before that I wrote books on alternative education (particularly home education) and parenting. My first novel and poetry collection were both published by Bluechrome Books and since then I’ve written eleven novels and seven poetry collections plus a book on creative writing and a memoir.
You can buy some of these books from Cinnamon Press:
If you are in the EU I have copies of At the Heart’s Farthest Edge, At world’s end, begin and smiling at grief in a house in a forest where life grows that I can send signed and without import duties from the UK. Email me for information.
Memoir
In October 2020, as new lock downs were implemented, Jan Fortune moved from a beloved home of twenty years in North Wales to a tiny hamlet in a forest in Finistère. Isolated during lockdowns, facing major unforeseen house renovations, illness and bereavement, she was also training as a herbalist while juggling work.
Constantly, she asked herself: What are you doing here?
How had a moment gazing at a stained glass window as a four-year-old, a friendship between two girls who role-played their way through seven years as people from 10th century Moorish Spain, a thirty-one year volatile marriage, work-place assaults, a heart-changing encounter with herbalism and a new relationship led to this place in the seventh decade of life?
At the heart’s farthest edge unravels a series of cusp moments so slight they might have vanished unnoticed, yet in retrospect make sense of following a call to a forest in a new land and language, exploring herbalism, creativity and the ways in which we might live a small life well in this beautiful, wounded world.
‘…a gorgeous, dazzling, glimmering book’
‘A fascinating memoir, not like any other…’
‘…brings us back changed. A magical memoir.’
Poetry
From the moment Meg seeks entry into the priesthood, her vocation is challenged. Charting a path through the campaign for women’s ordination, Stale Bread & Miracles unfolds into a story that is heart-breaking and hopeful… an unflinching meditation on the dehumanising power of the institution and the humane tenacity to re-invent life, told in language that combines the rhythm and lyricism of poetry with the narrative minimalism of pared down prose. This is an extraordinary narrative, now in it’s third edition.
Moving to a remote forest hamlet in a new country in the midst of a pandemic, the only way to connect is to take the time to linger, listen and observe—to be with the land that is becoming home. From this observations a series of haiku arise, following the Japanese system of 24 seasons divided into 72 micro-seasons and interspersed with eight lyric poems that travel around the Celtic wheel of the year. And so a forest garden and its surrounding Finistère woodland slowly reveals itself, weaving together the lunar and solar, melding the Celtic shape of the year with the increments of the Japanese solar terms, each one unveiling a new aspect of change.
Charting a life unmoored from the familiar, but permeable to the new the poems find their place at ‘the end of the world’, as the Romans called Finistère, but also in Penn-ar-Bed, the Breton name which is both the end and start of the world.
Novels
Smiling at grief in a house in a forest where life grows
Summer Solstice 2065 and, awake before dawn, Viola knows that all her ghosts are with her as she sets off into the forest to forage the last of the ingredients for the Solstice feast that falls on her 40th birthday and on the birthday of Isabelle, the oldest member of the tiny hamlet at 93.
It’s sixteen years since the pandemic that wiped out huge swathes of humanity only to be followed by the collapse of the structures of daily life that once seemed unassailable. Tucked away in the forest, the inhabitants of Restidiou Vras have their herbalist, Viola; they have skills and animals, homes and loved ones. But they carry their ghosts into an increasingly uncertain future and, as the inhabitants of the surviving twelve households gather for the longest day, they bring stories of loss, their resentments and fears, their hopes and secrets. Thirty-three adults and eleven children who know that a single day can change everything.
But in the forest, the humans are not the only voices. The trees and plants have their own stories of loss and resurrection, of abuse and forgiveness, of another way of living.
In a near-future world without privacy or freedom, life is unravelling for Luke, a teenager whose questions and individuality have no place in surveilled society. When a virtual encounter with a girl who claims to live beyond the all-controlling grip of E-Government, sets him on a quest not only for answers, but for escape. But is Alys real? Why are there echoes of her world in his father, Nazir Malik’s home, especially since Nazir is a celebrity artist trusted by E-Government? And what role can characters from Celtic Arthurian legend possibly play in saving the future? Most urgently, can Luke overcome the threats that surround him and find the Standing Ground?
In this prequel to The Standing Ground, we travel back two generations to the origins of the oppressive E-Government state that gradually infiltrates every aspect of people’s lives in the decade following Brexit and global pandemic. But as the darkness overtakes Britain and other areas of Europe, the light of resistance wakes in a community that spans the Celtic outposts of Brittany and North Wales. And in a strange child, Myrddin Emrys, who has also been known as Merlin.
Two years after the events of The Standing Ground, the tiny outpost of Y Tir in North Wales becomes a refuge for those who want to live without implants; permanent links to government surveillance that are threatening to dominate people’s lives again. But can Alys, Luke and Emrys thwart the growing threats of the new tech-giants whose offers of enhanced memories and virtual lives mask the erosion of privacy and even humanity? As new enemies threaten Y Tir’s existence, and old enemies emerge to sew seeds of destruction, Alys’ and Luke’s lives are put under increasing pressure. But there are also allies, not least Alys’ and Luke’s daughter, Iris, who appears to have fallen out of the mists of Greek legend and into Celtic myth. Can Iris, more strange and powerful even than Myrddin Emrys, also known as Merlin, save the day for Y Tir?
