Sunday Blog 178 – 30th March 2025 I have a card with the saying No Makes Way for Yes on my noticeboard in the hope it will enchant me to say no more often. It’s been there so long it’s yellowing around the edges. In 2019 I wrote a blog with the same title – …
Author Archives: pipbrennan
Slow is smooth and smooth is fast
Sunday Blog 177 – 23rd March 2025 I recently realised that I haven’t ever really blogged about the volunteer work I do in my neighbourhood. I’ve been living here for twenty-three years, and for at least fifteen off those years, I’ve moved in and out of the dance of volunteering. There’s something vulnerable about giving …
Throwing pots
Sunday Blog 176 – 16th March 2025 This month I’m participating in the March Micro Marathon with Smokelong Quarterly, producing a piece of flash fiction and non-fiction each day. Simplistically put, flash is a piece of less than 1000 words. Like throwing pots, one after the other off the potter’s wheel. After this month is …
Easter Story
Sunday Blog 175 – 9th March 2025 The nun with the small beard at University chides me for my bitterness at the Catholic childhood, the litany of endless sexual shaming, the nonsense tales of hellfire, the damnation and control. While at home the hellfire was more muted, but it still lapped at our feet, especially …
My Favourite Childhood Photo
Sunday Blog 174 – 2 March 2025 It’s one of my favourite childhood photos, ever. And there are a lot of photos. I mean, a lot. I think it’s my broad smile. I wasn’t always a smily child, in fact I was something of a brooding scowler. I’m sure I recall that perfect Perth Spring …
Witnessing in 2025
Sunday Blog 173 – 23 Feb 2025 When darling husband mentioned the UK Prime Minister’s name this week and I didn’t know who he was talking about, I thought perhaps I’d taken my news and current affairs sabbatical too far. With the same tentative gesture of venturing into the shed, pulling a box from its …
Post-retreat Retreat Pastiche
Sunday Blog 172 – 16th Feb 2025 “Your windows are super clean, Mum.” It was the sixth occasion I’d flicked on the windscreen wipers instead of the indicator while driving my daughter to Perth airport. She and I had a short window of overlap time between me returning from San Francisco and her heading to …
Beautiful Carmel-by-the-sea
Sunday Blog 171 – 9th Feb 2025 “Hands up if you rang your family to tell them you had no business coming to this writing retreat.” This question was posed to us on Tuesday, the morning of the first full day of the very last Carmel Writing Retreat run by Linda Sivertsen that I have …
Shedding my skin
Sunday Blog 170 – 2nd Feb 2025 It has come to my attention that the Chinese New Year 2025 kicked off 29th January-and it’s the Year of the Wood Snake. I am a Wood Snake, indeed a woman entering her third act of her life this year. There’s going to be some shedding. Here’s me …
Meet you in the field
Sunday Blog 169 – 26th January 2025 For most of this week I’ve snuck off into a log cabin to work on edits of my memoir, prior to flying out to Carmel-by-the-Sea next week for a writing retreat. I wanted to take a better draft of the memoir there to work on. A retreat before …