About Me

Making things, and making things happen, are crucial to my happiness and wellbeing. I write books, plays and songs; I make leaded glass windows and I am involved with the promotion of arts events, particularly in rural areas. I run creative writing classes and my students’ achievements are a source of joy.

My writing has been accepted for publications as diverse as Red Pepper, Somerset Life and Just 17. For ten years I was a co-editor and regular columnist for Somerset’s award-winning Just Women magazine. That was life changing. I found my voices, including the one that makes people laugh, and helped others to find theirs. After Just Women, my friend Madeleine Morey and I were inspired to write a sitcom loosely based on working as a collective of stroppy women in deepest Somerset producing a feminist magazine… (See my blog Adventures in Screenwriting). Recently I’ve been adapting those ideas for radio, with sound engineer Ivor Richards and friends.

I spent many years as a teacher and youth worker, and wrote several short musical plays geared to my students. I was a founding member and co-writer of Cock Crow Stone, a community theatre group. Our material was based on local legends and also included a musical inspired by Hans Christian Anderson’s The Snow Queen. I was short listed for the Ian St. James Award with Crystal, a poetic gothic horror story and was encouraged by the competition organisers to develop one of my short stories, A Window on Her Life, into a full length novel called Fire and Ice.

Dr. Martin Levinson  and I co-wrote Dreams of the Road, published in 2007 by Birlinn, using our extensive knowledge of Gypsies and Travellers in the South West. Martin shares my passion for helping others to tell their stories. We were honoured to be invited, on two occasions, to talk about our work at Ways with Words, the literature festival held at Dartington Hall.

Martin and I have also written two Dickensian plays, Beyond Expectations and The Ghosts of Mr Dickens, both of which toured extensively with Untold Theatre. Beyond Expectations put the character of Estella centre stage, and was performed at the Edinburgh Fringe to capacity audiences.

I love scriptwriting: George Fox takes a Selfie is a play I wrote imagining the founder of the Religious Society of Friends being catapulted into the twenty-first century. During the pandemic, I was commissioned to write a play about the extraordinary times we were living through. The result was Love in the Time of Corona.

I enjoy publishing books for friends and the community, including editing the Millennium books for Ashbrittle in Somerset and Stowell in Dorset and producing The Rose Queen Dined on Spam and Semolina, a book of childhood memories submitted by local people who come to our village Lunch Club and funded by Age Concern.

I wrote Who Stole the Stars? for younger readers, beautifully illustrated by Andrew Adam and designed by my son James Marshall.

A thrilling project has been creating The Wolfblood Prophecies, with tremendous support and encouragement from James. I tend to try and sidestep describing battles and explosions, which is where James comes into his own as editor and co-writer.

James and I also collaborated on a Covid comics project – The Avengers of Avalon, and intend to revisit it and the cast of amazing characters: Superhero Tor, mystical twins Chalice and Grail, and arch villain Burrow Mump.

Other novels in progress are Ghosts before Cock Crow, based on my work as a guide at Cothay Manor; Penfriends – a venture into cosy crime and The Camelot Garden – an experiment with writing light romance.

I make leaded glass windows, many of which can be seen in Somerset schools. When I retired from full-time teaching, there was a lot of Millennium money available for creative projects, and several schools took the opportunity to invite me to demonstrate how I make a leaded light catcher. The children then produced designs which I incorporated into the finished window.

During the pandemic lockdowns, thanks to Fodo Higginson negotiating with Somerset Skills and learning, I was funded to run online writing classes. We ended up publishing a splendid book – Once Upon a Lockdown. Fodo and I have since collaborated on four magazines inspired by women: Just Women 40 – a homage to Somerset’s own magazine, timed to celebrate the anniversary of the beginning of women’s suffrage; Resilient Women; The Soundtracks of Our Lives and Hear Me Roar.