This post is part of one of The Written Corner series: Chapters of the City.

London, through the eyes of a writer and the curation of a historian, each piece becomes both record and reflection - a small chapter in the city’s ever-unfolding story, an echo pressed between its pages. From seasonal reflections to literary maps, these writings offer creative nourishment for anyone living in or passing through the city.

Curated Chapters, welcoming the summer months, place emphasis on creative nourishment - where page and place sit in tandem, and imagined worlds meet the stories that shape the city itself. London, a city shaped through literature and the arts, where stories and places continually reflect one another. Exploring the city, centred around creative nourishment - to fill the artist’s well, with moments of gentle, mindful pause woven throughout. Whether a long-time Londoner seeking to reconnect with the city, or a visitor planning their next trip, I hope this page offers a moment of inspiration.

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On this page, you’ll find The Written Corner’s suggested guide to a curated chapter through London, exploring the world behind Winnie-the-Pooh. A kind of literary archaeology, the chapter moves through the city, each place revealing another layer of the story’s life - from its author and the family at its heart, to the illustrator, publisher, and places that carried Pooh into the wider world. Let the chapter begin!

The Author - A. A. Milne’s London Beginnings

Henley House (Mortimer Place), Kilburn, NW6

Historic Kilburn Plaque Scheme

A. A. Milne was born here in 1882, on the site of what was then Henley House School, the school run by his father, John Vine Milne (where H. G. Wells also taught for a year). An area and school, a family, and the beginning of A. A. Milne’s London story. From Kilburn, the chapter moves south towards Chelsea - through streets and across time, following the London that carried Milne from childhood towards the home where his own family story would unfold.

The Family & The Characters - 13 Mallord Street

13 Mallord Street, Chelsea, SW3 6DT

A. A. Milne and his wife, Daphne, moved to 13 Mallord Street (then numbered 11), in the summer of 1919. It was here that their son Christopher Robin was born a year after. Around him were the toys that would become familiar far beyond the walls of this house - a bear, a donkey, a tiger, a piglet - companions of childhood before they became characters upon the page.

The distance between life and literature feels especially small, carrying both family life and literary life alongside one another: a nursery above, a writer below, and between them the beginnings of a world that would eventually belong to generations of readers.

The Character - Harrods

87-135 Brompton Road, SW1X 7XL

Among the toys in Harrods, a teddy bear found its way into Christopher Robin’s nursery, becoming one of the small companions of his childhood. It was this bear who would eventually be named Winnie-the-Pooh - Christopher Robin had become fond of a black Canadian bear named Winnie at London Zoo, while Pooh was the name he had given to a swan. Two names from two childhood encounters came together, lending a new name to the bear that had travelled from Harrods into the nursery.

Punch Magazine - Before Pooh

10 Bouverie Street, EC4

During the years when A. A. Milne was associated with Punch (as contributor and assistant editor), the magazine was based at 10 Bouverie Street, just beyond Fleet Street. The future illustrator of Winnie-the-Pooh, E. H. Shepard was also working within its pages - their paths crossing in the world of early twentieth-century illustration and literary humour. Among Milne’s contributions was Teddy Bear - a poem first published in Punch in 1923, at a time when the character had not yet become Winnie-the-Pooh. Here, the pieces were already beginning to gather: a writer, an illustrator, and a bear not yet quite the bear we know.

London Evening News

Fleet Street & The Strand

Following the chapter along Fleet Street and the Strand - streets long shaped by London’s newspapers, printing houses and publishing world - brings us through another part of Milne’s literary life. His detective novel, The Red House Mystery, was serialised in the Daily News in 1921, before appearing as a book the following year.

A few years, in 1925, the first Winnie-the-Pooh story appeared in the London Evening News. Milne had been asked to write a Christmas story and adapted a bedtime tale he had told his young son Christopher Robin. This became the opening chapter of Winnie-the-Pooh.

Book Publisher - Methuen & Co.

36 Essex Street, Strand, WC2R 3AA

Winnie-the-Pooh, as a book, was first published in the UK in 1926 by the London-based publishing house Methuen & Co. The chapter now follows the streets into the Strand - from one year to another, and from one form of the story to the next, another layer of its world beginning to take shape.

The address may feel familiar to readers of an earlier Curated Chapter - The Wind in the Willows. Two very different worlds, yet both meeting within the same London publishing history.

Illustrations - E. H. Shepard’s Blue Plaque

10 Kent Terrace, Regent’s Park, NW1 4RP

It was E. H. Shepard who gave visual form to Milne’s words in the book, his pen-and-ink illustrations becoming inseparable from the world of Winnie-the-Pooh. Shepard lived at 10 Kent Terrace, overlooking Regent’s Park, where a blue plaque now marks his former home. From this corner of London came the illustrations that shaped how readers imagined Pooh, Christopher Robin and their companions - a visual language as gentle and enduring as the stories themselves.

London Cricket Grounds

From the quiet paths of Regent’s Park, the chapter moves beyond the desk and into London’s cricket grounds - where fresh air, friendship and a change of pace formed part of Milne’s creative life. Milne found his own moments of fresh air on the cricket field. He played for the Authors XI, alongside writers including Arthur Conan Doyle and P. G. Wodehouse - a literary circle that gathered not around manuscripts, but over cricket bats and scorebooks. Between writing Winnie-the-Pooh, his verses and the rhythms of family life, these pauses offered another kind of creative life: stepping away from the page and into the open air.

The Archive - Victoria and Albert Museum

Cromwell Road, SW7 2RL

The V&A holds a collection of Winnie-the-Pooh treasures, preserving glimpses of the story’s life beyond the finished book. Among them are loose pencil sketches from the earliest stages of E. H. Shepard’s illustrations - delicate traces of the drawings before they became the images generations of readers would know.

(Some of the collection is held at V&A East, including 1930s Winnie-the-Pooh and Christopher Robin cut-out dolls and a race game, alongside a 1960s pattern booklet featuring the characters. Together, these objects reveal another side of Pooh’s afterlife: how the world that began in Milne’s words and Shepard’s drawings continued to travel into toys, games, designs and everyday objects.)

The Voice - BBC

Prev: Savoy Hill, WC2R 0BL
Current: Broadcasting House, Portland Place, W1A 1AA

Not long after its publication, Winnie-the-Pooh began finding a new life on BBC children’s programmes. The stories entered the world of radio early, carried into homes through the voices and sounds of the BBC - first from its London home at Savoy Hill, before the Corporation moved to Broadcasting House.

In the following years, among the voices to bring Pooh to the radio was actor Norman Shelley, who became closely associated with the character through Children’s Hour. Shelley gave Pooh another life beyond the page - carried not by ink or illustration, but by voice, sound, and the imagination of a child listening in.

Lyric Theatre - Beyond Winnie-the-Pooh

Shaftesbury Avenue, W1D 7ES

Although Winnie-the-Pooh would eventually eclipse much of A. A. Milne’s wider body of work, his creative life extended far beyond the Hundred Acre Wood. The extraordinary fame of Pooh became a source of unease for Milne, who worried that the character had overshadowed his other writing, and later expressed concern about the lasting attention surrounding his son. Milne continued to write across forms, moving between books, plays and screenwriting. Among his theatrical works was Toad of Toad Hall, his adaptation of Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, which reached London’s West End in 1930 - carrying another beloved literary world from page into performance.

Shaping London and - Far Beyond: Pooh’s legacy travelled beyond the pages themselves in a myriad of ways. Among the beneficiaries of A. A. Milne’s estate was the Royal Literary Fund, whose interest in the rights was ultimately sold alongside those of the other beneficiaries. The proceeds helped establish the RLF Fellows programme, bringing professional writers into universities across the country to work with students on their academic writing. From one writer’s work came another kind of inheritance - a legacy that continues by making space for writers and writing.

The Centenary Celebrations - Fortnum & Mason

181 Piccadilly, W1A 1ER

If this chapter finds you during the centenary year, the celebrations are currently (Summer, 2026) unfolding at Fortnum & Mason: A century after Winnie-the-Pooh first appeared, the bear has returned to London’s streets in another form. At Fortnum & Mason, the 2026 centenary is being celebrated through the shop windows, a collection of honey-inspired treats and keepsakes, and afternoon tea.

Not far from London, the chapter continues into the landscape behind the pages. In Hartfield, the Pooh Corner & Winnie-the-Pooh Museum offers another glimpse into Milne’s world, preserving stories, objects and memories gathered around Pooh and his creator. From there, the journey opens into Ashdown Forest - the landscape that became the inspiration for the Hundred Acre Wood, where woodland paths, streams and open heath offer their own echoes of the places Christopher Robin and Pooh once wandered.

Perhaps this is where the chapter comes full circle: childhood is not something we leave behind, but something stories keep alive for us, waiting quietly between their pages until we return. Somewhere in the forest, a game of Poohsticks waits beneath a bridge - a small, enduring reminder that some worlds can always be entered again.

🖋 Dear Readers, if this corner of London explored in today’s Chapters of the City holds memories for you, do share. If there are other places you think deserve a gentle pause and a page in this series, I’d love to know.

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P.S. Thank you to everyone reading, sharing, and liking! A special thanks to those who already support The Written Corner - it helps grow and sustain this project, and your generosity means so much. Until the next dispatch x Nora

Follow along on Instagram: @thewrittencorner.

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This post is part of The Written Corner series: Corner Conversations, preserving voices from the worlds of creativity and culture through a writer’s pen, archiving them as a historian, and listening with the heart of a lifelong theatre child. I grew up in a creative milieu where storytelling was part of the craft itself, passed from one generation to the next as a precious gift. Each anecdote is a living legacy, letting its lessons ripple forward to inspire new journeys. Rooted in that tradition, this series is my way of paying homage to the creative spirit that threads through our lives.

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In this edition of Corner Conversations, I sit down with author Lauren Schott. Originally from Ohio and now based in the UK, Lauren is a graduate of Duke University and the Radcliffe Publishing Course (now the Columbia Publishing Course). Lauren has worked as a literary agent in both New York and London, including at Curtis Brown. Alongside her own writing, Lauren works as a freelance editor, ghostwriter, and course leader at Curtis Brown Creative. She is the author of five books for young readers and the adult novel Very Slowly All at Once, published by HarperCollins in both the UK and the US. In this conversation, we step behind the pages of her novel and explore Lauren’s reflections on storytelling and the publishing industry. As my own writing mentor, this conversation holds particularly special meaning for me - a chance to celebrate not only the UK paperback release of Very Slowly All at Once, but also to mark another page among the many conversations we have shared: one I feel incredibly honoured to archive here.

Multiple Points of View

The summer sun spills through the open window, warming the paper beneath my hand until the blue ink dries almost as quickly as it leaves my pen. Outside, the afternoon lingers with that peculiar stillness only summer seems able to hold - a quiet that allows my thoughts to speak louder, as though they have arrived already written. As I scribble notes and questions ahead of my conversation with Lauren, they carry a sense of familiarity. In many ways, they feel like another chapter in a conversation that has never really ended - I am incredibly fortunate to call Lauren my writing mentor and teacher - the questions for the interview return me to a place that has gradually come to feel like home: the shared language of stories. It feels fitting, then, that this conversation begins not with a blank page, but with one already carrying the traces of the many conversations that came before it.

Lauren has spent more than twenty-five years across various corners of the publishing industry - as an agent, editor, ghostwriter, children’s book author, and course leader - before publishing her first adult novel. Having spent years as a bookseller myself, I know how profoundly that experience shaped me as a writer. It made me wonder how Lauren’s years in publishing had shaped her own writing.

“Being an agent had a huge influence,” she reflects. Years spent reading submissions and championing manuscripts taught her to look beyond beautiful prose and ask a far more instinctive question: why would someone keep turning the page?

“It’s really about whether you can hold readers’ attention,” she says. “They want to know whether it’s a story they want to hear.”

Representing other writers also deepened her understanding of what lies at the heart of every novel. Selling books meant constantly distilling manuscripts to their essence, searching for the thread that made a story compelling enough to share with someone else.

“It makes you think: what is the story I want to tell? Can I shape it enough for someone else to immediately understand it?”

Yet knowledge carries its own weight. Working in publishing before becoming a novelist means seeing far beyond the manuscript itself. Once you understand the conversations that happen after a book leaves your desk - the positioning, the sales meetings, the expectations - it becomes difficult to forget them.

“There are definitely things I wish I didn’t know,’ Lauren says with a smile. Her years as an editor have shaped the way she approaches the page itself. Accustomed to identifying weaknesses in other people’s manuscripts, she often catches herself applying that same critical lens to her own work before it has the chance to breathe. “I start the next novel a million times.”

It is a tendency she recognises not only in herself, but in many of the writers she teaches - a reminder that knowing exactly what makes a story work can, at times, make it harder to trust the messy beginnings of one still taking shape.

The literary landscape is an industry in constant motion. Predictions, prize lists, and publishing parlance shift with every season, while trends emerge, fade, and return long before a book has found its way to readers.

“The longer I spend in this industry,” she reflects, “the more I feel that it is impossible to write to a trend or write to the market.”

Watching publishing evolve over decades has shown her that trends are, by their very nature, fleeting. By the time a manuscript is written, revised, acquired, and finally reaches a bookshelf, the landscape has often shifted again.

“A writer writes,” Lauren says, “they do not chase a trend that will fly away by the time of publication.”

For Lauren, the only constant worth pursuing is authenticity. A story should begin with curiosity rather than calculation, with an idea that insists on being written rather than one engineered to fit the market. Without that, she believes, both the creative and commercial rewards become increasingly elusive.

In Between the Pages

Before writing Very Slowly All at Once, Lauren had already begun another novel. It was a story that travelled through different identities - first imagined as a young adult novel, then gradually evolving into something else entirely. Yet its beginnings went back even further.

“We were developing ideas in-house, and I came up with this idea,” she says. “Everyone liked it, and I had this moment where I thought, if someone else writes it and it’s good, I’m going to be devastated. If someone else writes it and it’s bad, I’m going to be devastated.”

That moment became a turning point. After years spent helping other writers bring their stories into the world, Lauren began to wonder if this one was hers to write.

Leaving the agency behind, Lauren began making space for writing alongside freelance work, raising young children, and continuing to write for younger readers. Yet the path towards adult fiction was not immediate. The manuscript that came before Very Slowly All at Once brought moments of possibility and uncertainty. Rather than leaving Lauren discouraged, however, the experience created something else entirely: momentum. “It made me mad. I felt driven to write it.”

That feeling became part of the emotional landscape from which Very Slowly All at Once emerged. The novel follows Mack and Hailey Evans, whose seemingly ordinary family life begins to unravel after a series of anonymous payments arrive without explanation. Lauren describes the beginnings of the novel arriving from an ordinary moment - opening bills - but beneath that practical frustration was something deeper.

“The book is about biting off more than one can chew,” Lauren explains. “It’s about someone trying their absolute hardest. In the book, that’s what Hailey is doing. And in real life, I felt like I was trying my hardest with the book.”

Every book leaves something behind - not only for its readers, but for the writer who created it. When I ask Lauren what Very Slowly All at Once taught her, she returns first to the disappointment that came before it.

“It taught me that being disappointed can be good,” she reflects. “I don’t think this book could have come from any other time and place.”

That frustration became fuel. Even its difficult characters became part of that exploration: people making flawed choices, hurting each other, and still holding onto something recognisably human. In that way, a book not only teaches a writer how to write the next one, it also reveals who they are becoming.

Threads of a Book

This conversation celebrates another chapter in Lauren’s writing journey: the UK paperback release. With it comes a new interpretation of the story’s visual identity - another way for readers to enter the world Lauren created.

The UK hardcover edition leaned more towards the book’s thriller elements, capturing the darker tension of the story, while the US cover explored another side entirely - a reminder that a book can hold multiple identities at once, revealing different facets of the same story.

Very Slowly All at Once - a phrase that first caught my attention for the beautiful contradiction held within its four words - was a title that waited.

“Around ten years ago, I was reading a Cleveland magazine,” Lauren recalls. “It had an interview with a divorce lawyer, who had quoted - though wrongly from another source - ‘divorce happens very slowly all at once.’ At the time, I did not know where the phrase would belong, but it stayed with me.”

Years later, when Lauren began shaping Very Slowly All at Once, the connection revealed itself and became part of the structure of the story itself.

“It became even more significant when I realised one of the main characters could be a divorce lawyer,” she remembers.

The main characters, Mack and Hailey, began to take shape alongside each other - never as separate ideas, but as a pair that arrived together. “They complement each other,” Lauren says. “Mack needed to be the kind of person who could allow the events of the story to unfold, the kind of person who would let this happen.”

The Character of Place

Some places remain long after we have left them. They become less a location and more a layer of ourselves - a rhythm, a way of seeing, a landscape carried quietly into everything that comes after.

Having lived in the UK for twenty years, Lauren returns to Ohio and the American Midwest through her writing - her pen crossing the Atlantic, revisiting a world that remains woven into her imagination.

“Distance,” Lauren says, “has become part of the way I understand that landscape. Leaving allowed me to see it differently - to notice the contrasts, the particularities, and the qualities that might have disappeared if I had remained within it.”

In Very Slowly All at Once, Ohio becomes more than a setting. It becomes part of the novel’s emotional landscape.

“I wanted to make Cleveland, or rather make the Midwest, a sort of character as well,” Lauren explains. “There’s just a Midwestern sensibility - the way that you grow up in the world - and I can’t, I don’t want to leave it behind - it goes into the writing.”

Growing up in Akron, a smaller city near Cleveland, Lauren brings the Midwest into focus - a region that often sits quietly in the background of American storytelling, despite holding countless lives, histories, and identities within it.

Creating that sense of place became an act of both memory and discovery. Lauren began researching Cleveland suburbs, eventually finding the inspiration for the neighbourhood where Mack and Hailey’s story unfolds.

Although the fictional world of the novel was shaped through imagination, much of its history grew from real places and real stories. As Lauren researched the area, she found details that seemed almost to be waiting for the novel - fragments of history that gave the imagined world a deeper sense of truth.

In the end, the neighbourhood became a landscape shaped by memory, distance, and imagination - and a reminder that sometimes the places we leave become the ones we return to most often on the page.

A Pause Before the Paragraph

When I ask Lauren the Written Corner’s signature question - whether the blank page feels frightening or freeing - she pauses before arriving at an answer that feels fitting: both.

“The beginning is often the most exhilarating part,” she reflects. “It is not an empty page, but full of possibility; it thrills me.”

Yet it is not the beginning that unsettles her. It is the moment after - when the story has begun to take shape and possibilities start becoming choices.

“It’s the sort of third-of-the-way-through pages that fill me with terror,” she admits. “I fear going the wrong way and then having to edit.”

The irony is not lost on her. Editing is the very process she has spent years practising - guiding other writers through uncertainty and helping them find their way through the difficult middle.

The Voices We Carry

Teaching has become another form of creative conversation for Lauren - a space where ideas move in both directions, and where every writer brings something new into the room. Some of her greatest lessons, she explains, have come not only from what she teaches, but from what her students reveal to her.

“I learn from my students often,” Lauren reflects. “More importantly, I get inspired by them - by people being authentic.” That authenticity returns to one of the foundations of writing itself: “write what you love.”

Ghostwriting introduced Lauren to another kind of creative relationship - one built around stepping into someone else’s voice. Yet the experience ultimately deepened her understanding of the importance of protecting her own.

“More than anything, it made me more protective of my intellectual property.”

Ideas are not simply passing thoughts; they are the beginnings of something that can grow into a career, a livelihood, and a body of work.

“It’s amazing how an idea inside your head can then become your career and how you feed your family,” she reflects. “It’s art, but it’s also property - something that you have to value and guard.”

That understanding of ownership extends into the larger question every writer eventually faces: what can actually be controlled? After years on both sides of publishing, Lauren returns to the same answer she has arrived at throughout her career. “Write the best book you can. It sounds so trite, but it’s because it’s true.”

Through Words

Every creative journey carries moments where progress feels invisible - the manuscripts that do not find homes, the ideas that arrive before their time, the moments when rejection feels less like a response to a story and more like a judgment on the person who wrote it. For her younger self, Lauren would offer a simple reminder: “Keep going.”

“Even if you get rejected, at any point, think of it as training,” she says. “Writing is less a single moment of arrival than a practice of returning: sitting down again, learning again, trying again.”

Indeed, stories are not made in a single breakthrough moment; they are built through persistence.

At the end of our conversation, we return, once again, to the idea of moving forward.

“To any writer I advise: keep going,” she says. “When you’ve written something, and you send it off to agents, you’ve done the best that you can in that time period. You must remember that.”

For Very Slowly All at Once, that lesson became especially personal. Around the time of the book’s publication, Lauren’s husband was diagnosed with cancer, shifting her attention away from the numbers, reactions, and expectations that often surround a new release.

“It was especially an important reminder then - one does what one can do best on that day,” Lauren says. “I found a different kind of freedom in it: the understanding that the most important work - writing - had already happened.”

Perhaps that is the quietest lesson of writing: not that a book stops belonging to its author once it leaves their hands, but that there comes a moment when they must trust the journey it begins without them.

Revising in the Margins

I ask Lauren what she appreciates now that she did not fully understand at the beginning of her creative journey.

“I did not appreciate how deeply you analyse and feel everything when you have a book out there,” she says. “How vulnerable it makes you feel.”

Her earlier books for children had been meaningful, inspired by her own children and rooted in joy, but publishing this novel brought a different kind of exposure: a story that carried not only her imagination but a part of herself.

“As an agent, I had always understood the importance of approaching writers and their work with care. I hope I was a good agent in that way,” she reflects. “But I think I would be even better now because I understand what it feels like.”

Yet reflection also reveals the things that needed to be reconsidered - the beliefs we once wrote in permanent ink, only to discover that even the most certain pages can be revised.

Early in her career, while working as an agent, Lauren admitted to a boss that she had always carried a desire to write. His response stayed with her. He told her she might not be suited to being an author because she was “too social”: writers needed to enjoy solitude.

For years, she carried that assumption with her.

“I don’t like to be alone. But I don’t think you have to love to be alone to be a writer.” Lauren says. “There is no single shape a writer must take. The act of writing may happen in solitude, but the stories themselves are never created alone.”

The epilogue of this conversation is perhaps less an ending than another page. As Lauren’s reflections remind us, becoming a writer is not about fitting into an existing idea of what a writer should be. It is about making space for the voice, the experiences, and the way of seeing that already exist within you. Perhaps that is what books, and the lives lived around them, quietly teach us: that neither stories nor the people who create them are ever made in a single chapter, but through the many lives, voices, and revisions that slowly, (and then suddenly), become one.

Thank you so much, Lauren, for sharing your reflections in this corner, and for the generosity with which you approach stories - and the people who write them. Thank you for every conversation beyond these pages: for those that came before, and for those still to come; for your guidance, your encouragement, and your belief in me. I never take your mentorship for granted. I cannot imagine my own writing journey without your presence in it, and I feel incredibly fortunate that our stories have crossed paths.

Find Lauren on her Website, Instagram, Facebook, and Very Slowly All at Once on HarperCollins.

Continue the series: if you’ve enjoyed the conversation at this corner, turn the pages back to a…

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P.S. Thank you to everyone reading, sharing, and liking! A special thanks to those who already support The Written Corner - it helps grow and sustain this project, and your generosity means so much. Until the next dispatch x Nora

Follow along on Instagram: @thewrittencorner.

Give a gift subscription

This post is part of one of The Written Corner series: Chapters of the City.

London, through the eyes of a writer and the curation of a historian, each piece becomes both record and reflection - a small chapter in the city’s ever-unfolding story, an echo pressed between its pages. From seasonal reflections to literary maps, these writings offer creative nourishment for anyone living in or passing through the city.

Curated Chapters, welcoming the summer months, place emphasis on creative nourishment - where page and place sit in tandem, and imagined worlds meet the stories that shape the city itself. London, a city shaped through literature and the arts, where stories and places continually reflect one another. Exploring the city, centred around creative nourishment - to fill the artist’s well, with moments of gentle, mindful pause woven throughout. Whether a long-time Londoner seeking to reconnect with the city, or a visitor planning their next trip, I hope this page offers a moment of inspiration.

Subscribe now

On this page, you’ll find The Written Corner’s suggested guide to a curated chapter through London, exploring the world behind The Wind in the Willows. Though the story itself unfolds far from the streets of the city, among imagined riverbanks, woodland paths, and the countryside of Grahame’s imagination, this chapter follows the London that shaped its creation - from the life of its author, to the artists who brought its world to the page, the publisher who carried it into the world, and the places where its legacy continues to be held. Let the chapter begin!

The Author - Kenneth Grahame’s Blue Plaque

16 Phillimore Place, W8 7BU

Author of The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame lived at 16 Phillimore Place while writing his most celebrated work. Unlike his earlier books - The Pagan Papers, The Golden Age, and Dream Days - it was here, behind the white stucco façade of this quiet Kensington home, that he completed the novel. Set back from the city’s busier streets, the terrace carries a quiet elegance, its white façades and black railings softened by trees and the neighbouring garden squares.

Holland Park

W8 6LU

Though The Wind in the Willows unfolds far from London, among imagined riverbanks and woodland paths, Holland Park offers a gentle echo of its world. Here, the city softens beneath trees and winding paths, inviting the same slower rhythm that runs through Grahame’s writing - a place where observation, imagination, and the natural world quietly meet.

Through the Decades - Victoria and Albert Museum

Cromwell Road, SW7 2RL

Within its collections, the Victoria and Albert Museum preserves small glimpses into the enduring life of The Wind in the Willows. Among them are a portrait photograph of Kenneth Grahame by Frederick Hollyer, an illustrated edition by Arthur Rackham, and a poster for A. A. Milne’s theatrical adaptation of Grahame’s work. Together, they trace the story beyond its first publication, revealing how The Wind in the Willows has continued to inspire artists, illustrators, and audiences across generations.

W. Graham Robertson - The First Illustrator

Tate Britain, SW1P 4RG

Over the years, The Wind in the Willows has been illustrated by many artists, each bringing a different vision to Grahame’s imagined riverbanks. The first edition, published in 1908, featured a frontispiece and decorative illustrations by W. Graham Robertson - painter, collector, theatre designer, and a close friend of Kenneth Grahame. Today, Robertson’s portrait by John Singer Sargent hangs at Tate Britain, quietly connecting the first edition of The Wind in the Willows to the wider artistic life of Edwardian London.

Later Illustrations - E. H. Shepard’s Blue Plaque

10 Kent Terrace, Regent’s Park, NW1 4RP

Although The Wind in the Willows was first illustrated by W. Graham Robertson, it was E. H. Shepard’s pen-and-ink drawings for the 1931 edition that became inseparable from Grahame’s story. His gentle illustrations shaped how generations of readers came to imagine Mole, Rat, Badger, and Toad, becoming as enduring as the novel itself. Regent’s Park offers a fitting setting for this chapter - a landscape of trees and pathways that invites the same sense of discovery and gentle wandering found at the heart of Grahame’s world.

The Publisher - Methuen & Co.

36 Essex Street, Strand, WC2R 3AA

When The Wind in the Willows was published in 1908, Methuen & Co. was based at 36 Essex Street, just beyond the Strand. At the time, the street formed part of London’s thriving publishing quarter, where manuscripts arrived, books were edited and bound, and literary lives quietly entered the world. Though the original offices have long since changed, the address remains a small marker in the journey of The Wind in the Willows from manuscript to bookshelf.

The Bank - Bank of England Museum

Bartholomew Lane, EC2R 8AH

Kenneth Grahame spent almost thirty years at the Bank of England. Joining as a nineteen-year-old clerk, he rose to become the Bank’s youngest Secretary, balancing the routines of Threadneedle Street with the quiet, childlike imagination that found its way into his writing. Within the Bank of England Museum, visitors can glimpse the institution that formed so much of Grahame’s working life. It is a striking contrast: by day, ledgers and correspondence; beyond the office, a literary imagination that wandered far beyond the City, towards quiet riverbanks, woodland paths, and one of the most enduring stories in children’s literature.

Toynbee Hall

28 Commercial St, E1 6LS

Beyond his career at the Bank of England, Kenneth Grahame volunteered at Toynbee Hall, working with young people in London’s East End. The settlement’s commitment to education and community reveals another side of Kenneth Grahame; offering a glimpse into the values and experiences that surrounded the writer beyond his literary life.

A River Journey

River Thames

The river at the heart of The Wind in the Willows is imagined rather than mapped, but its spirit feels familiar to anyone who has wandered beside the Thames - where water shapes the landscape, boats drift past, and the rhythm of the city briefly softens. A journey along the river offers a fitting transition towards Kew Gardens, following the water from the movement of the city into quieter landscapes beyond.

Riverboats depart from Westminster Pier and travel west along the Thames towards Kew Pier, offering a different way to experience the city before arriving near Kew Gardens.

Kew Gardens - On Stage

Kew, Richmond, TW9 3AB

At the edge of London, like a corner of a page, Kew Gardens offers a moment of return to the natural world that sits at the heart of The Wind in the Willows. Beneath its trees and beside its waters, the pace of the city gently falls away, creating a quiet counterpart to Grahame’s imagined riverbanks.This summer, the connection between page and place continues as Grahame’s beloved story returns through an outdoor adaptation at Theatre on Kew, performed beside the lake within the Gardens.

After following the river to Kew Gardens and tracing the places connected to author’s world, the journey continues through the pages themselves. Scattered across London, rare editions, illustrated copies, and special volumes offer another way to discover The Wind in the Willows - from the collections of Peter Harrington to the shelves of Any Amount of Books, Hatchards, and other bookshops where stories await their next reader. The characters were never held in one place; they continue to wander through the city, carried by the books that keep their riverbanks alive.

🖋 Dear Readers, if this corner of London explored in today’s Chapters of the Cityholds memories for you, do share. If there are other places you think deserve a gentle pause and a page in this series, I’d love to know.

Leave a comment

P.S. Thank you to everyone reading, sharing, and liking! A special thanks to those who already support The Written Corner - it helps grow and sustain this project, and your generosity means so much. Until the next dispatch x Nora

Follow along on Instagram: @thewrittencorner.

Give a gift subscription

This post is part of The Written Corner series: Corner Conversations, preserving voices from the worlds of creativity and culture through a writer’s pen, archiving them as a historian, and listening with the heart of a lifelong theatre child. I grew up in a creative milieu where storytelling was part of the craft itself, passed from one generation to the next as a precious gift. Each anecdote a living legacy, letting their lessons ripple forward to inspire new journeys. Rooted in that tradition, this series is my way of paying homage to the creative spirit that threads through our lives.

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In this edition of Corner Conversations, I sit down with fine artist Maria Tran. Her practice centres on soft pastel work. She is London-based. Entirely self-taught and rooted in a deep connection to the natural world, her practice moves gently between observation and intuition. After working on commissions, she now sells her original work online. In today’s conversation, we discuss her journey into art, her reflections on craft, and her enduring connection to philosophy.

Soft Beginnings

Colours that imitate real life, and life that quietly creates its own colours. As I prepare my notes and open a blank page for my conversation with Maria, the white surface brings me back to an image of her pastel work, ‘Snowed In’, I looked at weeks prior - a Siberian tiger standing in snow; the animal’s strength balanced with the softness of its surroundings. Maria’s work holds a connection to nature, and so does she. Her presence and personality, shaped by the same landscape, are as radiant as the sunsets she often captures.

For Maria, creativity had been always present in her everyday - a constant, and instinctive thread running through her life. “Ever since I was a child, I’ve always been creative,” she shares. “I was just that kind of child - dancing, singing, drawing, making things.” Even in those early years, creation was not something separate from who she was, but something woven into her way of moving through the world. She laughs as she recalls how classmates would ask her to draw for them - informal “commissions,” long before the idea of art as a profession had taken shape.

Yet, despite this early inclination, Maria made a conscious decision not to pursue art through formal education. “I intentionally chose not to study it at GCSE, A-levels, or university,” she explains. Growing up within a large family, she had seen older cousins take that path - and with it, the pressure that sometimes followed. “They were stressed, and advised not to study it on an institutional level as it might ruin my passion” At fourteen, standing at that first threshold of decision-making, she chose to protect what she loved. “I was just protective of it,” she reflects. “I did not want something I loved so deeply to turn into a chore.”

Instead, art has remained passion, protected by the artist - an element that is still true in Maria’s life. She continued to draw, to doodle, to return to it instinctively, but without the weight of expectation. Her academic path moved elsewhere, eventually leading her to study Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at Goldsmiths, University of London. “Philosphy has always been my other passion - and one I was happy to pursue in an academic setting .”

That pull toward philosophy feels, in many ways, still present in her art work today - not explicitly, but in its underlying rhythm: a curiosity about meaning, about presence, about how we come to understand ourselves and the world around us.

It was not until after graduating that art began to move from the periphery into focus. Maria initially stepped into teacher training, with the intention of teaching philosophy to children - a path that led her, in practice, into religious studies classrooms. Something in that environment did not align. “I realised it wasn’t compatible for me,” she says, reflecting on her decision to leave the programme after seven months. “I have no regrets - I’ve loved working with children. It is often too complicated to be a deeply empathetic person; it just did not feel right within that system.”

Then came 2020, a moment that, for many, reshaped the pace and direction of daily life. For Maria, it marked a turning point. “It’s a bit cliché,” she laughs, “we were all inside, and I just thought, I want to start something.” There was no long-term strategy, no carefully mapped-out intention. Just a moment of impulse. “I remember creating my Instagram page - it was mid-June, around midnight. It felt organic. I just wanted to do it for fun, to see where it would go.”

What began as something tentative gathered its own momentum. Beneath that spontaneity, though, was a deeper commitment - one shaped by hours of self-directed learning. “I’m the kind of person who really locks in,” she explains. “I would spend hours researching - YouTube, Google, forums - just trying to learn everything I could.” Without formal training, Maria built her practice through observation, repetition, and an almost philosophical dedication to refinement.

“I always knew I could draw,” she says, “I was confident in that. But I wanted to understand how to refine it - how to push it further.” That process of exploration led her across different mediums - acrylics, oils - each one a step in discovering what felt most aligned. It was not until she encountered soft pastels that something clicked.

“I’d never used them before 2020,” she reflects. “But when I tried soft pastels, it was the moment - i knew this is my path.”

Becoming, in Colour

Maria’s practice exists not in isolation, but alongside a constellation of other roles - each one, in its own way, feeding into her creative life. “Creativity, and creative works are important in my life.”

Yet, rather than placing the full weight of her livelihood on her art, she has chosen a different rhythm - one that allows space for both freedom and sustainability. “I like to have day jobs that fund my life,” she explains. These roles are not separate from her creative identity, but extensions of it. She works as a supporting artist in television and film, stepping into different worlds, different narratives; and with a company that creates experiences - children’s parties and large elaborate events.

This multiplicity feels emblematic of something broader - the reality of being a creative today. Not a single, fixed path, but a shifting landscape of roles, incomes, and identities. It is something Maria is acutely aware of, as we discuss the topic of moving away from the polished image of the artist as singular and self-contained. “I think it’s really important to show honesty and vulnerability,” she says. Over the past few years, her own path has been anything but linear. “I’ve always been that person - I’ve bounced around different jobs, tried corporate, this and that.” Her last corporate role came to an end in 2024, marking another quiet pivot. Since then, her working life has taken on a more fluid, freelance shape - TV and film work, agency roles, children birthday parties, creative projects - each one forming part of a larger, evolving whole.

This way of living circles back to the same foundations that first shaped her path: philosophy, and a deep care for others. “I’d like to incorporate more of teaching philosophy to children in the next phase of my life - my other major purpose.”

There is a clarity in the way she speaks about it - not as an alternative to art, but as an extension of the same impulse. “Philosophy is the foundation of everything,” she reflects. “It shapes how we see the world, how we make decisions, how we understand ourselves.” To share that with younger minds feels, to her, deeply meaningful. Hence, philosophy and art are intertwined; Maria considers her art as part of her spiritual journey.

Loss became one of its catalysts for a spiritual journey that started a gradual unfolding. “A couple of years ago, I lost my grandad, I lost my dog - it felt like everything at once,” she says. In that space - where certainty loosened - something else began to emerge.

“I started looking into spirituality, into astrology, and back to philosophy,” Maria says. What began as exploration slowly became something more anchored, culminating in a retreat in Malta in 2023 - a moment that allowed her to step more fully into that evolving sense of self.

Running alongside this spiritual thread is her enduring connection to philosophy - a language she has long turned to in order to make sense of experience. The teachings of stoicism, in particular, have stayed with her. She speaks of Marcus Aurelius and his reflections in Meditations with a kind of quiet clarity, returning often to the idea of memento mori. “Thinking about that - act as if there’s no tomorrow,” she says. “Thinking on questions like- how would that change the way you think, or act, or speak? It is all part of my art.”

It’s not a dramatic principle in her telling, but a grounding one - a way of stripping things back to what matters. “I’ve always been quite passionate about living authentically,” she says. “I think that’s why, when I look back, it all makes sense in a strange way. Even if it did not at the time.”

This connection, she suggests, is central to her idea of what it means to be an artist. “For me, it’s about catering to your inner child,” she says. “It’s about play.”

In this way, Maria’s philosophy of art begins to take shape not through theory alone, but through lived experience - through loss, through questioning, through returning to the simplest forms of expression. Creativity, here, is not confined to the studio. It becomes a way of staying close to something essential: a sense of play, of presence, of being fully, unapologetically oneself.

The Shape of Originality

In the early stages of her practice, much of her work was shaped through commissions. “From when I first started in 2020, for about a year and a half, I was doing commissions full-on,” she recalls. It was, in many ways, a formative period - one that brought both validation and momentum. “It was incredible,” Maria shares. “I almost felt like I’d actualised my dream. My younger self would have been so amazed.”

There are moments she still holds onto with a kind of quiet disbelief - the first international commission, for instance, arriving unexpectedly and carrying with it a sense of something opening outward. What stayed with her most, though, was not just the work itself, but the connection it created.

Yet, even at its peak, something in the rhythm began to shift. “By the end of 2021, I realised I missed doing my own thing,” she reflects. The structure of commissions - however rewarding - carried an inherent externality, a responsiveness that slowly began to pull her away from her own instinct. Balancing that alongside other work became increasingly difficult. Eventually, she made the decision to step back. “I put a notice out saying I was not taking commissions anymore, and began to focus on creating original art.”

The idea of individuality - of each person holding something entirely their own - also underpins how she sees her work. “No one does what you do,” she says. “We all have our own input.” Her pieces, then, become more than finished images; they act as markers of time, of internal states. “When I look back at my work, I know exactly who I was at that moment,” she reflects.

“I think we’re all vessels of creative expression,” Maria says. “There’s something bigger that we tap into.” It’s a way of describing creativity not as something owned, but something accessed - moments where thought quietens and something else takes over.

That sense of connection - between self, work, and something beyond both - begins to surface more clearly in her subject matter. Her work returns, again and again, to nature: animals, landscapes, fleeting moments of light. When I ask what draws her there, her answer feels instinctive. “I just believe we are nature,” she says. “We’re not separate from it.”

Sunsets, Sound, and Stillness

Her art process often begins not with an image, but with a sensation. A moment that lands somewhere deeper than language. “One of my favourite composers is Hans Zimmer,” she tells me, “and if I’m listening to his music - headphones in, watching a sunset - I just feel so connected to something greater.”

That feeling - expansive, almost intangible - is what she returns to in her work. Whether capturing the fading light of a sunset, the stillness of an ocean horizon, or the fragile hush of a landscape, her intention is not simply to recreate what she sees, but to hold onto what she feels in that moment. “I try to capture that sense of connection.”

While much of her portfolio centres around wildlife and animals, she hesitates at the idea of being placed into a single category. “I never like boxing myself into one thing,” she reflects. “Even if most of my work is animals, I don’t want to just be known as a wildlife artist.”

I ask Maria why she feels this undeniable pull toward the natural world - particularly toward animals, whose presence in her work feels both instinctive and symbolic: “I just find them so majestic.” She describes watching nature documentaries, and feeling a sense of awe. “The sensation is like when you really feel music, rather than just hearing it.”

This idea of feeling, rather than observing, carries through into her process. Music often accompanies her while she works, shaping not just the atmosphere, but the rhythm of the piece itself. “If I’m really locked in,” she smiles, “I’ll have one track on repeat all day.”

When it comes to building an image, her approach moves fluidly between reference and imagination. “It’s a mix,” she explains. She often begins with photographic references - particularly for wildlife - grounding the work in anatomical detail. “I use them for things like structure, the eyes, the form.” But from there, the image begins to shift. Backgrounds blur, colours soften, and elements are subtly reworked to heighten a particular feeling. “I like to enhance their presence,” she says. “To emphasise their power.”

That word - power - returns often when she speaks about animals, particularly the big cats she finds herself drawn to again and again. “I’m obsessed with them,” she admits with a smile. There is something in their duality that resonates deeply with her: elegance alongside strength, stillness alongside potential force. “They’re so graceful,” she says, “but also incredibly powerful.”

In that tension, she sees something reflective of human nature too. “It’s like us,” she says. “We have all these different sides.” Her thoughts drift toward the ideas of Carl Jung - particularly the concept of the shadow self, and the integration of opposing traits. Kindness and anger, softness and strength - not contradictions, but coexisting truths. “It’s about the integrated self,” she reflects. “All those parts together.”

Her work, in this sense, becomes an exploration of that duality. The gaze of an animal - especially the eyes - becomes central. “That’s where the soul is.” Relevant in all her work, it is most prominent in her art piece, titled ‘Gaze’. Through careful layering and attention, she attempts to hold something of that presence within the image - a moment of connection between subject and viewer that feels almost reciprocal.

Tracing Nature

As Maria’s subject matter is rooted in connection, her choice of medium feels equally instinctive. Pastel, for her, is not simply a tool, but something almost tactile, immediate. “I love the feel of it,” she says. There is something about the way it moves - the softness, the directness of pigment against surface - that resonates in a way other mediums never quite did.

Part of that connection lies in the way pastel allows for layering; not just visually, but almost conceptually. “It’s all about layering,” she explains, recalling what she learned early on. “It reminds me of us, in a way - we have so many different layers to who we are.” The process becomes, then, not simply additive, but evolutionary.

She recalls learning about the technique in part through the work of artist Eric Wilson - one of the artists Maria looks up to - whose pastel practice and teaching she came across while teaching herself online. His emphasis on layering, both technically and visually, stayed with her. “It’s all about building effects.”

She starts with a foundation - a base layer that resists simplicity. “Even something like black isn’t just one colour,” she explains. “There’s purple, pink, brown… all these tones underneath.” Slowly, she builds upward, sharpening pastel pencils to carve out detail, returning again and again to the surface. “It’s about light and shadow,” she says. “Patience.”

There is also something inherently delicate in the medium - a quality Maria has come to embrace rather than resist. Unlike oil or acrylic, pastel does not fully fix itself to the surface. It remains, in a sense, open. “I don’t use fixatives,” she explains. “I like how raw, and natural it is.” The pigment sits lightly, vulnerable to touch, requiring care in how it is handled and displayed.

That fragility becomes part of the work’s meaning. Each piece must be protected - framed carefully, held at a slight distance from the glass. A smudge, a shift, and it alters irreversibly - an element part of its appeal. In a medium that resists permanence, Maria finds something closer to truth - a reflection of the very thing she seeks to capture: moments that are felt deeply, held briefly, and never entirely fixed.

In the Process of Creation

When I ask Maria the Written Corner’s signature question - whether the blank page feels frightening or freeing, she says: “It really depends on the day. If you put a blank page in front of me now, I’d feel excited - the thrill of endless possibilities.” Like others have shared during this series, it is often connected to hormones, and hormonal phases. “Depending on the day it can range from fear, to some excited butterflies in the stomach to quick sketches right away.”

In a landscape where comparison is constant and visibility often feels intertwined with value, that clarity can be difficult to hold onto. “Comparison can be helpful,” she acknowledges, “but only for inspiration, and for learning.” There is a line between looking outward and losing sight of oneself. “It can also be damaging and create challenges - as artists we have to say true to who we really are.”

As our conversation begins to draw to a close, I ask Maria what she values most now - something she may have overlooked in the earlier stages of her journey. Her answer arrives with a kind of clarity that feels lived rather than learned.

“Self-confidence,” she says. “A grounded knowing of who you are, what your intention is, how you show up in the world.”

When I ask what she might say to a younger version of herself - standing at the beginning of her path - her response resists the idea of rewriting anything at all. “I would not change it,” she says. “I really believe everything happens the way it’s meant to.” Instead, she imagines something gentler: not intervening, but observing. Watching the unfolding from a distance, with understanding rather than correction.

There is, in that perspective, a kind of trust - in timing, in process, in the slow accumulation of experience that shapes both life and work. That trust, perhaps, is what underpins the final reflection she offers - not only on art, but on what art, in turn, has taught her. “There are no limits,” she says. “There’s no wrong way to express yourself.”

In a world that often leans toward structure, expectation, and definition, her words return us to something more open. Art, as she describes it, is not something to perfect, but something to access - a space where expression moves freely, without constraint. “You’re just tapping into something,” she reflects. “There’s always more there.”

It is a perspective that feels both expansive and grounding at once: that creativity is not finite, not something to be reached or completed, but something ongoing - a current we step into, again and again. To me, this is where Maria’s art ultimately lives. Not only in the finished pieces themselves, but in the quieter, less visible space behind them - where feeling, intuition, and presence meet. Where the act of creating becomes less about arriving somewhere, and more about returning: to self, to nature, and to something just beyond both.

Thank you so much Maria for not only being a conversation guest in this series - and all your beautiful reflections - but being a dedicated reader of Written Corner, and supporter! Your friendship means so much; it’s an honour to have some of your words in this corner archived!

Fiend Maria on her Website, Instagram, and Facebook.

Continue the series: if you’ve enjoyed the conversation at this corner, turn the pages back to a…

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P.S. Thank you to everyone reading, sharing, and liking! A special thanks to those who already support The Written Corner - it helps grow and sustain this project, and your generosity means so much. Until the next dispatch x Nora

Follow along on Instagram: @thewrittencorner.

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This post is part of one of The Written Corner series: Chapters of the City.

London, through the eyes of a writer and the curation of a historian, each piece becomes both record and reflection - a small chapter in the city’s ever-unfolding story, an echo pressed between its pages. From seasonal reflections to literary maps, these writings offer creative nourishment for anyone living in or passing through the city.

Curated Chapters, welcoming the summer months, place emphasis on creative nourishment - where page and place sit in tandem, and imagined worlds meet the stories that shape the city itself. London, a city shaped through literature and the arts, where stories and places continually reflect one another. Exploring the city, centred around creative nourishment - to fill the artist’s well, with moments of gentle, mindful pause woven throughout. Whether a long-time Londoner seeking to reconnect with the city, or a visitor planning their next trip, I hope this page offers a moment of inspiration.

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On this page, you’ll find The Written Corner’s suggested guide to a curated chapter through London, exploring the world of Paddington. Moving through the streets and stations that shape his journey, it follows the character, as well as the author, the illustrator, and the city that holds them together on one page. Let the chapter begin!

The Author - Michael Bond Silhouette Artwork

St Mary’s Churchyard

Author of Paddington, Michael Bond is captured in silhouette seated beside the small bear he created, a quiet figure set within the grounds of St Mary’s at Paddington Green. Trees soften the edges of the space, their branches shifting with light that moves slowly across the bench. Every story begins with its author, and this quiet corner of Paddington feels like a place to begin - to pause, and notice what is waiting on the platform.

Paddington Station

Praed Street

In the vast iron and glass of Paddington Station, trains arrive beneath the curved roof into the steady movement of west London. The original bronze Paddington statue, the commemorative plaque, and the book-shaped bench sit quietly near the platforms, marking the place where Michael Bond’s bear first entered the city’s imagination and where the Browns first met him on a station platform.

Harrow Road

West London

Harrow Road stretches away from Paddington Station in a steady flow of buses, shopfronts, and passing footsteps, where the movement of the city begins to settle into everyday life. It is one of the routes through which Paddington’s world expands beyond the station, a road of transition between arrival and home, where west London continues quietly onward.

Portobello Road

Notting Hill

Portobello Road winds through Notting Hill in pastel façades and market stalls, where antique shopfronts sit beneath shifting light, and where Mr Gruber’s antique shop lies quietly among the street’s slower rhythms.

Buckingham Palace

Buckingham Gate

In Paddington at the Palace, Paddington finds himself within Buckingham Palace, where a well-meaning attempt to help leads to a memorable royal mishap.

Selfridges

400 Oxford Street

Christmas Eve 1956 marks the quiet beginning of something far larger, when Michael Bond bought a lonely teddy bear left on a shelf at Selfridges - an encounter that would go on to inspire the creation of the beloved Paddington stories.

In the books, the Brown family are often associated with shopping trips to the elegant department store “Barkridges,” a fictional counterpart that reflects the same store. Together, the real and imagined stores sit side by side in the world of Paddington - one as origin, the other as echo - both part of a city where everyday moments can turn into stories.

Paddington Statue

Leicester Square

In the busy centre of London, the Paddington statue sits among cultural figures in Leicester Square. It may not be the first thing you notice in the movement of crowds and lights, but it marks a quieter presence - a character who has moved from page into the shared imagination of the city, where one can pause on a nearby bench beside him, marmalade sandwich in hand.

The Illustrator - Central School of Arts and Crafts

Southampton Row

Peggy Fortnum studied at the Central School of Arts and Crafts, where she developed the delicate pen-and-ink style that would come to define her illustrations of Paddington Bear. During this time, she was also part of a wider circle of illustrators and writers working in London, including Judith Kerr. The streets still hold that same sense of creative focus - places where ideas are shaped in studios and classrooms, and where illustration becomes a way of noticing the world more closely.

The British Library

96 Euston Rd

Within the vast modern architecture of The British Library, early drafts and manuscripts by Michael Bond sit alongside first editions and original illustrations. Among the collections are personal traces of the writing life - including a typewriter and family photograph. In this setting, the world of Paddington Bear is held not only as fiction, but as something in the process of being made: written, drawn, and imagined over time.

London Zoo

Regent’s Park

In Paddington at the Zoo, Paddington Bear visits London Zoo, set within the wider green expanse of Regent’s Park, where pathways, trees, and enclosures sit close together in careful order. What begins as an ordinary visit soon turns into one of his many well-meaning misadventures, as Paddington moves through the zoo with his usual sense of curiosity and helpfulness, often misunderstanding the rules of the world around him.

The distinctive look of Paddington was also shaped in part by early visual research for the books: illustrator Peggy Fortnum visited zoos to observe and sketch real bears.

Young V&A

Cambridge Heath Rd, Bethnal Green

The museum holds a collection of childhood objects - while not a direct story location, it contains a broader cultural connection to Paddington Bear through its display of vintage teddy bears, including a rare British-made Paddington from 1980. Seen among other well-loved objects, he sits within a wider landscape of memory and play, where stories are carried less through narrative and more through touch, familiarity, and time.

Hampton Court Palace

Hampton Court Way, East Molesey

A short journey beyond the city leads to Hampton Court Palace, where the world of Paddington Bear expands into gardens, corridors, and into the world of Paddington and the Marmalade Maze.

A pause for a marmalade sandwich, a wander through bookshops or museum spaces where bears and books are kept, becomes part of the journey itself - small moments of noticing that extend the chapter beyond the page. Returning to Paddington Station at the end of the day offers a fitting close - where arrivals and departures continue, and the story begins again.

🖋 Dear Readers, if this corner of London explored in today’s Chapters of the City holds memories for you, do share. If there are other places you think deserve a gentle pause and a page in this series, I’d love to know.

Leave a comment

P.S. Thank you to everyone reading, sharing, and liking! A special thanks to those who already support The Written Corner - it helps grow and sustain this project, and your generosity means so much. Until the next dispatch x Nora

Follow along on Instagram: @thewrittencorner.

Give a gift subscription

This post is part of The Written Corner series: Corner Conversations, preserving voices from the worlds of creativity and culture through a writer’s pen, archiving them as a historian, and listening with the heart of a lifelong theatre child. I grew up in a creative milieu where storytelling was part of the craft itself, passed from one generation to the next as a precious gift. Each anecdote a living legacy, letting their lessons ripple forward to inspire new journeys. Rooted in that tradition, this series is my way of paying homage to the creative spirit that threads through our lives.

In this edition of Corner Conversations, I sit down with illustrator Lisa Liglou. Born in France, Lisa now lives and works in Lisbon. In this conversation, we explore her journey, reflections on art and creative process, her sources of inspiration, and her experiences navigating freelancing and social media, including the development of her animated series documenting her journey.

Drawn Before Decided

Opening our conversation is mirrored in the act of Lisa opening her sketchbook and showing me a page. It is not for the public, nor for commissioned work - but rather a rare insight into an artist’s everyday life: a diary of doodles and observations. It is a privilege I do not take lightly, and one that is echoed in Lisa’s generosity throughout our conversation - something I am determined to commemorate in this piece. There is a freedom in her marks that resists polish, a looseness that holds its own quiet precision: bursts of colour that open like sudden light, or pared-back line drawings that feel almost whispered. Each piece carries the trace of a hand unafraid to pause, shift, or begin again. Moving between illustration and animation, her practice holds both stillness and motion at once - images that breathe, flicker, and sometimes simply sit in their incompleteness with ease.

For Lisa, the decision to become an artist did not arrive as a long-held plan, but rather as a realisation - one that surfaced through a period of personal upheaval. “It’s quite recent,” Lisa shares.

Before fully stepping into illustration, Lisa’s professional life moved along a different path. She worked in roles far removed from drawing. What followed was not a linear unfolding, but an interruption. A period of depression in 2022 paused plans, momentum, and clarity.

“Art has always been there with me,” Lisa says. “The only thing I could do was to draw; it was my way of dealing with emotions.”

In many creative journeys, there is a moment where making shifts from something optional into something necessary. For Lisa, drawing became less of a choice and more of a language - one that held what words could not. “At that point, art was too strong to ignore,” Lisa reflects. “I felt like I had to do something with it.”

There is a careful distinction in the way she speaks about this period. Drawing as a lifeline during depression is not the same as drawing as a profession - two different relationships to the same act. Yet, for her, the two came to exist side by side, each feeding into the other.

Now, just over a year into fully investing in her practice, Lisa speaks with a quiet conviction. Not because the path is easy, she is clear that it is not - but because it feels true. “It’s a hard path. It’s super intense,” she says. “There are huge downs and few ups. But I feel I was right to make this choice.”

Before illustration, there was another life - structured, corporate, outwardly distant from the fluidity of drawing. Her previous work is tied, in part, to a period marked by depression, and the memories remain complicated. “I’m not in a place where I can be thankful for it.”

Still, with distance, certain traces become visible. Not as defining features, but as quiet tools carried forward. Organisation. Structure. An ability to navigate client relationships with clarity and care. “I can do more than just illustration,” she explains. “I can understand what a client needs. I can help shape it.”

Colour Palettes of Life

Lisa was born in the west of France - a place shaped by coastlines. But the inheritance of place, for her, arrives less as geography and more as medium. “My father and grandfather both painted with watercolour. But that was not for me.” She also lived in Paris for a while - a city often romanticised, but for Lisa, did not translate into creative energy.

Years later, in a different city, under a different light, something shifted. If her birthplace was defined by muted tones and inherited imagery, Lisbon arrived as a kind of visual reawakening. Colours lifted, expanded, took on a new vocabulary. “I was so inspired by the colours when I moved to Lisbon.”

“I often go to the beach and draw,” Lisa shares. “I just sit and observe. It’s one of the best moments.”

Not scenes in the traditional sense, but people - bodies in motion and rest, small gestures unfolding without performance. Figures lying in the sun, eating, talking, simply being. These sketches often live in what she calls her “ugly sketchbook” - a space deliberately freed from expectation, where drawings are allowed to remain raw, unfinished, unpolished. Perhaps this is where the place reveals its deeper influence: not only in palette or scenery, but in permission.

There is something distinctly human in Lisa’s work - a visible hand, a looseness, an almost - unfinished quality that resists over-polish. Lines remain open, forms slightly uncontained, as though the drawing is still in conversation with itself.

When I ask her about this - how she arrived at that language, and how she knows when a piece is complete - her answer begins with distinction: “Great question - for me, there are two kinds of work,” Lisa explains. “There are the more refined pieces, where time allows for detail, for layering, for precision. Then, there are the others - particularly in animation - where time itself becomes a constraint. Movement demands repetition, frame by frame, and perfection quickly becomes impossible to sustain.”

The so-called “unfinished” quality in her work emerged partially due to small disruptions such as the unfamiliar act of drawing with her non-dominant hand, and to timed exercises - three-minute drawings, quick responses, imposed limits - shifting her understanding of what a drawing could hold. “I realised that even in a few minutes, I could still express the subject matter,” Lisa reflects.

It is a radical shift: from labour to immediacy, from perfection to presence. Lines become less controlled, more instinctive. “The work becomes more intuitive, less rehearsed,” Lisa says. “It’s not always my usual style, but it’s still a version of it.”

There is freedom in that allowance - in letting something be different without immediately needing to name or refine it. Perhaps this is why, when faced with the Written Corner’s signature question - does the blank canvas frighten or liberate? Lisa’s response is immediate: “Freeing. Always.”

Where others hesitate, she sees possibility. “A page is a space where nothing is fixed, and therefore anything can emerge. Even during creative blocks, I focus on the permission, rather than pressure.”

Again, her “ugly sketchbook” holds that space - a place for drawings that are not meant to be seen, not meant to be shared, not even meant to be good. In a culture that so often demands visibility, there is something radical in keeping work private. In allowing creativity to exist without an audience.

From Reference to Resonance

If Lisa’s personal work resists structure, her client work follows a more defined rhythm - though still guided by intuition rather than rigidity. “I start with a brainstorm,” she says. “Just words. But it is the most difficult part - language to me does not come as naturally as image - it’s important for laying the foundation and to create a loose framework of ideas, and direction.”

From there, the process opens outward. “Then, I create Pinterest boards - one for each project, a growing archive of references, textures, colours, atmospheres,” Lisa shares. “Other moodboards follow, then sketches - many of them are exploratory.”

She shares the example of a recent project: collaborating with a Portuguese wine producer on a label - one of her long-held dream commissions, and a project rooted in both tradition and reinvention; she moved through multiple iterations before arriving at the final direction. “There were a lot of sketches,” she smiles, “before the perfect ones appeared.”

It is a process of a gradual movement towards clarity. When everything aligns, the resolution feels effortless.

Music inspires Lisa’s work. Certain songs linger, repeating themselves over days or months, asking to be translated into image or motion. Some become full projects - visual interpretations, fragments of animation, attempts to hold sound in form. “I have songs in my head for months,” she says. “I feel like I need to animate them.” This was the case with her project, Thelma and Louse - a self-initiated project inspired by the song ‘Thelma & Louise’ by French singer-songwriters Solann & Yoa.

Cinema, too, shapes her visual thinking - its framing, its colour, its rhythm. Then, there is the everyday. Food. Coffee. Wine. The quiet theatre of restaurants. One of her personal projects included illustrating her favourite restaurant, Soeurs. The way light settles on a building, or how a window frame holds its detail.

In Lisbon, she is drawn to miradouros - elevated points where the city opens itself up, and offers panoramic views. Drawing, here, becomes a way of staying with a moment a little longer. Of resisting its passing. “Time stops, and there’s only that moment.”

Movement & Meaning

As Lisa’s practice expands, it moves not only across subjects, but across forms. Illustration and animation sit side by side - sometimes distinct, sometimes interwoven. I ask her how she navigates that decision: how a piece becomes still, or begins to move. “Animation was not something I formally trained in, but something discovered - first through my collective (Inkygoodness created by Lisa Hassell), and then through a growing awareness of the industry itself, as well as the possibilities.”

There is, she notes, a hesitation around animation, even among illustrators. It carries a certain weight: time-consuming, technical, often perceived as complex. But Lisa approaches it as an extension of what already exists. “Even a small movement can be enough,” she says. “Just a flicker, something subtle.”

Rather than building from scratch, she begins with the still image. A finished illustration, already holding its own atmosphere. “Then I ask myself what could move?” Lisa shares, “It’s as simple as that, but movement creates a whole another layer and feeling to an illustration.”

A small example: a self-portrait posted online, where tiny stars flicker gently around her. Minimal, almost imperceptible - yet, it shifts the entire image. It draws the eye, creates rhythm, introduces a sense of life.

This search for dynamism, and sensitivity to where movement might carry meaning, is a key element in Lisa’s work.

A Practice of Continuing

The conversation turns to the reality of freelance life. Having experienced both a traditional working environment and now a self-directed creative one, I ask Lisa what surprised her most in the transition: “too many things to list.”

“One of them, unexpectedly, was solitude,” she shares. “In my previous role, I worked remotely - a setup I once valued deeply. Distance from colleagues felt like relief, even freedom. Hence, I imagined freelance life would extend that feeling: long days alone, fully immersed in her work. I thought it would be great - to be alone all day.”

But the reality felt different. “It can be lonely, and depressing.”

What she discovered was not just a need for solitude, but a need for people. Not only socially, but professionally - shared spaces, conversations, the quiet energy of others working alongside you. I do need time alone. But I also get energy from people, and from conversation like this.”

Practically, her work unfolds mostly at home. But not exclusively. “When the weather is nice,” she says, “I go outside.” Cafés, terraces, parks - the city itself becoming a kind of extended studio. Spaces where drawing meets observation, and work blends gently into life.

When I ask what aspects of freelance creative life are not spoken about enough, her answer shifts in tone. “The money,” Lisa says. It arrives not as a complaint, but as truth - direct, unembellished. “The lack of money - artists, I think most due to the uncertain nature of the work, always have that as some level of stress factor. Less so of a logistical concern, but more as an emotional weight.”

Starting out, she had imagined a quicker transition - an earlier moment where illustration would fully sustain her. But the reality unfolds more slowly. “It takes time, especially when one is a bit more shy to reach out, to network” she says.

Yet, within all of this - there are moments that hold everything in place. When I ask about her favourite part of freelance life, her answer softens: “I’m in a flow state, doing what I was meant to do.”

Those moments where time shifts - slows, dissolves, almost disappears entirely. Where the work takes over, and she moves within it effortlessly. It is these moments, the uncertainty recedes. “It’s hard to define,” she says. “But it’s… everything.”

The conversation turns then to balance - to the invisible tension between creative freedom and the practical realities of making a living from it. The question of how to hold onto something that began as joy, while it becomes work - Lisa shares: “Every morning I try to start with doodling.”

There is also a ritual she returns to: a small system she built with her husband. At the end of January, she asked him to write 28 names on pieces of paper and place them in a small bag. Each morning, she would draw one at random and create a portrait - fictional or real - within 10 to 20 minutes.

I’m curious to know what once felt important, and no longer does as a creative: “I think before releasing my first episode that was super successful on Instagram, I had the wrong idea about followers,” she says. “I was really impressed by illustrators with a lot of followers. I thought if I have more than that - then I’ll have more projects, it will be better, I’ll be happier.”

It was a logic that felt certain at the time. But it did not hold. “Now I have some recognition, and it’s really nice to be recognised,” she says. “But the financial situation is not reflected in these numbers, or popularity. In my opinion, Instagram cannot be the only priority for any creative.”

The origin of her own series is almost incidental. Not planned, but discovered through necessity, emotion, and response. “I don’t really remember deciding it,” she says. “I knew I wanted to do something on Instagram, to be seen, to catch attention.” Before the series, there was a single animation. What Lisa did not expect was the response. That was the moment of recognition - of possibility.

A conversation with another illustrator reinforced it. Someone from her collective suggested she should tell stories on Instagram. At first, she was unsure. “I was not convinced,” she admits. “ I did not expect that engagement. It has been so successful.”

Later in the conversation, the question turns toward what she values now as a freelance artist: “The kindness,” Lisa says. “Being kind to one another. Being kind to someone else, and someone else being kind to you.”

It has become, she explains, a guiding principle in how she now chooses collaborators.

When asked what she would tell her younger self - or someone starting out in illustration - she pauses. “You don’t have less value than someone else,” Lisa shares. “Keep doing. Keep drawing every day, keep practising. This way you can’t be wrong.”

As such, in Lisa’s creative practice, freedom is not a final destination but a way of moving. Whether in the openness of her sketchbook, the rhythm of commissioned work, or the fleeting movement of animation, there is a constant trust in what the hand already knows. In this way, illustration becomes less about arriving at certainty, and more about remaining in conversation with the image as it unfolds - line by line, moment by moment, always becoming.

Thank you, Lisa, for sharing your journey - your reflections and creativity will become an important part of this growing archive! It has been a genuine joy to put some words alongside your illustrations!

Find Lisa on her Website, and Instagram.

Continue the series: if you’ve enjoyed the conversation at this corner, turn the pages back to a…

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P.S. Thank you to everyone reading, sharing, and liking! A special thanks to those who already support The Written Corner - it helps grow and sustain this project, and your generosity means so much. Until the next dispatch x Nora

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This post is part of one of The Written Corner series: Chapters of the City.

London, through the eyes of a writer and the curation of a historian, each piece becomes both record and reflection - a small chapter in the city’s ever-unfolding story, an echo pressed between its pages. From seasonal reflections to literary maps, these writings offer creative nourishment for anyone living in or passing through the city.

Curated Chapters, welcoming the summer months, place emphasis on creative nourishment - where page and place sit in tandem, and imagined worlds meet the stories that shape the city itself. London, a city shaped through literature and the arts, where stories and places continually reflect one another. Exploring the city, centred around creative nourishment - to fill the artist’s well, with moments of gentle, mindful pause woven throughout. Whether a long-time Londoner seeking to reconnect with the city, or a visitor planning their next trip, I hope this page offers a moment of inspiration.

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On this page, you’ll find The Written Corner’s suggested guide to a curated chapter through London, exploring the world of Mary Poppins. Moving between real and imagined spaces, it follows the author, publisher, illustrator, and the London that connects them all. Let the chapter begin!

The Author - P. L. Travers Blue Plaque

50 Smith Street, Chelsea

Author of Mary Poppins, P. L. Travers lived at 50 Smith Street, a quieter Chelsea street set just off the main flow of traffic. Brown brick, softened by time, rises behind a narrow black iron fence, with a short flight of steps leading up to the front door. Above, arched windows hold a stillness against the movement of the street below. Every story begins with its author, and this quiet corner of Chelsea feels like a place to begin - to step gently into the world she created.

Cherry Tree Lane, the fictional home of the Banks family, is shaped not by a single London street but by the blossom-lined roads of Kensington and Chelsea - quiet residential streets where the everyday and the impossible sit close together.

Illustration and Parks

Regent’s Park and 10 Kent Terrace, Regent’s Park

Though illustrator Mary Shepard herself does not have a blue plaque, her father, illustrator E. H. Shepard, is commemorated near Regent’s Park. Parks play a significant role in the Mary Poppins series - places of movement, observation, and quiet interruption within the city.

It is from this wider environment of drawing, attention, and everyday detail that Mary Shepard emerged as an illustrator, later chosen by P. L. Travers to give visual form to Mary Poppins.

The Illustrator - The Slade School of Fine Art

University College London, Gower St

Mary Shepard studied art, painting, and drawing at the Slade School of Fine Art in Bloomsbury. The streets around Gower Street carry that same academic stillness - institutional stone, quiet courtyards, and a sense of ideas being formed in concentrated spaces.

Gerald Howe Ltd. - Publishing Office

Soho Square

Gerald Howe Ltd., operating from Soho Square, brought Mary Poppins into print in 1934, bound in yellow cloth and illustrated by Mary Shepard. Soho Square offers a brief softness in the density of central London, a place to pause and to sit with a book.

Mary Poppins Statue

Leicester Square

In the busy centre of London, the Mary Poppins statue stands among film icons and cultural figures in Leicester Square. It may not be the first thing you notice in the movement of crowds and cinema lights, but it marks a quieter kind of presence - a character who has moved through books, illustration, theatre, and film to become part of the city’s shared imagination. Surrounded by bookshops, theatres, and cinemas, she exists here not as one version, but as many: gathered into a single public form.

St Paul’s Cathedral

St Paul’s Churchyard

St Paul’s Cathedral rises above the city like a steady presence amid movement and sound. On its steps sits the memory of the Bird Woman - a figure who appears in both the books and the film. The stories overlap - not entirely the same, but held together by the image of a quiet exchange on cathedral steps.

Admiral’s House

Admiral’s Walk, Hampstead

Admiral’s House sits above the city in Hampstead, its weathered form long associated with the inspiration behind Admiral Boom - the resident of Cherry Tree Lane who measures time through spectacle and order. Visually echoed in the film adaptation, it belongs less to a single moment in the story and more to the wider imagination of Mary Poppins - a London where character and architecture blur, and everyday life is allowed a touch of theatricality.

Along the way, London reveals itself through literary moments and quiet resonances of its Edwardian past, offering a fuller immersion into the world of Mary Poppins. A pause for afternoon tea, a step into independent bookshops in search of first editions or special prints in rare volumes, becomes part of the experience itself -small acts of wandering that extend the chapter beyond the page. If the timing allows, an evening in the theatre watching the story return in performance - a fitting way to close the day.

🖋 Dear Readers, if this corner of London explored in today’s Chapters of the City holds memories for you, do share. If there are other places you think deserve a gentle pause and a page in this series, I’d love to know.

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P.S. Thank you to everyone reading, sharing, and liking! A special thanks to those who already support The Written Corner - it helps grow and sustain this project, and your generosity means so much. Until the next dispatch x Nora

Follow along on Instagram: @thewrittencorner.

Join readers and creatives - a corner offering inspiration, pause, and creative nourishment.

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This post is part of The Written Corner series: Corner Conversations, preserving voices from the worlds of creativity and culture through a writer’s pen, archiving them as a historian, and listening with the heart of a lifelong theatre child. I grew up in a creative milieu where storytelling was part of the craft itself, passed from one generation to the next as a precious gift. Each anecdote a living legacy, letting their lessons ripple forward to inspire new journeys. Rooted in that tradition, this series is my way of paying homage to the creative spirit that threads through our lives.

In this edition of Corner Conversations, I sit down with Emily, a freelance book cover designer based in Brooklyn, New York. Before embarking on her freelance journey, Emily worked as Associate Art Director at Henry Holt & Company and held design roles at Berkley, Viking, and Penguin Books, following her graduation from the Rhode Island School of Design. Her freelance portfolio spans major publishers including HarperCollins, Penguin Random House, and Simon & Schuster, among others. She is also a guest lecturer at several universities. In this conversation, we explore Emily’s path into graphic design, her reflections on creativity and collaboration, and the behind-the-scenes of book cover design.

Collages of Imagination

To hold a book is to hold a story. The cover greets the reader before a single page is turned - the dust jacket’s colour setting the stage, the fonts performing in a delicate ensemble, the composition hinting at what lies inside. Each design is a promise, a whisper of plot, a glimmer of character, a secret waiting to be discovered. Picking a book from a shelf, brushing fingertips over the texture, is a ritual both intimate and fleeting. Book cover design is a delayed dialogue - one that unfolds over time. The cover speaks first, but it does not say everything. It waits, lingers, reveals itself slowly, asking to be returned to. Book cover design, in Emily’s hands, is this careful orchestration made visible: the curve of a letter, the scale of an image, the shimmer of foil. In this way, book cover design becomes the storyteller of the story itself.

The path toward book design, Emily explains, was never a sudden revelation for her, but a series of small awakenings - a collage of moments shaped by the flick of a pen, the cut and paste of a page, the quiet joy of arranging images. Emily speaks of a childhood rooted equally in drawing and reading, where creativity and story existed side by side. “I had always been into art and loved drawing as a kid, and I’ve always been a big reader.”

By high school, those instincts began to gather direction. “I knew I wanted to go to art college, study some form of design. I’d always loved making PowerPoints and playful school projects, noticing fonts, layouts, colour combinations. Growing up scrapbooking with my mom also felt like design in a way - arranging photos, type, images in an analogue way.”

All of these fragments slowly aligned. The realisation, when it came, was quiet but certain. Book covers suddenly revealed themselves as a possibility. “I was the kind of reader who picked books off the shelf just by their covers,” she reflects. “From that moment on, I did everything I could to try to get into publishing.”

Book design exists in a space of duality: between precision and play, discipline and imagination. It is not creation in a vacuum, but in response - to language, to narrative, to someone else’s world. “It’s such a unique niche in the design world,” she says. “Most of the time, you’re working from a text; it’s a fine line between honouring the text and taking creative agency.”

What emerges is not just an image, but a conversation - between designer, editor, author, and reader - each iteration moving closer to something that feels true.

It is this collaborative tension that Emily finds most exhilarating. “Book covers have evolved,” she continues. “They’re not just marketing pieces anymore - they’ve become art objects people collect.” And within that evolution lies the heart of her work: the act of translation. “I love reading a book and envisioning it in my head, then translating that vision for others.”

Iterations & the Invisible Interlude

Designing a book cover is rarely a solitary act. It is a delicate choreography unfolding behind the scenes, largely unseen by the reader. “For a single book, I might submit anywhere from six to fifteen initial designs,” Emily says. “The design gets presented to a larger group - editor, publisher, marketing, sales.”

What follows is a process of refinement - of distillation. Ideas are sifted through, narrowed, reworked. Colours shift. Typography evolves. Some directions fall away entirely, while others are reshaped and carried forward, eventually placed before the author and their agent, where another layer of dialogue begins. “It can take anywhere from a month to three or four months before a cover is approved in traditional publishing.”

Time, in this process, stretches. There are also moments of immediacy - projects that seem to click into place from the first round - but more often, it is a slower unfolding. “Sometimes it’s a lot of back-and-forth,” Emily reflects. “Authors are close to their work, and it’s understandable that they want it visualised just right. I always think about how much time they’ve put into the book, and always want the authors to be happy.”

In this, empathy becomes one of the most essential - and often overlooked - skills of cover design. The ability to step into the author’s world, to read not only the text but the intention behind it, quietly shapes every decision: “It comes from being a reader first and a designer second.”

Freelancing adds a different kind of layer of complexity. Traditional publishing moves to the rhythm of deadlines - sales conferences, schedules, publication dates set long before the design begins. Independent projects, by contrast, often unfold at a gentler pace. Yet, the pressure of time, Emily notes, can be unexpectedly generative. “Sometimes it forces me to just get ideas out, not be too precious. We can refine later, but the first concept matters most.”

The materials Emily receives shape the first steps of her design. For fiction, she’s often handed a nearly finished manuscript, sometimes only a few chapters, enough to understand the story’s rhythm, tone, and characters. “They make sure the main elements of the story stay consistent so I can start exploring visuals without worrying about the plot shifting under me. The brief might include summaries, target audience insights, comparable covers,” Emily says. Non-fiction, by contrast, often arrives as a proposal, an outline of chapters or a distillation of ideas. “Non-fiction is often different, with fewer visual cues to draw from.” Emily reflects. “It forces me to find the core, the essence of the book, rather than getting lost in detail that might not matter for the design.” The approach changes with each genre, but the goal is always the same: to translate a text - whether fledgling or finished - into a visual language that invites a reader in.

Her days unfold in a quiet rhythm: reading, note-taking, image research, design - then back again. A constant returning. “I read a bit, then do some image research, take notes, go back to reading, then design a little,” she says. “I’m very much a back-and-forth person.”

Sometimes instinct arrives early. “Occasionally I get the vibe straight away - even before reading,” she admits. “But usually, I like to read a good chunk first - it’s exciting to immerse myself in the story before translating it visually.”

When I ask the Written Corner’s signature question - does the blank page frighten or liberate, for Emily, the page is never entirely empty. There is always something to respond to: a title, a name, a fragment of language waiting to be shaped. “That’s why I think I gravitated toward graphic design,” she reflects. “I like having a starting point. It’s about organising what you’re given and presenting it in a way that feels right.”

In this sense, the work is never about pulling something from nothing. It is about noticing what is already there - and learning how to bring it into view.

A New Chapter

The shift from in-house to freelance rarely arrives as a single decision; first, it gathers through small frustrations, creative restlessness, a sense of something not quite aligning. For Emily, the turning point came after several years within publishing, when the work, though steady, began to feel distant from her own creative instincts and rhythm. “I had been working in-house for around five or six years,” she reflects. “And I got to a point where the books we were publishing were not completely speaking to me in the way I had hoped. If you’re not loving the material you’re given, you’re not going to be as creative. I wasn’t growing as much as I wanted to.”

What followed was a decision rooted in instinct: “I’ve been doing this for a while. I should just give freelancing a try. See if I can make it work. But I was so scared at first.” The uncertainty - whether projects would come, whether momentum would build, whether the decision would hold - but after the first few jobs, a new type of certainty settled: “I started getting projects I was more excited about.”

Freelancing, for Emily, and for many others, is not just a career move - it is a different way of structuring creativity itself. One that allows for rhythm, for pause, for stepping away and returning with clarity. “I can take longer breaks, or take a day off if I’m overwhelmed,” she explains. “That kind of balance actually helps me make better work - and deliver better designs.”

Like many freelance journeys, it began with the quiet infrastructure of relationships. “I definitely utilised my contacts from working in-house,” Emily says. Alongside that, cold emails sent to art directors, portfolios shared without guarantee of response. Sometimes she heard back, sometimes she did not - but it worked, overall.

In addition, there is the social media layer - the contemporary equivalent of knocking on doors. Instagram has become a kind of informal network within the book design world. “I’ve made so many connections just through Instagram, commenting on work I like, messaging people,” Emily says.

In this way, freelancing becomes not just independent work, but a web of visibility, connection, and ongoing conversation.

The practicalities of freelancing add another layer to this creative work. Emily typically juggles multiple projects at once, between three and six, balancing deadlines, reading, and design development. “I try to schedule based on round-one deadlines. It’s never perfect because approvals and timelines are uncertain, but I give myself about two weeks from receiving a project to delivery. I also consider the genre, whether it’s something familiar or completely new - it all affects how long it will take.”

Looking outward, Emily sees subtle shifts in the industry itself. A growing openness to freelance designers, new structures emerging - retainer roles, rotating creative voices, a move away from fixed in-house aesthetics. “I’ve started seeing publishers work with designers on retainer, which feels quite new,” she notes. “It’s a good way to bring in different perspectives.”

And with that, a broader evolution of what a book cover - and a book designer - can be. Illustrators, fine artists, non-traditional designers entering the space, reshaping its visual language. Still, she is clear-eyed about balance. “There will always be a need for in-house roles,” she reflects. “You need people to steer the ship. But freelancing allows for rich, creative, and original designs.”

Weight of Words

In a world where so many books are discovered online, the cover has taken on a new role. It is the bookseller’s guiding hand, reaching across a screen - as discussed in another Corner Conversation (with Senior Sales Executive Andrea Tome), Emily nods to this shift, recognising both the opportunity and the pressure it brings. “I definitely feel both,” she says. “When I was really starting in book cover design, the big thing was legibility at thumbnail size - for Amazon, for your phone.”

Yet, trends, she notes, move in cycles. The strictures of digital display no longer dominate all decisions. “I think we’re kind of moving back toward more experimental covers,” she reflects. “For some genres, it still depends on the publisher, how commercial they are, how willing they are to take a risk. But there’s a trend toward making something that stands out in a more interesting way, rather than just screaming at you.”

This tension - between fitting in and standing apart - defines much of her creative challenge. “It pushes me to think outside the box, to do something that has not been done before,” she says. “But it still has to feel rooted in the genre, feel right for the book.”

In this, as in all her work, she balances appreciation with discernment - understanding the power of a book’s first impression while remaining quietly critical of surface-level spectacle.

The Spine of the Work: Edges and Editions

The life of a book cover does not end at the hardcover. In fact, Emily explains, its journey often shifts with the format. The choice to change a cover from hardcover to paperback is usually a sales or marketing decision,” she says. “Sometimes a book did not sell as well in hardcover as expected, so a new cover gives the team something fresh to try, to get stores to sell into.”

Audience, she notes, often dictates these choices. Hardcover buyers may be collectors, drawn to the tactile and the beautiful. Paperback buyers, by contrast, may be more focused on accessibility than permanence. “You might see a literary, beautiful cover for the hardcover, and then when it comes to paperback, it might look a lot more commercial. That’s the intention - to attract a different audience and increase sales.”

Working across these markets means navigating different expectations. “I mostly work with US, sometimes Canada, but occasionally UK or other foreign publishers license my designs,” she explains. “They sometimes tweak it to fit the market.” While major changes require her approval, minor adjustments - type tweaks or small layout shifts - can proceed without her input.

The physicality of the book extends beyond format into touches like sprayed edges, foils, or special endpapers. Special editions - sprayed edges, exclusive variants for different booksellers - have proliferated, met with both fascination and fatigue: for some, a form of overconsumption; for others, the thrill of collecting. I asked Emily, from a designer’s point of view: “When it works as a whole package, you can tell it was planned from stage one, and that is great. But when it’s just another edition of the same cover in a different colour, clearly added at the end to hype sales - see through that, and I’m less enthused. As designers we can suggest an array of elements - from sprayed edges, effects, and endpapers - we can suggest them, but it comes down to budget,” Emily says. “Usually it’s for bigger books, ones they anticipate will sell a lot.” Merchandising - bookmarks, tote bags, other promotional material -is generally handled by marketing teams rather than the cover designer, though the design files she produces often form the foundation.

Contracts and rights also shape the cover’s evolution. “As a freelancer, my contracts are normally just for hardcover, e-book, and sometimes audiobook,” she notes. “If they decide to pick up a paperback later, they come back for that as well.”

In all these variations - format, geography, marketing strategy - the cover is never static. It is a living interface between the story and its readers, shaped by commerce, culture, and craft alike.

The Anatomy of the Dust Jacket

The way Emily speaks of the “whole anatomy” and structure of the full dust jacket is fascinating to listen to. I ask her what, in her opinion, makes a good design: “For me, a really good book jacket does not feel like an afterthought. The cover is usually designed first, but the dust jacket often is not built out until a few months before printing,” Emily says. “Whether you’re a junior designer extending someone else’s cover or the cover designer building the jacket yourself, it needs to feel cohesive - as if one person designed the entire package. I also think about practical details, like full-bleed images and spine placement, which are crucial because sometimes the spine is all a reader sees on the shelf. Special editions with sprayed edges or other effects can set a jacket apart if they’re thoughtfully integrated from the beginning.”

The scope of responsibility depends on the role. “In-house, if I designed the front cover, I usually handled the whole jacket. As a freelancer, it’s rare - I mostly design the cover, and someone in-house completes the jacket. Designing the full jacket requires handling copy, edits, and multiple rounds of feedback, so it’s usually managed internally. Occasionally, I’ll draft the first version, but someone else continues it.”

Timing, too, plays a role. Emily typically begins a project a year or more before publication, while the full dust jacket design comes together in the final months - accommodating blurbs, commercial elements, and finishing touches. “I love checking the physical book when it’s out,” she adds. “Especially as a freelancer, I might not have worked on the dust jacket, so it’s fun to see any effects or finishing details added - like gloss finishes or special textures.”

The full dust jacket is also shaped by questions of continuity - particularly in series work. “An author might work with the same designer repeatedly, if possible - especially for a series,” Emily explains. “They’ll usually bring the designer back to maintain a visual identity. And if that designer isn’t available, someone new will still follow the original design to keep that continuity.”

Prior to the Prologue

For Emily, the book cover is a first conversation with the reader - an invitation extended before a single page is turned, a quiet threshold between the seen and the unknown. “I hope for an ‘aha’ moment,” she explains. “They pick up the book, intrigued by the cover, probably not knowing anything about it. And then, while reading or after finishing, I hope they notice little Easter eggs I’ve placed, or subtle symbolism. That moment of recognition, when they see the cover in a new light, is my goal.”

Reflecting on her own journey, Emily considers the advice she would offer her younger self, standing at the edge of the industry: “Be more experimental. Early on, I was focused on playing it safe, proving I knew what I was doing. That helped me get in the door, but I think there’s a lot to be said for taking risks, really showcasing your creativity. I feel like I’m doing that more now, as a freelancer, with more confidence. But if I’d started like that from the beginning, it would have been amazing.”

For those just beginning, her advice turns practical: “Go to bookstores. Study the covers that resonate with you. Understand the full jacket - not just the front, but flaps, back, barcode placement. Try redesigning covers for books you’ve read, or even ones you didn’t like. Build out full jackets to showcase typography and layout skills. Learn the rules, then break them. Study, practice, and emulate - this is how you develop both skill and confidence.”

Success, too, has shifted shape over time. “When I first started, I wanted to work at a big publishing house and thought that would be the goal. I got there, and I truly loved it. But now, after experiencing other publishers and imprints, my aspirations have shifted. I focus on growing, collaborating with different art directors, and exploring new kinds of projects.”

A book cover, at its core, is not just an object - it is an encounter. A first glance, a held gaze, a question posed without words. And in Emily’s hands, it becomes something more enduring: a visual echo of a story, waiting patiently for the reader to recognise it.

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Thank you so much, Emily, for joining us at The Written Corner - your rich insights into the world of book cover design, and your reflections on freelance life and creativity, are an important addition to the growing collection of publishing reflections at this corner. It has been such a joy to capture your journey (especially as one of my favourite book cover designers!).

Find Emily on her Website, Instagram, LinkedIn.

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P.S. Thank you to everyone reading, sharing, and liking! A special thanks to those who already support The Written Corner - it helps grow and sustain this project, and your generosity means so much. Until the next dispatch x Nora

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This post is part of The Written Corner series: Lettered London. A blend of essay, observation, and creative non-fiction, these dispatches are a writer’s perspective of the city. A page in an envelope, from my desk to yours - offered for a gentle pause and a breath of presence.

In spring, London becomes its own painter, laying out a palette of colours across the city.

Starting with soft washes and larger areas, early spring’s first paint comes as the diluted green haze of trees in the parks - Regent’s Park, Holland Park, Primrose Hill, and many more. Dividing sky and land, a pale lilac is pressed into the canvas at dusk, stretching gently into the evening.

The first day of chalky sunlight catches in the sunglasses of those sitting outside cafés, while other rays shimmer on the Thames, along South Bank. The only dark patches are the coffee spilled on the table, hastily covered by a napkin beside an open book.

Movement across the city - from buses on the road to the river roaming, to people passing by - becomes a gesture, part of a layered painting rather than fixed lines. Cyclists weave through traffic, baskets and tote bags filled with freshly cut flowers. The mosaic blur of commuters emerging from Tube stations into sudden sunlight, glints dancing in shop windows.

Other moments hold still, pauses in the painting - grey ink settling into place: a small table outside a restaurant with a single cup of espresso and an open book; newspapers folded beside a freshly baked pastry, crumbs catching the light; a half-finished sketch in a notebook in a park.

Accent colours appear across the city’s palette, sharper strokes added to London’s surface. Pink confetti scatters near St Paul’s Cathedral, and in Kew Gardens - cherry blossoms are placed as vibrant strokes of pigment. Hampton Court Palace becomes a sea of rainbow, tulips spilling through it like a moving spectrum. Finding more of its spring tones, buckets of ranunculus and peonies sit outside Columbia Road Flower Market. Dragging purple across the canvas, wisteria climb Georgian facades in Chelsea, while accent notes of yellow - daffodils - emerge in forgotten corners.

Suddenly, spring rain deepens the colour - showers arriving without warning, changing the tones, darkening sky and pavement, while intensifying the scent of spring. It blends the smell of paint with a hint of metal in the rain, mixing stone, leaves, and grass.

Then, the wind lifts flower petals into an improvised choreography, as the earth dries after the rain, still leaving traces of petrichor. Breezes become almost visible across the canvas, as the sun peeks through a soft white cloud.

Loose brushstrokes of linen shirts, flowy skirts, and bare ankles compose the painting. Pastels meet perfume puffs in the air, while, in the background, birds carry their song - asking spring to linger a little longer.

The painter’s varnish seals everything into an ephemeral luminance. The accidental marks - petals across the pavement - remain like traces of a brush that has just passed through, the paint still wet.

Sunlight is borrowed; from deep pigments to soft pastel washes, spring has painted over the city and left a soft afterglow.

🖋 Dear Readers, thank you so much for reading and spending time in this cosy corner - I hope it offered a moment of pause and a deep breath. As always, if you have any questions or suggestions for any of the series, please do share.

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P.S. Thank you to everyone reading, sharing, and liking! A special thanks to those who already support The Written Corner - it helps grow and sustain this project, and your generosity means so much. Until the next dispatch x Nora

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This post is part of The Written Corner series: Corner Conversations, preserving voices from the worlds of creativity and culture through a writer’s pen, archiving them as a historian, and listening with the heart of a lifelong theatre child. I grew up in a creative milieu where storytelling was part of the craft itself, passed from one generation to the next as a precious gift. Each anecdote a living legacy, letting their lessons ripple forward to inspire new journeys. Rooted in that tradition, this series is my way of paying homage to the creative spirit that threads through our lives.

In this edition of Corner Conversations, I sit down with Jess Bruno, a content strategist whose work helps creative businesses find their voice, share their stories, and grow with intention. Jess works across 1-2-1 mentoring, group programmes, online courses, and workshops, guiding creatives to use content not just as a marketing tool, but as a way to express themselves in an authentic and sustainable way. Jess is also the host of the podcast Chronic Iconic Business. In our conversation, we trace her journey - from music, through marketing, to content strategy - exploring how she navigated chronic illness and developed a practice that blends craft, strategy, and intuition. Along the way, Jess shares reflections and advice for creatives seeking to make content that resonates, builds connection, and supports both their goals and their creative joy.

From Stage to Strategy

Neon colours, bold words, joyful creating - Jess’ brand and guidance are positivity in its most authentic form. She helps creative businesses thrive online and, by extension, offline. Her work is about shaping stories, coaxing ideas into the light, and finding the unique rhythm of each person she works with. Her energy feels like a ray of sunshine on a summer day, warm and steady, and during our conversation it radiates through every word. This piece is a blend of Jess’ story and her advice - a slice of her world archived: a universe of possibility, brimming with the kind of energy that nudges you forward.

Jess Bruno’s path into content strategy was “definitely not on the bingo card,” she says. “I never thought I’d be a business owner. Let alone working in content. I didn’t go to marketing school - this was never the plan.”

Jess grew up with a singular vision: she was going to be a Spice Girl. Not as a passing childhood dream, but with the kind of wholehearted commitment that structures a life. From primary school onwards, music shaped her days - singing lessons, dancing lessons, acting classes - each step pointing in the same direction. By the time she reached university, she was studying pop vocals, building a life around performance, movement, and sound.

After graduation, music became a livelihood as well as aspiration. Jess coached girl bands, performed on the wedding circuit, and helped artists record toplines - a working musician’s life, far from glamorous, yet thrumming with creative energy. “It wasn’t perfect, and I was not making much money,” she recalls, “but it was my job.”

Then, the rhythm of that life shifted. Jess developed a chronic illness, arriving quickly, and altering everything. “I went from always being out, always partying, always having energy - to having nothing. My life just stopped. I didn’t know what to do.”

The demands of performance, travel, and long rehearsal days became impossible. Gigs were cancelled. Coaching sessions stopped. The music career she had carefully built had to be set aside. Jess began looking for work that could flex around her new reality - something creative, but less physically demanding. In Brighton, she found herself in the events department of a cinema, a small role that would quietly awaken a different instinct.

She was tasked with marketing a modest weekly programme called Kids Club - Saturday screenings, tickets costing just a pound. “I realised I was really, really good at marketing,” she says.

Under her guidance, the programme flourished. Birthday parties filled, audiences grew, and the small local initiative began to expand across the cinema chain in the UK. “I was invited back to London to help run the programme there - a first sign that this new direction might hold meaning.”

From cinema marketing, she moved deeper into events marketing, helping a now well-known boozy brunch brand grow during its early expansion. Once again, she witnessed a creative idea reaching wider audiences. “I was like, oh - I’ve helped another business do this - again.”

Just as this second career began to take shape, life intervened once more. In 2020, the events industry shut down overnight. At the same time, Jess became seriously ill again. “The singing career had already stopped because of my body,” she reflects. “And now my marketing career… I was really, really sick again. Even more sick than before.”

She moved back home, sharing a tiny room with her mum and grandmother, recovering in what she affectionately calls “a tiny little box room.” Yet, even in pause, a new path began to form. Friends from the creative industries, navigating a suddenly empty landscape, started reaching out for guidance. Coaches, makers, and artists sought advice: “I began helping them think about how to talk about their work - how to share it, position it, and reach the right audience.”

A small sentence from her mother crystallised everything: “I bet you could charge for that.”

With that simple sentence, the third chapter of Jess Bruno’s career began - helping creative businesses shape not only their stories but the strategies that allow those stories to reach the world. A quiet pivot had blossomed into a thriving purpose, built in the pauses, in the small tasks, in the spaces life had left behind.

Interrupted, Then Ignited

Starting something new during the pandemic meant stepping into a world both unusually fertile and deeply uncertain. Entire industries paused, while others quietly took shape. People reconsidered how they worked, what they created, and how they shared it. For Jess, the early days of her business arrived not with a clear strategy or carefully mapped plan, but with curiosity and instinct.

“I didn’t know what I was doing,” she laughs. “I didn’t know any of the words - freelance, copywriting, any of it. My laptop wasn’t even Zoom compatible. It was so old and dusty. I didn’t know how to send invoices - I’d only ever been paid cash in hand before.”

What she did know was that she could see clearly where someone’s messaging was falling short, and where it could shine. “I just knew I could give advice to people,” she says. “I could tell them what they were doing wrong and what they should do right.”

Those early conversations, informal and tentative, slowly began to solidify. Encouraged by her mum - who suggested she start charging for her time - Jess sent her first invoice. “I just pulled the number out of thin air but way too low,” she admits. Alongside this, she began sharing advice publicly online, posting tips and reflections on Instagram in response to the questions landing in her inbox.

“I thought I was being really helpful,” she laughs. “Everyone kept asking the same questions, so I thought - I’ll just post about it.” The response was quieter than she had hoped. “Followers were just disappearing.” Afraid of starting from scratch, she had transformed her personal Instagram account into a space for business advice - a shift that initially felt like retreat rather than expansion. Change came gradually. By 2022, the curve began to turn, and over the past two years, her visibility within the niche has grown significantly. “Last year and this year are when things have really started scaling from a visibility perspective.”

Yet looking back, the most striking part of her journey is not a sudden breakthrough, but the quiet rhythm of learning while doing - the slow accumulation of knowledge, the small victories that quietly build toward something larger.

Voice, Volume & Visibility

If the early chapters of Jess’ business were defined by improvisation, the craft that emerged at its centre was far more intentional: storytelling.

At its heart, content strategy is often described in technical terms - algorithms, engagement rates, posting schedules. But when I ask Jess about the core of her work, the answer returns to something older and more human. “That is storytelling,” she says simply.

The approach she teaches her clients is something she calls founder-led content - a method built around the voice and perspective of the person behind the business. “I tell people all the time to use ‘I’ statements.”

Jess works primarily with founders who are the face of their brands - people whose businesses grow from their own experiences, ideas, and ways of thinking. In those cases, the most compelling content rarely begins with the product itself, but with the person behind it.

“If you run a product-based business, sometimes the product is the story,” she says, pointing to brands whose identity is built entirely around what they sell. “But what I know how to do really well is help founders show up and tell their own stories.”

The concept sits alongside the now familiar idea of the personal brand - a phrase that has become something of a buzzword in recent years. Yet, Jess is quick to point out that the way it is often discussed online can feel far removed from the realities of small businesses.

For smaller founders, showing up authentically can feel far more vulnerable. It means sharing opinions, perspectives, and experiences in a way that inevitably attracts some people while pushing others away. Jess argues - that is exactly the point: “I’m in the business of repelling people. You should repel the people you don’t want to work with. That’s how you attract the ones you do.”

Still, storytelling in business does not mean turning every post into a confession. Jess is careful to emphasise that authenticity does not require oversharing. “You don’t have to open your knicker drawer and tell me all your deepest, darkest secrets,” she says. “People probably know about ten percent of my whole story.”

There are clear boundaries she keeps in place - family, personal relationships, private parts of her life that remain exactly that: private. “I’m very open about the things I talk about,” she explains, “but I also have hard lines about what I don’t.”

For founders trying to find their voice online, that distinction can be reassuring. Authenticity, Jess argues, is not about revealing everything; it is about expressing what makes your perspective distinct.

One of the ways she teaches this is through a content pillar she calls “spice content”: “It is not simply about being provocative or controversial. Instead, it asks a simple question: what is your unique edge?”

As such, the goal of content strategy is not simply visibility but resonance - finding the people who connect with the way you speak, the language you use, and the values behind your work. In many ways, is the essence of the craft she teaches: content with a clear voice.

Between the Lines of Launch

One of the recurring questions in The Written Corner is about the blank page - whether it feels intimidating or inviting. For Jess, the equivalent is often a new project, a new offer, or a new idea waiting to be built. Her answer comes with immediate honesty. “I have such a fizzy brain. I’m always putting down a project, starting a new one, putting down an offer, starting a new offer.”

Yet over time, Jess has noticed a pattern in her own working rhythm. Starting something new is rarely the hardest part. “If I don’t give myself enough of an incentive at the end - a pot of gold at the end of the project - I’ll never finish it.”

In that sense, the challenge is less about starting and more about finishing. “It’s the art of finishing and seeing it through,” she reflects.

Behind the finished posts, polished captions, and structured programmes people see online, the process itself is far less tidy. Much of Jess’s work - both for her own business and with clients - involves experimenting, adjusting, and occasionally rebuilding ideas that seemed promising at the start. One approach she encourages is something she calls “building in public”: “As founders and creatives, we do not often take stock of what we’re doing now. We just move straight on to the next thing.”

For creatives especially, documenting the process can feel counterintuitive. Yet sharing fragments of the process can offer audiences a way into the work itself.

Jess recently experimented with this by sharing something unusually simple: a Pinterest inspiration board for an upcoming programme. “It was completely messy,” she says. “But I posted it and said - these are the vibes for the new offer I’m building. People loved it.”

That small glimpse behind the scenes reflects a broader philosophy that underpins Jess’s work: content should be sustainable. Rather than chasing every new trend or platform, she encourages creators to think about what she calls the “least path of resistance.” Equally, it is also about choosing the format that feels most possible on that day. “Today maybe you just post an image with a caption - and that’s great - another day might hold the energy for video, or a longer post, or something more ambitious. The key is consistency without burnout.”

Threads of Connection

Looking at Jess’s work from the outside, it appears to move in several directions at once: one-to-one consulting, group programmes, workshops, and an active presence online. Yet behind that variety lies a surprisingly coherent rhythm. At the centre of it is her work with founders themselves. “I only take a small number of one-to-one clients at a time,” she explains. “It’s very collaborative - we’re speaking all the time, testing things together.”

“Helping them test their content teaches me so much,” she says. “I’ve got a finger on the pulse of what’s working.”

That knowledge flows outward into the rest of her work. The insights gathered from those collaborations inform her group programmes, where she teaches founders how to test their own ideas using both data and instinct. Those same lessons then filter further into the workshops and talks she hosts throughout the year.

“I wouldn’t have the right information for those workshops if I wasn’t constantly doing the work,” she says. In that sense, the different strands of Jess’s practice feed each other - experimentation becoming teaching, and teaching returning again to practice.

It is a rhythm that mirrors the way many creatives work today. In the twenty-first century, artists and makers rarely occupy a single role. They are creators, storytellers, communicators, and often business owners at the same time. For those who choose to use social media as part of that ecosystem, Jess believes the rules have shifted slightly; she says: “Don’t just talk about your art. I want to know about you - the human behind it.”

Yet, she is also quick to acknowledge the paradox of the platforms where these stories unfold. Social media offers extraordinary opportunities for visibility, but it also exposes creators to a constant stream of comparison and distraction. “The issue creatives face right now,” she says, “is that they’re working on platforms that are completely overstimulating.”

Seeing someone else’s success can create the illusion that there is a single formula to follow - one format, one strategy, one kind of post that will unlock growth. But the reality is usually slower, and far less predictable. “The key is not copying what others are doing but understanding the stories you want to tell - and the boundaries around them.”

Once that line becomes clear, something else often happens naturally: the right people begin to gather around the work. “Like attracts like.”

For many creatives, those people are often reflections of themselves - audiences who recognise the same interests, perspectives, and sensibilities in the stories being shared.

Often, Jess adds, those connections do not even need to begin online. While social media remains a powerful tool, she often reminds her clients that the original idea behind it is still the most important. “I am all about putting the social back in social media.”

One exercise she gives participants in her programmes is deceptively simple: reach out to fifty people outside your usual circle, not to sell anything, but simply to start conversations. If one builds the network first, the content will follow.

Archways of Worth

For Jess, the advice she would tell her younger self - and to anyone just starting out on their own creative or entrepreneurial path: “Get an accountant, and fix your relationship with money,” Jess shares. “Know that you can make all the money in the world, and do not be scared to put a price on your work. Asking for what you’re worth is not selfish - it helps both you and the people you’re serving.”

She remembers the early days, scraping by, with twenty pence in her account and a thousand in the red. “I never looked at my money because there was never anything there. Learning to track it, investing in tools, even hiring money coaches - it’s been a process - and such an important one.” Today, with a multi-six-figure business, it’s clear this is advice Jess takes seriously - a lesson in valuing yourself, your work, and the systems that let you thrive.

For Jess, this is not just practical advice. It’s part of a broader philosophy she carries into her work with creatives: the courage to value yourself, the patience to learn as you go, the grace to accept that growth and clarity take time. “Understanding your money is just as important as understanding your craft,” she says, and it echoes as a quiet imperative for anyone carving a path on their own terms.

In the end, it’s the small, steady acts that matter - showing up, doing the work, telling your story, and keeping faith in your own rhythm. The ledger balances, the content flows, the work finds its audience - and somehow, in that measured persistence, the world opens up just enough for your own story to land.

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Thank you, Jess, for sharing your time, energy, and reflections at The Written Corner. It has been a joy to wander through the chapters of your story, your ideas, and to witness the light, warmth, and possibility you bring to every room - and every corner!

Find Jess on: her Website, Instagram, Chronic Iconic Business (podcast), and LinkedIn

As much as The Written Corner is a space for my own writing, I couldn’t imagine it without a place to spotlight inspiring stories and celebrate the conversations that are rooted in creativity. Often, both as people and as creatives, we work in solitude, but this series is a gentle reminder that creation thrives in community. Please feel free to share this story, help foster a creative network among readers, and if you’d like to have your story “written,” reach out to me at nora@writtencorner.com or on @thewrittencorner.

🖋 Dear Corner Community, if any of the topics discussed here spark a question or reflection, let us know in the comments - we’d love to hear from you.

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P.S. Thank you to everyone reading, sharing, and liking! A special thanks to those who already support The Written Corner - it helps grow and sustain this project, and your generosity means so much. Until the next dispatch x Nora

Follow along on Instagram: @thewrittencorner.

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This post is part of one of The Written Corner series: Chapters of the City.
This series explores the places and events that shape London; through the eyes of a writer and the curation of a historian. Each piece is both record and reflection, a small chapter in the city’s ever-unfolding story - a quiet fragment pressed between its pages.

The mingling of noise - musicals, comedies, tragedies - lingers in the hallway before stepping into the room on the second floor at the museum; the sound like a studio where multiple rehearsals are taking place at once. Corridors of memory: doors opening onto other doors, each leading to a different stage, a different voice. Or perhaps a schoolroom, where the overlapping cadence of classes becomes its own kind of score - a cacophony of theatre.

At the V&A, the exhibition Enthoven Unboxed: 100 Years of Collecting Performance closed only a week ago. This post hopes to be a small act of commemoration. An attempt to hold onto something of it: a partial record, a fleeting catalogue, a quiet preservation. For those who did not have the chance to see it before it closed - and for those who will miss it, as I already do - this is a (written) corner to remember. If there was a moment, an object, a detail that stayed with you, I hope you will leave it here too - so that alongside her collection, another may grow: a small archive of memory, our own collection.

From props to programmes, the exhibition extended far beyond Gabrielle Enthoven’s personal collection. It unfolded instead as fragments of performance history - things once held, once worn, once spoken beside - objects that survived the moment they were made for; an archive of afterlives.

Among the first items in the exhibition - and among the earliest pieces in her own collection - was a glove, collected in 1880 from a pantomime at London’s Gaiety Theatre. It was a small act of time travel: a fragment carried forward from pantomime’s golden era.

Nearby, another kind of permanence: not fabric, but marble. Not costume, but memory carved into form. The bust of Sarah Siddons - composed, and almost severe in its stillness - framed by the lavish red drapes of the permanent collection at the V&A. Perennial theatre looking at theatrical history. One woman who collected the stage; another who once ruled it. Timelessness directed the room.

In one of the first corners of the exhibition - stepping away from the sparkles of costumes - sat a ledger. A wage book from the Monstrous Regiment Theatre Company (established in 1975): pages of names, numbers, careful entries. A record not of performance itself, but of the conditions that made it possible. A performer-based collective, they worked with and for women - centring lived experience, creating space where there had been little before. Actors, writers, directors, designers - listed not as exceptions, but as foundation. A small reminder that theatre is not only what is seen under the lights, but what is built behind them - negotiated, written down, accounted for. Another kind of archive. Not of illusion, but of labour.

All throughout the exhibition, different projections showed scenes from an array of performances - moving images among the still objects. Some focused on language and text; voices carrying meaning through rhythm and pause. Others on timing, on gesture, on the craft of acting.

Further along, another invited visitors to put on headphones and step into a different perspective altogether: stage management. Cues called, pages turned, voices over headsets - the invisible choreography behind the visible one. Through the headphones, the visitor could see and hear the stage from the wings rather than the stalls, fully immersed in the backstage life of the musical 9 to 5.

Theatre exists in layers. Performance may disappear each night, but the work around it leaves traces everywhere.

Walking through the maze of performance history, the exhibition felt like a backstage - not of one theatre, but of many theatres at once. Corridors leading to different productions, different decades, different voices; the visitor moving not through rooms, but through performances that had already ended.

One of the displays included backstage passes to various concerts, ranging from the 1970s to the 1980s - small rectangles of permission and access. Displayed now in two small rows, they were a modest addition compared to some of the larger pieces, yet still one of my favourites. Together, they formed a kind of collage poster of concerts - a rainbow of colours, with a dominant green.

Harsh lines of blue and red crossed each other, an ensemble of geometry and rhythm, on the next wall - a set design from the early 1920s in the Constructivist style, Tektonika. While on another, another kind of artwork: the Rolling Stones’ logo, a study in concept, a design as iconic as any stage set.

Paintings, one portraying a village festival in medieval Europe, led the eye to posters from the following centuries, black block letters typed out, the occasional splash of red ink marking the title. Then, the visitor walks into a lush garden - a painting. The frame was full of green trees, bursts of colour among flowers, grass stairs ascending from tall trunks, pink patches blooming as if freshly sown. Indeed, the stage itself included real grass, even a functioning fountain - the set design for Twelfth Night (1901, Her Majesty’s Theatre).

The path leads to a corner of words. Scripts, letters, lyrics - most in draft form, folded, scrawled, crossed out. A corner that feels like home. Fragments of sentences, random scraps, marginal notes. Some words smudged, some corrected, some left unfinished.

Running for two years, the exhibition in 2024 marked a century since the founding of the Theatre and Performance collection at the V&A - a dream realised from Gabrielle Enthoven’s persistence. After years of failed attempts, of proposals turned down and doors closed, her archive was finally accepted in 1924. It is an exhibition I will miss dearly - a space of inspiration, of discovery, of quiet wonder. One that I hope will find its way back into the public eye, not only temporarily (especially after the 2007 closure of the Theatre Museum in Covent Garden).

Even in its absence, it leaves a trace: a memento that theatre survives in fragments, in the spaces between performance and preservation; in the hearts and memories of the people - indeed, by gathering artefacts of theatre, theatre gathers people and creates community, a family.

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🖋 Dear Readers, if this corner of London explored in today’s Chapters of the City holds memories for you, do share. If there are other places you think deserve a gentle pause and a page in this series, I’d love to know.

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P.S. Thank you to everyone reading, sharing, and liking! A special thanks to those who already support The Written Corner - it helps grow and sustain this project, and your generosity means so much. Until the next dispatch x Nora

Follow along on Instagram: @thewrittencorner.

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This post is part of The Written Corner series: Corner Conversations, preserving voices from the worlds of creativity and culture through a writer’s pen, archiving them as a historian, and listening with the heart of a lifelong theatre child. I grew up in a creative milieu where storytelling was part of the craft itself, passed from one generation to the next as a precious gift. Each anecdote a living legacy, letting their lessons ripple forward to inspire new journeys. Rooted in that tradition, this series is my way of paying homage to the creative spirit that threads through our lives.

In this edition of Corner Conversations, I sit down with Helen, a coach for creative people. Helen works with creatives of all stripes - writers, artists, web designers, copywriters, and presenters - supporting them through 1-2-1 coaching, group programmes, and retreats, including her upcoming writing retreat for authors-to-be in rural Wales. Helen is the author of Founders, Freelancers & Rebels, a book guiding creatives as they navigate their own paths and she is also podcaster of For Creative People. In this conversation, we explore Helen’s journey to coaching, the patterns and practices she sees across creative lives, and the ways she nurtures space, freedom, and confidence for others to create.

Coaching, in many ways, is about climate. Not the kind measured in degrees, but the atmosphere we create around our ideas - the conditions that allow something fragile to take root. On the morning of our conversation, the skies above London are winter grey outside my window, but Helen shows me snow surrounding her home - a white hush stretching across the landscape. The cold feels tangible between us, two different versions of the same season. And yet, as we begin to talk, warmth gathers. Helen’s reflections shimmer in the way snow does when it catches the light. Just as the snow outside her window softens edges and reshapes the ground, Helen’s work reshapes the spaces in which creative people stand - making them feel steadier, braver. As the snow gently melts under the sun during our talk, we trace if creativity is something to protect, practice, or recover? Fragile and resilient all at once, it mirrors the snow outside her doorstep.

Ways Worn and Waiting

Creativity is not something Helen arrived at one day, like a train pulling into a long-awaited station; it has always been there - a bright, steady thread stitched through the fabric of her life. “I’ve never done a job that was not creative,” she shares. From summer days at the BBC during her university years, to nearly two decades spent in the quick-moving worlds of PR and marketing, and now in her work coaching creatives into their own becoming.

After almost twenty years in PR, Helen began working for herself. “I was made redundant in 2008 from a senior role at a PR agency,” she says. “At the same time, I was offered a contract - but to take it, I needed to have my own company. It’s quite different from how most people do it. There was no business plan; it was a condition, and a way forward.”

Colleagues from that contract moved into new organisations and invited her to collaborate on freelance projects. Step by step, what began as practical necessity softened into something steadier - a sustainable, independent career shaped as much by trust as by intention.

Helen’s book, Founders, Freelancers & Rebels: How to Thrive As an Independent Creative, captures much of that journey - and the journeys of many others. I ask her why the word rebel felt essential to include. “When I started working for myself, people kept asking me how I did it,” she says. “It rarely felt like they were simply asking for information - they were searching for permission.”

Prior to the book, Helen had started a Facebook group for, which she ran for ten years - with around 4K members. “Now remote and freelance work is much more common,” she notes. “But back then, it was different - what the group showed me was that there were thousands of people out there looking for direction - and reassurance.” Therefore, the rebel in the title speaks to something deeper than simply self-employment.

“It’s about working outside of the designated structure,” Helen says. “Even nowadays, a lot of the creative freelancers I speak to identify as neurodivergent, or as part of the LGBTQIA+ community - seeking a life outside of the mainstream system.”

She remembers school flashcards listing traditional, often gendered careers - jobs that assumed employment within an existing system. “There was never really any suggestion that you could work for yourself. Choosing that path felt like a rebellion against the default.” The creatives she interviewed for the book shared that same spirit. Though from different backgrounds, each of them carried a certain courage - succeeding against the odds, learning through failure, taking risks, and trying again. Independence, in Helen’s world, is not simply about business. It is about authorship - of work, of identity, of possibility.

Patterns of Permission

Working closely with creatives across disciplines - writers, artists, founders, entrepreneurs - I ask Helen whether there are recurring fears, habits, or longings she notices in those who come to her. “A lot of creative individuals imagine they are alone,” she says. “But while they may be working alone on their projects, there are threads that connect them as you say.”

One of those themes is permission.

“In society, most of us are told - either through school or at home - what we can be. There’s a list of jobs to choose from. When you step outside of that structure, it can bring up guilt, shame, confusion, even a lack of direction.”

The turbulence, she suggests, does not appear out of nowhere. “The images we see as children are so crucial. Many of the things creatives do don’t look like ‘actual work’ - and that stirs something.”

She paints a quieter picture instead: a walk through a winter forest. Snow loosening into melt, light caught in its slow surrender - thousands of tiny rainbows trembling at your feet. You are not ‘working’, and yet something inside you is stirring. A thought. A colour. A line. Creation rising almost without announcement. Yet, we have been taught that work should look otherwise. It should sit at a desk, clock itself into hours, live inside offices or warehouses, produce something solid enough to point at. We have been handed a narrow image of labour - fluorescent-lit and measurable - and told to recognise it as the real thing.

Creative work often resists those frames. “Lack of structure can hold us back too,” she says. “The different hours.”

Validation also plays a part - the quiet hinge on which so much turns. “When we work for ourselves, it’s very unlikely someone will come along and give us permission,” Helen says. “It’s a bit like in The Wizard of Oz - the characters are looking for someone to give them the heart, the brain. We look for our own Wizard. But the moral of that story is that they had those things all along.”

I asked Helen what creatives have taught her about creativity. “My book is a collection of lessons gathered from others along the way”, and I keep learning through my coaching as well,” she says. “I also have a podcast where brilliant insights come up. One of the interviewees was my sister, who really inspired me to think differently about creative blocks. She says that if you feel blocked as an artist, it’s often not about creativity itself but about something else going on in your life that needs attention. There’s a clear connection between mindset, wellbeing, and what we express artistically in the world.”

In the act of naming, we find a subtle authority - a bridge from thought into being. “The way we consider ourselves, the titles we give our projects, and even the titles we give ourselves - there’s power in that,” Helen explains. “When I interviewed Katie Parsons for my podcast, we talked about the job title of ‘creative.’ In advertising agencies, it’s a title that is often bestowed, and people wonder, ‘How do I become that?’ How we choose to name ourselves matters - it can shape both positive and negative outcomes.”

Helen recalls a personal example: “For my own journey, I did The Best 90 Days Ever program with Hannah Isted - it helped me with my own group project. We changed the name of one of my workshops - the product itself did not change, but the energy shifted. It was a pivotal moment that showed me how much influence naming has.”

I was curious whether Helen’s relationship with creativity changed after becoming a coach for creatives. “It evolved over time, especially after becoming an accredited coach,” she reflects. “Particularly, I noticed how hierarchy affects creativity. In PR agencies, there’s a lot of emphasis on levels - assistant, senior, junior - and that hierarchical model can hold back ideas and people. When coaching, I remember an event where organizers suggested I wear a suit to create ‘gravitas.’ That’s not what coaching is about. Hierarchy in creative spaces is often a default safety net, but magical things happen when we let it go. Hierarchical structures are, in my opinion, built out of fear.”

When coaching, Helen tries to fully immerse herself in the workshops she leads. She is intentional about not placing herself on a pedestal, even unintentionally, choosing instead to move alongside participants rather than above them. It’s not always easy, she admits; there’s a vulnerability in that position, and she’s not sure she’s entirely there yet. But the intention remains clear: to create shared spaces where ideas can flow, and where creativity breathes more freely - unbounded by hierarchy or expectation.

The Space Between Lines

When I ask the Written Corner’s signature question - does the blank page frighten or liberate – and what it is like to sit beside so many creatives and witness their arrival at the blank page, to watch someone begin - Helen smiles at the question. “A beautiful question! Something I remind my coaching clients of a lot is this: most of the time, you are not truly at the beginning. You’re not at the ‘beginning’ when you book a discovery call with me, not when you are reading this piece, subscribing to a series on creativity, and even when you sit down to start your first project - be it a painting, a poem, or something else. By the time you sit down, though the page may seem blank, it really is not.”

Tuning into intuition, Helen adds, is another key. “Allowing the subconscious to come forward, listening to our own bodies - these things help us move past the fear of the blank page and start the work. Paying attention to gut feelings is often the first step.”

In group sessions, she often reads a passage aloud - in recent months, frequently from The Almanac by Lia Leendertz. “It’s really grounding, a foundation for any blank page,” Helen explains. She also invites guest authors to join for Q&As - Lia was one of those guests. Around us, there are always cues: snowy fields, grey London skies, the colours of a jumper, artwork on a wall, even pieces made by my sister. “Even though the page seems blank, it is threaded with stories and patterns waiting to be noticed.” The world itself spills into the page - it is never truly empty.

Opening the Room

Helen coaches in many forms - when I ask how these differ energetically, she reflects, “Though a group is made up of various individuals, they create a unified energy. I still feel I coach and approach that group as one entity.”

She describes the Write the Book groups, where participants often meet for the first time, yet a distinct energy emerges with each cohort. “One-to-one coaching is intimate, transformative,” she continues. “People come with an aim. Even in a limited time, some kind of transformation always happens. The client brings the willingness - I go as deep as they are prepared to go, and I show up willing to be vulnerable too. I never really know what they’ll bring; it’s always co-creating.”

One element I have always appreciated in Helen’s work is the range of programmes she offers, not just in energy but in accessibility. From free tasters and small workshops to long-term group programmes like Write the Book, retreats, and individual coaching, Helen designs entry points for many paths. I ask her about the importance of accessibility and inclusivity.

“I never do any hard-sell,” she says. “I want people to participate and to feel invited, and then they can choose. I recently completed a series of free community workshops - completely free of charge. Locally, winters can be harsh, and not everyone has the funding for wellbeing, yet it is probably when we need it most. Curating these sessions is deeply important to me - it always comes back to values.”

Community and diversity, she emphasizes, are central to her practice. “Financial barriers are part of that. If you only offer premium products, you won’t have a truly diverse group. That would be a loss - missing voices, experiences, perspectives. It would create an echo chamber, a two-dimensional space, and deplete the experience for everyone involved. Coaching should not be an elite product.”

The Castle by the River

From the circling of permission to taking tangible steps that nurture it, Helen’s writing retreats are intentionally slow and spacious. I ask her what happens when creative people step away from their usual environments.

“There’s space for dreaming,” she says. “Allowing ourselves to dream, letting our minds wander - these are so important. During my retreats, there are also many sensory experiences: delicious food, beautiful scents, movement through yoga or dance, visits to bookshops, meeting new people - all of it awakens the creative spirit. Even the time before the retreat is sacred. Traveling to the location becomes part of the journey, both real and metaphorical, a way to connect with our creative selves.”

Helen paints a picture of one retreat in rural Wales: a castle by a river, a town where time slows, full of bookshops, where the pace of life encourages reflection. “Arriving there is an invitation - to connect, to tune in, to meet wonderful people, both attendees and speakers.”

“All these fabricated structures we live with every day are removed,” she continues. “There’s something about slowing down that actually speeds up the story we are trying to write.” Her next retreat is in August: A Writing Retreat for Creative People.

Gathering Sparks

Community building sits alongside Helen’s coaching work and connects many, if not all, of her endeavours. She co-founded the first Pride in Hay-on-Wye with her friend Graham Nolan. “I’m proud that we did it,” she says. “As you say, it’s all part of my ethos and values to work on projects like this. But it was a huge amount of work - fundraising, hiring someone to teach volunteers drumming, closing the road for the parade, managing health and safety, publicity.” She pauses. “Though it was a beautiful event and so many were grateful, I also got trolled online and received a huge amount of negativity. I found that very hard.”

Exploring new avenues of creativity is central to her journey - and building new projects from the ground up. “I like starting projects but then handing the baton on,” Helen reflects. “I’ve done this in many areas of my work - creating things and then passing them on.”

Creating a podcast was another adventure. “It was challenging in terms of production - producing a media product - but deeply fulfilling,” she says. “As a child, I loved putting on radio shows with cassette recorders, and it was wonderful to see that childhood memory manifest itself in the present.” She secured a small grant from the local council and collaborated with a professional sound engineer and musicians, embracing the often-overlooked joy and importance of working together.

Inkless Horizons

On the topic of guidance for creatives and her younger self, Helen offers a thoughtful reflection. “I used to get so caught up, particularly when I was younger. I would get upset when something, even small, didn’t go according to my vision - if a meeting went badly, if I wore the wrong outfit to an event, if a project fell through, or even if someone didn’t like the sandwich served at an event. Truly, it all felt so important. What I realized is that none of it deserves that kind of emotional upheaval. It does not matter; it should be fun.”

“When we’re younger, everything can feel high-stakes,” she continues. “It’s like that game Operation - the buzzer could go off if you touch the wrong spot. For the first ten years of my career, I felt like I was living like that: strung up, stressed, constantly afraid of getting things wrong. PR, not the ER - creative projects probably don’t need that level of stress. Caring deeply about a project is vital, but how we handle situations and talk to ourselves often worsens the quality of our work and our own mental health. We can just… enjoy it.”

Inspired by the blank page and the fresh snow surrounding her house, Helen adds a gentle reminder: it’s easy to forget that every day is full of possibility. It’s easy to get stuck in routine, to stare at our phones, to worry - but every day is a fresh page, waiting to be written.

For Helen, success is no longer measured by accolades. “It’s about being rather than doing,” she reflects. “Being creative, rather than doing something, is the key - arriving at that feeling.” Ticking off a project, winning a grant, or receiving an award, she continues, is not what defines success. Instead, it lies in presence: inhabiting each moment fully, paying attention to the small, unfolding details, and living as authentically as possible. In this way, creativity is not a task to complete but a life to inhabit.

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Thank you, Helen, for spending time at our corner - your reflections and wisdom are deeply valued. It has been a joy to mark the end of winter’s hush with you, and to glimpse the promise of spring turning toward summer through the light of your work and upcoming retreat!

Find Helen on her Website, Podcast, Writing Retreat for Authors-to-Be, Newsletter, and Book: Founders, Freelancers & Rebels.

As much as The Written Corner is a space for my own writing, I couldn’t imagine it without a place to spotlight inspiring stories and celebrate the conversations that are rooted in creativity. Often, both as people and as creatives, we work in solitude, but this series is a gentle reminder that creation thrives in community. Please feel free to share this story, help foster a creative network among readers, and if you’d like to have your story “written,” reach out to me at nora@writtencorner.com or on @thewrittencorner.

🖋 Dear Corner Community, if any of the topics discussed here spark a question or reflection, let us know in the comments - we’d love to hear from you.

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P.S. Thank you to everyone reading, sharing, and liking! A special thanks to those who already support The Written Corner - it helps grow and sustain this project, and your generosity means so much. Until the next dispatch x Nora

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This post is part of one of The Written Corner series: Nora’s Notebook. More personal than the main journal, it’s a tiny addition to the collection. It opens the pages of reflections on creativity, footnotes of a freelancer, and my own stories - straight out of the pocket, the ink still fresh.

Names exchanged, phone numbers typed in, intentions offered, fragments of hope shared. Attending networking events and building connections within the creative industries is often part of the journey, and to me, it is about building walls together - a room of shared hopes and anecdotes.

Over the past month, I attended one of the best networking events I’ve been to in a long while. It made me reflect on why networking so often gets a bad reputation, and why this particular January evening gave me an even deeper appreciation for it - especially as someone who has always been quite fond of these kinds of gatherings. In sitting with those thoughts, this piece reflects on that experience and explores the approach one might take, as well as what - in my opinion - should sit at the heart of it all. Let this page of the notebook open.

The wind swept through London that evening as I arrived in the centre of the city. Stepping inside, into the warmth, time slowed - that familiar anticipation usually reserved for a theatre show. This time, it was a theatre networking evening. In the middle of London, gathered for conversation. More than the event itself as a date in the calendar, what stayed with me was the quiet reassurance of being among people who speak the same language, even when we’re still figuring out the words.

By nature, theatre socials tend to be among the most welcoming and high-energy gatherings there are. People listen with open ears, responding by reflecting on one another’s journeys and aspirations with genuine warmth. There is an ease to these rooms - a sense that enthusiasm is not something to be rationed, but freely offered. This is not something I’ve found to be true across all industries/career paths. Yet, it’s precisely this contrast that makes creative networking evenings so genuine (and my opinion, effective). There is much to be learned from these kinds of encounters - from the generosity of spirit they foster, and from the way encouragement circulates instinctively.

Theatre, at its core - and to those wishing to enter its realms - is more obviously a team effort from a relatively early stage (pun intended). Most of all, those who have stepped over its threshold have already experienced the training, the work, and the hustle alone. As a result, true appreciation emerges when the journey, or at least a path of it, can be shared.

The magic of networking begins to lose its charm when it is reduced to career advancement alone. In doing so, it moves away from its very essence: the strengthening of community. This feels more important than ever: to foster real-life connections (or online spaces that can meaningfully spill into the physical world) in an age shaped by artificial, tech-led modes of engagement. Networking, from the outside, can appear contrived (and when done poorly, it indeed is). Yet, evenings like the January one followed a far older tradition: the chance meeting of people with shared interests, guided by curiosity rather than outcome, and held together by the simple, but nowadays lost, art of conversation. It’s a kind of gathering that builds community not only in service of careers, but in service of belonging.

One of the clearest differences between creative, human-led networking and more traditional models lies in where the focus rests. In creative spaces, attention is often directed outward - toward others. Toward being inspired by someone else’s work, considering how I might support them, and seeing how we can build a community together. Traditional networking, by contrast, tends to centre the “I”: what can I gain, what can I take. This shift pulls the mind toward ego and outcome.

The emphasis on numbers cripples the true essence of gathering: quantity over quality, time pressure over presence. In my view, a more meaningful approach to networking favours fewer names exchanged, but held with greater care. Fewer events, perhaps, but longer-lasting relationships, and a rhythm that can be sustained even later in one’s journey. It becomes less about showing up everywhere, and more about choosing wisely - attending a handful of gatherings rather than exhausting oneself in all, picking a few and showing up with real presence (and actually enjoying oneself, as the event aligns with one’s own rhythm).

Many associate networking with pressure and awkwardness. Yet, one of my biggest takeaways is when you are in the right room, enjoyment follows naturally. If there is a sense of unease, perhaps it is not the right room - and one has every right to leave. There is a particular relief in being among people where one doesn’t have to explain oneself, or why the work matters; a room where understanding is assumed, and conversation can simply begin.

It is not about business, but about presence. Not about gain, but about what I can give. Not about building a network, but about nurturing a circle of trusted collaborators. Not about the immediate moment, but investing in the unfolding future. It is sharing, not a transaction.

It is about people making rooms for one another - as themselves, as potential collaborators, as those seeking advice to bring one dream to life, and to help hold another’s dream. We need these rooms. In a way, my intention with The Written Corner that it creates such a corner, and it is one of the guiding principles of the series Corner Conversations (all welcome!) Especially today, and especially within the creative industries, the work survives through introductions, listening, and conversations.

Generosity travels quietly, but in a powerful way: a conversation, whether during a networking event or one archived in this corner, can change the shape of a day, a week, or even an entire path. Creativity is rarely solitary, even though the core work often is, and networking is a reminder of this: we gather to remind each other that the dream, the work, is possible. Perhaps it is another reason we keep showing up - not to be seen, but to recognise one another, and to help build the walls of the room where we work together, not against each other, and never alone.

P.S. Thank you to all the lovely souls from the networking evening who inspired this piece - you know who you are. I’m so grateful that you are part of the Written Corner readership!

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🖋 Dear Readers, many of you have already written to me, sharing what you’d love to read next in this and other series - thank you for that. Please keep doing so, or leave a note in the comments.

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P.S. Thank you to everyone reading, sharing, and liking! A special thanks to those who already support The Written Corner - it helps grow and sustain this project, and your generosity means so much. Until the next dispatch x Nora

Follow along on Instagram: @thewrittencorner.

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In this edition of Corner Conversations, I sit down with Olivia Rafferty, a songwriter and musician from North-East Scotland. Olivia is also a poet, and a podcaster. Her EP Hurricane explores love, loss, and self-reflection, while her debut album, Typical Forever - funded by the Geologists’ Association - takes inspiration from how geologic processes mirror the rhythms of human experience. In this conversation, we explore Olivia’s journey as a songwriter, the shaping forces of place and curiosity, her reflections on time and craft, and the unusual, inspiring spaces where her music comes to life. This piece also celebrates her latest creative endeavour - writing a tiny song every day for the Winter Olympics - marking another milestone in her music practice (congratulations!).

Tracing the Layers

Listening to Olivia’s music is like tracing the slow, patient rhythm of the Earth itself - the gentle erosion of stone, the way sunlight catches on a cliff face, the quiet, unhurried turning of seasons. Each song feels is a journey through layers of time, textures, and feeling, a geological expedition mapped in chords, melodies, and lyrical reflection. As her music unfolds, through geology, time stretches beyond the human frame, carrying you along hidden trails, past the familiar and into landscapes that feel at once external and deeply personal. There is a sense of wonder and the sweetness of nostalgia in her craft; through her songs, I find myself reflecting as much on my own interior landscapes as on the paths she traces in sound.

Olivia grew up in North-East Scotland, a landscape that quietly shaped the first movements of her songwriting life. Music was not something discovered, but something always present. “My parents filled the house with music,” Olivia recalls. “Also, unlike England, where there are so many artists, Scotland has fewer - but they often carry a strong, distinctive identity.” As such, Scotland - long known for its rich musical culture - formed part of her early music education, and she cites figures such as Annie Lennox and Gerry Rafferty - the latter, she shares with a smile, was her grandfather’s cousin, though they never met.

Picking up the guitar at a young age felt instinctive. “I had an unrequited love, and pouring my heart out into a guitar just felt like the most natural thing to do,” Olivia says. From a music-forward school - where she studied the French horn for seven years, sang both solo and in groups, and immersed herself in performance - to university in Edinburgh, music remained a constant thread. Classical foundations slowly gave way to something more contemporary, shaped by late-night open mics and evolving influences.

Curiosity became central to her creative spark. At university, while studying English Literature, Olivia filled her schedule with electives that stretched far beyond the expected - Astronomy, History, Music Composition, Counterpoint and Harmony. That appetite for “getting stuck into something new,” as she puts it, continues to define her songwriting. If you listen closely to her work, that intellectual and emotional curiosity is woven through the melodies.That same spirit of exploration would eventually lead to her debut album - notably supported by the Geologists’ Association - even though the journey itself was often rocky on the way to the rocks.

Minute Melodies and Hovering Horizons

During the pandemic, Olivia joined a mentorship programme for musicians. At that point, she had not yet released music on Spotify and was still working toward her first EP - a process that felt endless. “Part of me was seriously blocked,” she admits. “I felt like there was a step I just did not know how to do - because I’d never done it before.”

One particular call during the programme proved unexpectedly pivotal. “The mentor pointed out all the fears I was already feeling - the deepest ones about me as an artist,” Olivia shares. “It felt like a deep wound. Some of it felt like misplaced criticism, especially in a programme I had applied for and been accepted into.”

But within that difficult conversation was one piece of constructive feedback that stayed with her. Olivia had a Bandcamp project under the name INKA, where she released songs in a different style. She refers to them fondly as her “silly little songs” - vignettes about living in Canada for a year, the liminal space at the end of university, working as a waitress.

After sitting with the feedback, she recognised: “there comes a moment in a songwriter’s life when the attention turns outward. You spend years writing about huge emotions, about yourself, about experiencing life for the first time. But then something shifts - you begin to look beyond yourself.” She sensed she was already moving into that transition when the mentor challenged her to develop work she could potentially apply to the Arts Council with.

What followed became one of the most defining creative developments of her career so far. “I decided to write 100 of those tiny songs - in 100 days.” During the stillness of lockdown, 100 Tiny Songs was born. Each piece under a minute long, written daily - a discipline that became both diary and devotion. “It was a huge boost to realise I could show up every single day,” she says. “And allow the song to be whatever it needed to be that day.”

The project was not just prolific; it was liberating. It reframed output as practice rather than product. It also opened new channels of connection, drawing in listeners who resonated with these intimate musical snapshots. In the quiet constraint of a minute-long song, Olivia found expansiveness - proof that sometimes the smallest forms hold the deepest truths.

From Sediment to Studio

It was from this mindset of proving something to herself, and questioning inherited ideas about time and productivity - that her next body of work began to take shape. “While I was doing 100 Tiny Songs,” Olivia tells me, “I was also thinking about what I wanted to do for my DYCP application.” One phrase from that earlier mentorship conversation lingered: the suggestion that she had ‘wasted time’. “It was the exact thing none of us need reminding of,” she says. Yet, that very idea became the seed of something unexpected. It was the pandemic after all - a period that, for many, felt suspended. Creative plans paused. Careers stalled. Life reduced to stillness. The concept of wasted time, during a time that itself felt wasted, began to preoccupy her.

“I started looking into long-termism,” Olivia explains. She began interviewing friends about their own experiences of “wasted time” - stories ranging from the uncertainty of being a slow starter after university to navigating chronic fatigue syndrome. What emerged was an archive of reflection. “It became extremely heavy,” she admits. “I had to ask myself - how can I reframe this? I still wanted to address these feelings, but differently.”

It was a moment to re-frame time itself. “I’ve always been someone who likes reaching out to people and starting conversations,” she says. “But before, I didn’t feel like I had anything concrete to present; no purpose. When you give yourself a project, it becomes much easier to reach out.”

During this phase of inquiry, someone recommended a book: ‘Timefulness’ by Marcia Bjornerud - a work rooted in geology and the deep timescales of the Earth. “When I started reading it, I thought: everyone needs to know more about geology,” Olivia laughs. “I was genuinely surprised by some of the stories and I felt reassured by the age of the planet - by the rate at which it moves, and how it’s always changing. Suddenly, time had context. Including my own.”

In the Earth’s history, there are vast periods where, on the surface, nothing seems to happen. And yet, beneath that stillness, tectonic plates shift. Pressure builds. Mountains rise slowly over millennia. What had once felt like stagnation began to resemble gestation.

Curiosity deepened into study. Olivia read further, joined an online geology class, and eventually attended a geology walking tour through London - from Victoria Station to Westminster - examining the city through its stones: pavements, pub walls, building façades. History written in rock. By then, the album was forming. When she decided to formally pursue it, she reached out to the expert who had led the tour. That connection led her to a funding opportunity through the Geologists’ Association - a grant supporting public engagement with geology. “At its core, I felt better about myself, and my creative projects because of what I’d learned,” Olivia reflects. “I wanted to share that perspective with others.”

The funding made the album possible, covering studio time. It also gave the project material grounding. What began as an internal reframing became a fully realised body of work - music shaped by strata, sediment, erosion, and deep time. Indeed, the metaphors woven through the album - mountains forming, fault lines shifting, rock faces enduring - render Olivia’s music, quite literally, timeless.

When the funding was announced, something shifted externally, too. A new audience emerged - one that might never have discovered her through traditional music channels. “People who probably wouldn’t have found my music otherwise,” she notes.

It also opened what she often calls now “Different Rooms” - a phrase she shares frequently on Instagram when speaking about creative careers. Not every opportunity fits the conventional venue. Suddenly, she was performing at the Yorkshire Fossil Festival, at Oxford’s Natural History Museum, and in the library of the Geological Society. Spaces where science and song met in quiet conversation.

Alongside these performances, Olivia publicly documented the writing process itself. An audience formed not just around the finished product, but around the unfolding. “I shared the whole journey,” she says. “People heard most of the songs before they were recorded. That helped build something - an audience I didn’t really have before.” In tracing geological time, Olivia found both perspective and pathway. What once felt wasted became foundational, strata stacked into sound.

Echoes of the Craft

Fascinated by the idea of changing rooms - literal venues, literal audiences - I ask Olivia where that shift truly began. Before the geology project, she had moved to London to complete a music course. She immersed herself fully in the city’s music scene, surrounded constantly by other emerging artists. “Being in the London music scene, I quickly realised it was full of people with the same - or very similar - dreams,” she says. “And it felt like we were mostly playing gigs to each other. Musician to musician.”

“There’s a difference between your peers and your audience,” Olivia reflects. “I was craving to build that community - the listeners who connect with the songs in a different way.”

Being surrounded by peers brought another layer of pressure. “Not from a place of jealousy,” she clarifies, “but competition and self-criticism were definitely there. It inhibited me. There was too much noise, too much networking. It felt intense - and at times, unauthentic.”

The lesson of carving out a different path was not strategic at first; it unfolded gradually. “I did not realise how important it was until it happened,” Olivia admits. “It was not my original goal. But once it began, I knew I had to lean into it. It made me more visible, and suddenly I was reaching people - from scientists to academics, for example -who I would not have otherwise.”

“Everything was about the same,” she says. “It was still me. The same skillset. The same talent. But because I transferred it into a different environment, I suddenly saw the value of what I could do. If you always stay in the same circles - around people with almost identical skills - you start to undervalue your own and you forget who you are as an artist.”

When I ask the Written Corner’s signature question - does the blank page frighten or liberate? - Olivia smiles thoughtfully. “It depends whether it’s fully blank,” she says. “Often there’s already a topic, or something has been marinating for a while before I ever sit down. Naturally, sometimes nothing happens. But I think the magic is in showing up, rather than producing.”

She speaks candidly about something rarely addressed in creative discourse: seasonality. “All creators are seasonal,” she says. “Especially for those who identify as living in a woman’s body - hormonal cycles make a huge difference. There are times for creating, and times for resting. Resting is part of the process.”

Before creativity can flourish, a foundation is needed. “We also have to take our hierarchy of needs into account,” Olivia explains. “There was a point in my life when I couldn’t write at all. And I had to tell myself that was okay - even when it really did not feel like that at all.” The timing was paradoxical. She had just finished her London music course - a moment that, externally, should have felt like launch. Instead, she froze.

“There was this expectation that I should feel inspired and ready,” she says. “But the burden of being taught ‘how to properly write a song’ became creatively stifling. It introduced strict rules to something that had once felt instinctive - a natural gift.” Beyond the classroom, life was happening. Financial instability. Part-time jobs. The loss of her grandfather. It affects one’s ability to create.

Stepping away from music, even temporarily, felt enormous. “It felt like a break-up. Before that, I had never stopped making music. But even though I kept showing up to the blank page, it became harder and harder. Eventually I realised I needed to walk away for a bit,” Olivia says. “As creatives, we sometimes also forget that first we need to go out and experience life - so we have something to write about. Human interaction. Seeing other art. Being inspired by other forms.”

In stepping outside - into different rooms, different disciplines, different rhythms - Olivia deepened her craft.

Navigating as a Contemporary Creative

Working as a musician in this day and age is profoundly different from even a decade ago. The ways we listen have shifted. Platforms rise and disappear. The industry mutates at speed.

“When I was a teenager, I had completely different goals - but often that was because the platforms I was aiming for do not even really exist anymore. iTunes felt huge. Now it’s different again,” Olivia says. “Also, there were historical moments when creative ecosystems looked radically different; certain eras of British music - Britpop, for instance - were shaped not only by talent, but by circumstance. Some of those bands wouldn’t have been able to make their music without the benefits system supporting them, and so artists could survive - modestly, yes - but with enough stability to have time to create. That’s incredibly hard now.”

To lead a creative life today is to make deliberate choices. Often difficult ones. “Sometimes they feel closer to sacrifices,” Olivia says. “You’re stepping away from traditional expectations - buying a house, climbing a clear career ladder, ticking off milestones in the ‘right’ order. For me, if I made money, I invested it back into the craft.”

Financial pressure, societal narratives of success, comparison - they all surface eventually. “There are moments when you ask yourself, why am I doing this?” she admits. “Sometimes you question it. Sometimes other people question it. But for a true artist, there is literally no other way. I was born to be a musician. It’s not a question.”

Making peace with that certainty helps steady the turbulence. Sustaining the work often means finding jobs that fit around creativity - roles that provide structure without draining the source entirely; layered it onto all of this is the internet. “It’s an amazing tool,” Olivia says. “But it’s also distracting - I do not mean scrolling endlessly - but because you feel like you have to be everywhere. All platforms. All the time. And doing it all - without a team - is impossible.”

Her solution is pragmatic: focus. “Choose one platform for a period of time. Put your energy there. Then switch if you need to. But do not try to do everything at once.” There is another subtle trap, too - the lure of instant affirmation. “The real work - songwriting for , writing novels for you - is long. And often lonely,” Olivia reflects. “Social media gives you an instant dopamine hit - if you become a full-time social media manager instead of an artist, something needs to shift.”

Streaming has complicated the economics of music further. Revenue rarely flows proportionately back to the musician. Touring is costly, often barely breaking even. Sustainability becomes a puzzle. “One of the best things I’ve done is Kickstarter campaigns and releasing physical CDs,” Olivia shares. “With analogue and physical media coming back into trend, being an active fan is one of the best ways to support an artist - and each other in the creative community.”

Physical releases create a different kind of exchange. “When someone buys something directly, it’s an active step. It’s more connected. You’re giving listeners the opportunity to engage in a tangible way.”

Alongside her album, she continues to nurture other creative threads. Her newsletter, 100 Tiny Songs, extends the spirit of that original pandemic challenge - peek into Olivia’s life; she also co-hosts the podcast Write Me a Song with Edward Randell. “In each episode, we explore a different way to write a song,” she explains. “We wanted it to be different from other music podcasts, which often focus on breaking down existing songs or feature interviews. This show is about giving prompts, exploring the craft, and supporting a creative community.”

Projects, Peaks, and Permission

During our conversation, Olivia had just crossed the halfway mark of her current creative challenge: writing a tiny song every single day throughout the 2026 Milano Cortina Winter Olympic Games. Each piece is inspired by a different sporting event - a musical response to the rhythm, tension, and poetry of the Games. This year, she once again gave herself permission to follow an idea. “Other than tapping into new creative projects and feeding curiosity,” she tells me, “it is equally about having fun with the craft - and proving to myself again that I can do this.”

That word again stands out. Prove yourself again. Not in a competitive way, but in a renewing way. She encourages other creatives to do the same: set yourself a project, especially one with a clear frame or time limit. Writing an album is one kind of mountain; writing a tiny song every day is another. The scale may differ, but the sense of completion - of crossing a finish line - carries its own quiet power. As such, this Written Corner piece commemorates this small but meaningful celebration of her reaching that finish line - congratulations, Olivia!

When I ask Olivia what success means to her, her answer begins with self-knowledge. “It means something different to everyone. I’ve never defined success by the size of a stadium,” she says. “To me, it’s about having interesting projects and being authentic. Presenting music in different ways. I look up to musicians who build a dedicated audience by simply being themselves and committing to interesting ideas.”

She continues by expanding the idea beyond music itself. Success, to her, is also about lifestyle. About questioning what kind of life you actually want. Is constant touring part of that? Is it not? “For me now,” Olivia reflects, “success is the ability to create. To have the resources from music - and then to use those resources to make more music and reach people. To sustain that.” It’s a definition rooted less in visibility and more in longevity. Less in applause and more in freedom.

As we close the conversation, I ask what advice she would give her younger self - and by extension, other creatives. Her first point is about ownership of identity. “You have to say you are an artist. A musician. A writer. Whatever it might be - without ‘aspiring’ or ‘emerging’ in front of it. When you keep adding those pre-adjectives, you devalue yourself. You create a false image in conversation and within yourself.” Indeed, there is something powerful in claiming the title without apology.

Her final advice returns to that same theme of permission. “Do your own project. Make something. Anything. You have to choose something and do it. I wish I had started my own projects earlier,” she says. “You can do it badly and cheaply - but you have to do something first. I tended to wait. I wrote my own music, but then did nothing with it. Maybe it’s because of those naïve, film-based ideas of someone ‘discovering’ talent. Don’t wait.”

Like rock forming over centuries, creativity follows its own rhythms and shifts. Music, just as life, is expansive, and in tracing stories both personal and universal, Olivia’s music become a resonant soundtrack.

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Thank you to Olivia for joining us at The Written Corner - your journey, your insights into music, and your advice will continue to resonate like an echoing hum. Listening to your album during the final edits made the writing process all the more special, and it’s an honour to celebrate the completion of your Winter Olympics Tiny Songs challenge!

Find Olivia on her Website, Instagram, Patreon, 100 Tiny Songs, Write Me a Song Podcast.

As much as The Written Corner is a space for my own writing, I couldn’t imagine it without a place to spotlight inspiring stories and celebrate the conversations that are rooted in creativity. Often, both as people and as creatives, we work in solitude, but this series is a gentle reminder that creation thrives in community. Please feel free to share this story, help foster a creative network among readers, and if you’d like to have your story “written,” reach out to me at nora@writtencorner.com or on @thewrittencorner.

🖋 Dear Corner Community, if any of the topics discussed here spark a question or reflection, let us know in the comments - we’d love to hear from you.

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P.S. Thank you to everyone reading, sharing, and liking! A special thanks to those who already support The Written Corner - it helps grow and sustain this project, and your generosity means so much. Until the next dispatch x Nora

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This post is part of The Written Corner series: Lettered London. A blend of essay, observation, and creative non-fiction, these dispatches are a writer’s perspective of the city. A page in an envelope, from my desk to yours - offered for a gentle pause and a breath of presence.

There comes a time when, after the holidays and New Year cheer, quiet feels louder in the city. After the brightness of the season and the momentum of beginnings, London settles into a lower register as its pages are reopened. These days, when the temperature is still cold, the clouds hang mostly grey, and the forecast promises rain, the city finds moments of hibernation in its own way, breathing softer. It is when winter gets its last - but important - edit.

These days, London is a winter manuscript, with changes tracked. A time for noticing, slowing the pace, crossing sections as the season edits on, and trusting the fragile yet strong structure of the piece. With a blend of observation and advice, it is as if winter has taken a careful pen to its excesses; the city is edited.

Bare trees of the city are the main sentences in winter’s edit. They write the syntax. Breakable bones of charcoal-grey spread around the streets, like rivers on a map - long and often intertwined. The leafless branches frame windowsills. Now, with leaves fallen and festive lights gone, the facades of the buildings are visible again. Lines. Bricks. Lines between bricks - they all are legible now, like pauses between words, a moment to sigh. With more crossing and cutting, buildings and balconies become main characters again. Winter edits on. The draft becomes crisp as the cold air.

It is the season when winter clarifies, deleting the sentences that need to go - when readers contemplate, and evenings find calm within the hurry. It leaves empty breaks on the page: emptier streets, fewer tourists, more locals walking; emptier carriages on the Tube, and extra paragraphs for thought. Nothing new is built, yet more is seen in the adjusted light of winter’s sun. It is a time to re-read. While winter edits on with an act of care, not correction, it holds someone else’s words through the season. It is this attention that creates warmth and quiet moments, a chance to notice again: the fog on the windows, the thick coats hanging on chairs, a small stain of coffee on the table from the morning.

The editor takes away the vivid colours of the city, but only so it can reveal the beauty within the framework. It cuts the chapters - shorter days of winter - but only so that the reader can appreciate the sunlit hours. What remains after the cut exposes the metropolitan, so the sentences are visible from the foliage. The eyes follow rhythm, direction, and lines: a draft where even the weakest branches show, while the strongest ones carry the whole, and where seasonal reflections fill the margins.

Cold winds return in the evenings, the light tap of rain meeting the pavement, softening winter’s edit and washing away the remaining ink of the cold season’s words. The page is blank, prepared for the next story - its scent already in the air: the prologues of spring, still unedited.

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🖋 Dear Readers, thank you so much for reading and spending time in this cosy corner - I hope it offered a moment of pause and a deep breath. As always, if you have any questions or suggestions for any of the series, please do share.

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P.S. Thank you to everyone reading, sharing, and liking! A special thanks to those who already support The Written Corner - it helps grow and sustain this project, and your generosity means so much. Until the next dispatch x Nora

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In this edition of Corner Conversations, I sit down with illustrator and animator Flossy Waters. Her work centres on storytelling - tender, emotionally resonant narratives that move between illustration, animation, and film. Working across children’s and young adult illustration, editorial projects, and 2D and stop-frame animation, Flossy brings together a rich visual language. A graduate of Southampton University and the Royal College of Art, her work has been recognised internationally, from the Bologna Children’s Book Festival to the Webby Awards. In this conversation, we explore her journey into art, the role of storytelling in her practice, the relationship between emotion and making, and how drawing becomes a way of beginning.

Drawing What Words Could Not Hold

While Flossy Waters works across multiple artistic mediums - from illustration to animation - narration is the thread that quietly ties her practice together. It’s this instinct, to tell stories through images, that sits at the heart of her work. Even when created for children, her images hold layers that speak to adults too: small details, emotional undercurrents, moments of recognition. Inspired in part by childhood memories and the comfort of familiar stories, Flossy’s work often carries a sense of nostalgia. Through animation, she pushes the still image further, allowing stories to unfold in time, movement, and rhythm. Across every medium, her practice returns to the same question: how can an image tell a story that feels lived in?

That sense of storytelling - of finding form for feeling - also runs through Flossy’s own creative journey. Drawing had always threaded through her life, but the moment it crystallised into a conscious, committed path came more recently, coinciding with her graduation and a pivotal personal shift. “I was diagnosed with ADHD,” Flossy shares. “I was an adult - a woman in my twenties - and suddenly I was given this framework for understanding myself that I’d never had before.”

Navigating the diagnosis without many reference points around her, Flossy found herself without language for much of what she was experiencing. “I didn’t know people who had the same diagnosis, or who were going through similar things,” she reflects. “Drawing has always been a form of therapy for me. An outlet I can always turn to.”

That instinct later took on a new form through one of her most personal ongoing projects: animating and illustrating her diary. Short passages - often written in the Notes app on her phone - become starting points for visual storytelling. “I keep a list,” she explains. “I return to it once the emotion has quietened, and then I start to illustrate them - in a way, it’s processing emotions, and sorting them out through art.”

There’s a quote she returns to often: “I heard this once never forgot: ‘What’s bad for the heart is good for the art.’” Going through something becomes fuel; turbulence transforms into motion, line, and colour.

Sharing these diary animations publicly marked another threshold entirely. “It felt very vulnerable,” she admits. But the response reshaped that fear. “The more open I am, the more supportive the reception is. People respond by sharing that they feel the same way, or that they’re going through something similar.”What emerges is a quiet but powerful sense of recognition - “of not being alone. ”

A Language Made Visible

Flossy’s work carries a recognisable softness - a visual language that feels emotionally clear, gentle without ever being vague. “Other illustrators’ work keeps me inspired,” she says, “especially traditional illustrators - even though I work on my iPad so much.” She speaks with particular affection about artists such as Laura Carlin and Lauren Child. “Being raised on Charlie and Lola was a huge building block in my own art - and then finding my own ways into that world.”

Questions of style became more pressing during university. There was an unspoken urgency to arrive. But when progress became visible and measurable it also became addictive. “That’s one of the advantages of being a visual artist,” she reflects. “You can really see how far you’ve come. Yet many of those early instincts remain present in my work today. From the outset, I was drawing with the hope of taking people on a journey - even if I wasn’t consciously naming it at the time.”

Filtering through a growing confidence in an artist’s instincts extends to knowing when a piece is finished - emotionally, not just visually. “I used to overdo things,” she admits. “I’d keep adding, fitting in as much as I could.” Now, she’s learned to listen more carefully. Sometimes that means stepping away entirely. Returning to a piece after time has passed often brings clarity: whether something is complete, or whether it’s simply time to let it go.

When asked the Written Corner’s signature question - does the blank canvas frighten or liberate? - Flossy shares that the empty space can feel intimidating at first. “So I sketch things very lightly at first,”she says. “As soon as I make the first mark - just breaking up the page - it gets easier and easier. Starting is the hardest part. Once something exists, even tentatively, momentum follows.”

There are moments when the process feels effortless. When an idea arrives fully formed - sparked by a flash of inspiration - she cannot wait to get it down. “Then it feels like meditation,” she reflects. At other times, when the idea is less definite, beginning requires more patience. Flossy keeps ideas wherever she can - a sketchbook, the Notes app on her phone - small fragments waiting for the right moment. “I come back to them when I have the time.”

From Stillness to Movement: Working Across Disciplines

Flossy’s multidisciplinary practice grew from the same impulse: curiosity, momentum, and a refusal to stay contained. “I was really keen to learn,” she says. “Trying new things, having ADHD means moving a million miles an hour, so I kept thinking on how I could push the boundaries of traditional illustration.” As such, her practice moves fluidly across illustration, animation, murals, and editorial work - not as separate lanes, but as interconnected ways of thinking. Each discipline feeds the others.

Experimentation, she believes, is essential. Trying different mediums, following curiosities, allowing things not to work - this is how the practice stays alive. “They all interlink,” she explains. “When I practise and get better in one area, the others benefit too.” Her work in stop-frame animation, for example, has deepened her understanding of physics, movement, and the smallest bodily details - knowledge sharpened further during a masterclass with Tim Allen. Stepping away from one discipline often brings clarity to another.

Choosing a medium often begins with intuition, and intention. “With illustration,” Flossy explains, “I often see quite clearly what I want to make. An image might arrive fully formed, sparked by a reference or an initial moment of inspiration, and the process becomes one of translating that vision onto the page.”

Other times, the starting point is more ambiguous. The diary passages - fragments of emotion and reflection - rarely come with a plan. Instead, they ask to be explored. “I try different approaches, letting the material guide me,” Flossy reflects. “More often than not, those ambiguous beginnings find their way into movement, becoming 2D animations where feeling can unfold gradually rather than resolve into a single frame.”

Stop-frame, she notes, sits in its own category entirely. Her award-winning film Something So Lovely began with a very definite idea. “I knew exactly what I wanted to say,” she explains. “The question wasn’t what to make, but how. Because of the weight of the subject, the work needed to feel immersive - music, tactility, time. It had to feel handmade, imperfect, human. Too much polish would have drained it of its heart.” As such, it was a deliberate step away from polish in favour of something more human.

Art in Public, Art in Place

Painting murals entered Flossy’s practice when the Goldfinch Bookshop invited her to create a mural for their space, a commission that would become her first at that scale. She now holds the role of artist-in-residence there, but the beginning was simply an open wall and an invitation to respond.

“The foundation is the same,” Flossy explains. “As well as the reasons.” The shift, she realised, was not in why she was making the work, but in where it would live. The process itself remains familiar. “Each mural begins on my iPad, drawn out digitally much like any other illustration.”

The image is shaped, considered, resolved - long before it ever reaches a wall. “The driver is the place, the people who move through it, and the story they want to tell,” Flossy shares, often creating murals for bookshops, libraries, and schools - spaces already steeped in narrative and learning. “It’s still a story in one piece, just larger.”

Scale introduces its own challenges. “There’s a mathematical precision required - keeping proportions true, holding rhythm across a surface that demands full-body movement rather than wrist-sized gestures,” she reflects. What makes murals especially meaningful, though, is their shared nature. Unlike work confined to a page or a screen, they become part of daily life: passed by, paused at, absorbed slowly over time. They belong not just to the artist, but to the place itself. In that sense, murals feel like an extension of Flossy’s wider practice - the same emotional core, translated into public space. Familiar stories, opened outward.

The Craft of Connection

Flossy’s social media posts, particularly her diary-like animations have found a wide audience online. What draws her to that format is not visibility for its own sake, but connection. “When I post, it is always honest,” she reflects, “people share that they feel the same way.” Experiences that once felt isolating - anxiety, overwhelm, quiet sadness - suddenly become shared ground.

There is something quietly radical in that exchange. Topics that are often left unspoken find space to exist. “Those conversations feel really important,” Flossy says. Hence, social media, for her, is almost like another medium. “It can still be scary,” she admits. “But I approach it as any other creative form: with intention, so rather than focusing on numbers, I try to hold onto the reason I started,” she says. Comfort comes up again: “I want to make things that comfort people - whether that’s a mural, an illustration, or something shared online.”

That same desire for connection extends into Flossy’s online shop, offering postcards, stickers, and prints - small, tactile pieces designed to live in people’s homes.

“There’s something really special about that,” she reflects. “Knowing my art is in someone’s space - that’s one of the biggest honours.” Flossy has always loved surrounding herself with images, decorating her room with her own work; creating objects that allow people to do the same felt like a natural extension of her practice - an invitation to share that intimacy.

The shop also opened up a more accessible way for people to support her work. “Original commissions are not always possible, being more on the more expensive end, but a postcard or print offers another entry point - a way to live with the art, to return to it daily,” she says. “It allows people to connect with the work in their own way.”

Running a shop also brought new lessons; requiring a different kind of thinking - logistics, timing, planning - another creative hat layered onto the practice. The Christmas period became a learning curve, and Flossy is already applying those lessons to her next release, with a fresh launch planned for Valentine’s Day.

What remains consistent, across screens and surfaces, is intention. Whether held in the hand or encountered online, her work continues to offer the same thing: a moment of quiet reassurance that feeling deeply is not something to hide.

From Beginning to Ongoing

Behind the softness of Flossy’s work sits a clear-eyed understanding of what it means to sustain a creative life. “At the end of the day,” she says, “this is a business.” Much of her work now comes through commissions and briefs - the reality of being an illustrator rather than a fine artist working solely for oneself. It requires flexibility, communication, and the ability to create within someone else’s framework.

The business side, she admits, does not always come naturally. “A lot of artists aren’t very mathematically or business-oriented - myself included,” she says. Similarly, self-employment is an entirely invisible job layered on top of the creative one: “There should be more recognition as well as education around self-employment,” she adds. “It’s such a big part of the job, but we’re rarely taught how to navigate it.”

For Flossy, having a part-time job alongside her practice has been an intentional choice. “It offers stability - financial and emotional - and eases the pressure of expecting art to carry everything. Despite that there can be a lot of shame around needing another job,” she says. “As if it makes you less successful. But I don’t see it that way at all.” That structure gives her space to make work with less fear, and less urgency. It also offers something else that freelance life can lack: people. “Being a self-employed artist can be very lonely,” she says. “Going into my part-time job, working as a team, being around others - I really enjoy that. It gives energy back to my art.”

This lifestyle is a perfect representation of being a 21st-century creative, and juggling all the parts - multiple income streams, multiple roles, shifting definitions of success.

Throughout of it all, the passion and relation to art does not change. Thus, when asked what advice she would give to emerging creatives - or to her younger self - Flossy does not hesitate “don’t let perfectionism stop you from starting.”

So much of her practice, after all, is built on beginnings: the first pencil mark, the first frame of an animation, the first vulnerable share. Progress comes not from waiting until things feel ready, but from allowing them to be imperfect, in motion, and alive.

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Thank you so much to Flo for joining us at The Written Corner - for all your beautiful reflections on inspiration, heart-felt personal stories, and a glimpse into your world - drawn, whimsical and nostalgic! It’s been an absolute honour to archive this conversation!

Find Flossy on her website, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn.

As much as The Written Corner is a space for my own writing, I couldn’t imagine it without a place to spotlight inspiring stories and celebrate the conversations that are rooted in creativity. Often, both as people and as creatives, we work in solitude, but this series is a gentle reminder that creation thrives in community. Please feel free to share this story, help foster a creative network among readers, and if you’d like to have your story “written,” reach out to me at nora@writtencorner.com or on @thewrittencorner.

🖋 Dear Corner Community, if any of the topics discussed here spark a question or reflection, let us know in the comments - we’d love to hear from you.

Leave a comment

Continue the series: if you’ve enjoyed the conversation at this corner, turn the pages back to the…

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P.S. Thank you to everyone reading, sharing, and liking! A special thanks to those who already support The Written Corner - it helps grow and sustain this project, and your generosity means so much. Until the next dispatch x Nora

Follow along on Instagram: @thewrittencorner.

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Amid the hush of winter coats and the soft murmur of trees, London’s streets feel like the turning of pages in a story waiting to be entered. The city holds layers of history, personal memories, brilliant lives lived loudly or quietly, alongside imagined ones. Its streets have carried real events and fictional footsteps in equal measure; books have been written into its corners, films projected onto its pavements, stories folded into doorways and façades. These layers tend to reveal themselves unexpectedly - not through grand monuments, but through small portals: a street caught in the right light, a window dressed for a season, a building that forgets what it is supposed to be and becomes something else entirely.

This winter, Annabel’s created not only a spectacle but a threshold. Set within the familiar triangle of Berkeley Square, Hyde Park, and Piccadilly, its façade opened like a cabinet into another world. It was less of a seasonal decoration and more of like an invitation: something that felt borrowed rather than fabricated, as though it had always existed elsewhere and was only briefly passing through London - so that, right at the centre of the city, one could almost turn the doorknob to Narnia. With the sound of snow crunching beneath our feet and the flicker of lamplight catching on the edges of things, it became an opening page - and, indeed, the beginning of this short writing from me - a step into a version of the city where wonder lives beyond the last chapter.

That moment, standing before the threshold of Annabel’s, offered a pause: a door into recollection and a chance to step differently into the world. It was a winter fantasy in miniature, a fleeting concord among strangers: a subtle permission to pause, to notice, to inhabit the city differently for a moment. The façade itself may have been more art than story, yet it carried memory and suggestion, a gentle reminder that childhood could be revisited. Between deadlines and the rush of streets, the glare of screens, and the weight of adult seriousness, it offered seconds of deliberate wonder. One slowed, as if opening a book - perhaps the original by the author, perhaps any story that once held you, and that you once held in return - stepping carefree along the pavements of nostalgia. For a heartbeat, the city became a shared collective, a place where we could return to a part of ourselves that never fully disappeared.

Beneath the spectacle, with the faint hum of a fawn’s lyre echoing, one walks not past, but through it - a passage into something felt, remembered, and as magical as the city itself. A full moon hung in the center, catching the light of golden arches and motifs. Looking up, one could smell the fresh snow, falling with willed softness, as if placed rather than dropped, and inhale the crisp winter air. The glow of the street lamps shifted along the pavements, not brighter, just altered, as though they had stepped into a role they once played in a story. It was the sort of winter one once believed in: the kind that did not arrive from the sky so much as through doors, through wardrobes, through those rare moments when the city was an open book.

The display was at once stepping into a carefully crafted world, and yet also walking along a familiar street; it was part of the city - as if wonder does not arrive loudly but sideways, a place suspended between nostalgia and recognition. It belonged to a metropolis that has the power to reimagine itself over and over again, reminding its citizens that they can do the same at any moment. A pause where winter is deliberate rather than meteorological, with snow drifting where it might not belong, and a single façade holding a whole forest within its architecture. It is a reminder that you can step into a story without looking for one, that a familiar corner can whisper that not all spells are broken - and for a moment, the city unfolds like a library of a thousand stories, old and anew.

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🖋 Dear Readers, if this corner of London explored in today’s Chapters of the City holds memories for you, do share. And if there are other places you think deserve a gentle pause and a page in this series, I’d love to know.

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P.S. Thank you to everyone reading, sharing, and liking! A special thanks to those who already support The Written Corner - it helps grow and sustain this project, and your generosity means so much. Until the next dispatch x Nora

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The holidays have passed, yet the hush of 25th December continues to echo. An imposed pause that the city takes; though still not returning to sleep, instead she takes a deep breath. Her shoulders drop, jaws unclench - not resting, but recovering. A rare moment when infrastructure loosens, commerce quiets, scaffolding stands empty, and urgency loses its claim to the main character role.

A misplaced day that feels as if it belongs to another century, or another country. Her citizens know the clock keeps ticking, yet the city’s internal metronome slows reluctantly. It is like a temporal seam - a stitch between years where time thins.

With the exhale of the city, the pavements stretch out wider. The shops close their eyelids. The roads rest their muscles without traffic. Stations keep their announcements a secret, resting their vocals.

Rather than the usual unified orchestra, the reverberations in the city on the day sing individually once again: wind along the buildings, the chirping of birds, a single footstep echoing twice. It is a kind of quiet that arrives, not something one enters. The streets still stir with latent energy, but the city is no longer narrating itself for the day. A day when the city edits without comment: it is not silence, but the absence of insistence.

That day is a breath that reaches the lower ribs; a pause that resets circulation and prepares itself for the pulse of the following year. It is a day that teaches her citizens to notice once more, to pause not as an escape, but as a kind of attunement. Not merely a permission, but a demand. A whispered reminder that pause exists - and can be practiced - even as the city draws in its next inhale.

A silence impossible to recreate on any other day of the year, yet the kind we can carry forward within, in fragments: to keep tucked in our pocket and return to during the tiny hushes that echo from it - in the steam of early morning coffee, a deep breath on a misty afternoon, the moments after rain. A quiet that reminds us - even amidst the city’s buzz - that pause is within reach, and from it we gain focus: so we can hear the thoughts that only murmur, so we can feel the wind on our skin rather than moving against it, so we can hear the turn of pages in a book.

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🖋 Dear Readers, Happy New Year! Thank you so much for reading and spending time in this cosy corner - I hope it offered a moment of pause and a deep breath. As always, if you have any questions or suggestions for any of the series, please do share.

I’d love to hear if you have any traditions for the day, or moments of quiet you cherish.

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Continue the series: if this letter lit a small glow, read more letters from the archive - the envelopes are waiting to be opened again.

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P.S. Thank you to everyone reading, sharing, and liking! A special thanks to those who already support The Written Corner - it helps grow and sustain this project, and your generosity means so much. Until the next dispatch x Nora

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In this edition of Corner Conversations, I sit down with painter Megan Cleasby. Her work is rooted in capturing the quiet intimacy of the table and the beauty of everyday rituals. Alongside her painting practice, she is also a graphic designer; carrying with her a breadth of visual languages and creative experiences. In this conversation, we explore her journey, reflections on art, sources of inspiration, and the rhythms of her creative practice and business. It also celebrates her latest collection launch - Hot Mess (congratulations!).

From Shorelines to Studio

From the shimmer of sunlight dancing on a sea’s wave to its reflection on a tabletop during a shared meal, Megan’s paintings bring to life the textures, gestures, and rhythms of everyday experience. Growing up on the Isle of Wight, with the sea as a constant backdrop, Megan’s surroundings imprinted themselves on her imagination. Though life and landscapes have shifted since those early days, she still looks outward for inspiration - to the everyday, the ambience, and the world immediately around her.

Her first seascapes found their way into the reception of her aunt’s campsite. “A couple of them sold,” Megan recalls, “that’s when I realised that art could be a profession, and that people might want my work in their homes.” Before stepping fully into painting, Megan studied theatre and film design at university - sets, props, costumes - only to discover, at graduation, the challenging reality of breaking into the industry. That recognition led her to a new direction and her job as a graphic designer.

Alongside that role, Megan began taking on painting commissions, mainly pet portraits passed along through a small circle of clients. “I do my best work when it’s less regimented,” she says. Portraits demanded precision - a likeness that had to match life. She sees that discipline as essential practice, a valuable tool in any artist’s pocket. But her truest enjoyment lies in the work she creates now: instinctive, expressive, and entirely her own; completely free and freeing.

Meals, Memory, & Medium

One of Megan’s signature focuses - those intimate, joy-filled scenes gathered around the dinner table - unfolded during a trip to Greece with her partner. “We had so many amazing meals, and at the end of each one I kept taking a picture,”Megan shares. “I realised it wasn’t just the food I was capturing, but the whole holiday: the conversations, the atmosphere, the feeling of it all.”

What began as a small instinct became a revelation. Just as someone might frame a landscape from a beloved place or a portrait of someone dear, Megan found herself wanting to preserve these table moments - the memory itself - through paint. In a culture that often rushes through dinners and overlooks the quiet communal rituals of eating together, Megan’s paintings gently remind us of the beauty in slowing down. Thus, her still lifes become vessels for atmosphere: the dawning rays of the sun lingering on plates, the pause after a conversation, the warm clutter of a meal shared.

When it comes to commissions versus original work, the process shifts, but the wellspring of inspiration remains rooted in everyday life. It might be a scroll through Pinterest, a friend’s quick snap, or one of her own photos taken almost unconsciously. “I constantly take pictures of dinner tables, little scenes of the everyday,” she smiles. Before painting, she often creates a loose collage in Procreate - not as a strict guide, but as a way to sense the rhythm of the composition. “It always changes once I’m painting, but it gives me the foundations: scale, balance, mood.”

Rituals, Rendered in Brushstrokes

Megan’s latest collection, Hot Mess, marks a milestone - her first fully realised launch, celebrated with an intimate gathering of people who have followed her artistic journey. The collection is rooted in themes of girlhood, feminine energy, daily rituals, and the joyful disorder that threads through modern life.

“Hot Mess is all the roles I play - going to work, showing up, moving through different versions of myself - and still somehow looking put together,” Megan tells me. “It’s about the chaos, but also those little sparks of energy that say, ‘I’ve got this’.”

Each painting carries its own theme: morning coffee, skincare rituals, girls’ night dinners - moments that feel deeply personal yet universally familiar. Collectively, they form a portrait of women’s lives not through grand declarations, but through the scenes we return to day after day.

Books appear often in Megan’s work, tucked into still-life compositions or resting on table edges - small but deliberate anchors. Given this corner’s love of reading, these subtle inclusions feel perfectly at home here. “Many of the books in my paintings are my own favourites,” she shares. “Reading is the only time my brain fully switches off. Painting is immersive, of course, but still active for me. Reading feels like a gentle hug.” (If you’re curious to wander deeper into this theme, turn back a few pages in the archive to the page Building This Corner.)

Beyond the stories themselves, Megan is drawn to the artwork of books - their covers, typography, and colours, all subtle inspirations. But at the heart of it, she says, “Reading is important to many of the people who follow my work. It’s a quiet and intimate time, and I think that resonates.”

Skincare and make-up rituals also find their way into her paintings: the everyday gestures of cleansing, getting ready, winding down. Having struggled with skin issues herself in the past, these small routines became moments of care - acts of looking after herself that eventually shaped a recurring motif in her art.

Hot Mess lingers on the grounding moments; the small repetitions that quietly structure our days, even when they seem insignificant at the time. “These paintings can be a gentle reminder,” Megan says, “to honour those moments, to romanticise life a little, to find joy in the mess.”

A Colour Palette of Art and Rituals

Alongside her painting practice, Megan works as a graphic designer - a pillar in her weekly rhythm that brings a different form of creativity. Balancing both requires a certain intentionality, something she has learned to honour through the natural phases of her artistic life. Equally, Megan finds it crucial to schedule time for recharging - often by returning to the island, taking long walks, and stepping away from social media. “That downtime is when the best ideas arrive,” she says.

Her creative routine forms the foundation of her art. “I treat my painting days as one block - like a single long day. If inspiration doesn’t appear on day one, I trust it will come the next,” she explains. Yet if an idea strikes on a non-painting day, she follows it. Everyday rituals - romanticising small moments, celebrating tiny pleasures like morning skincare, casual sketches, or a walk outside - also anchor her process. Podcasts accompany her graphic design work; music soundtracks her painting. Many of her pieces are shaped, quite literally, by what she listens to. “Music helps me slip into my world and shut out the rest. I always paint with earphones in. Some albums end up tied to a single painting because I play them on loop until it’s finished.” Songs by Lily Allen and Olivia Dean, in particular, guide her brush, alongside other voices that carry both feminine softness and strength.

When asked the Written Corner’s signature question - does the blank canvas frighten or liberate? - Megan doesn’t pause. “I always feel excited. Worst case, I can literally paint over it,” she reflects. A beautiful reminder for all creatives, whether with canvas, Word doc, or a piece of fabric, that starting again is always an option. She also embraces imperfections: “some marks that feel like mistakes end up becoming the details that make the painting what it truly is.”

From the opening stroke to the closing touch, I asked Megan when a painting feels complete. “Some pieces tell me straight away. Others, I move around in the house - seeing if they hold their place as a finished work in different lights, from morning sun to evening candlelight. It has to ‘work’ at all times.”

Creativity begins when we release the weights of expectation and let the work breathe on its own terms; a notion that Megan shares: “I used to put so much pressure on myself to have one specific style and to stay within it. Letting go of that allowed me to find my true, original voice - and it’s still flexible. Even with the Hot Mess collection, I created a language across the pieces, but I didn’t restrict myself.” This freedom extends to subject matter. Early success with seascapes made her think she had to stick to that path. “But as a creative, you can do whatever you want,” she says. “Art is liberating by nature. It only becomes limiting if we forget that.”

Making a Life by Making Art

Turning a creative passion into a living is like charting a path through an ever-shifting landscape - full of possibility, risk, and discovery. Megan moves through the business side of her art with curiosity, treating each decision as part of an experiment. “It’s about testing things - seeing what works, what doesn’t, and being at peace with that,” she says. For the 21st-century artist, creativity is rarely confined to a single form. “Painting is at the heart of my practice,” Megan reflects, “but it’s not the only part of my creative life - or my income. Today, being an artist often means finding multiple pathways that stretch beyond your main art form.”

Social media, as with many creatives today, is both a tool and a tension. “It’s amazing that artists can now share their work and build an audience that resonates with them,” Megan says. “But comparison kills creativity. Everyone is on a different path - and we never truly know what’s happening behind the scenes. Numbers don’t talk.”

Starting out, she too felt the pressure of those unseen expectations, and admits the struggle to start: “I kept thinking: why would there be space for me? I was frozen by comparison, seeing others with polished careers and established audiences. But the last few months proved the opposite. People are supportive. You just have to begin - what’s the worst that can happen? It’s about the journey - and you’re allowed to enjoy the ride. The first post is the hardest. The rest flows.”

Readiness is often an illusion; courage blooms only in the act of beginning. Just as Megan’s paintings draw us into their layers of colour, gesture, and quiet rhythm; this creative journey invites us to lean into our own. Art is limitless - there is space for every artist, every voice, every story. And here, at Megan’s painted table and in my Written Corner, we gather, we create, and we celebrate one another - together.

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Thank you to Meg for joining us at The Written Corner - your reflections on art and creativity are just as colourful as your beautiful paintings, and it’s been an absolute honour to archive this conversation and commemorate the launch of your latest collection!

Find Megan on: her website and Instagram.

As much as The Written Corner is a space for my own writing, I couldn’t imagine it without a place to spotlight inspiring stories and celebrate the conversations that are rooted in creativity. Often, both as people and as creatives, we work in solitude, but this series is a gentle reminder that creation thrives in community. Please feel free to share this story, help foster a creative network among readers, and if you’d like to have your story “written,” reach out to me at nora@writtencorner.com or on @thewrittencorner.

🖋 Dear Corner Community, if any of the topics discussed here spark a question or reflection, let us know in the comments - we’d love to hear from you.

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P.S. Thank you to everyone reading, sharing, and liking! A special thanks to those who already support The Written Corner - it helps grow and sustain this project, and your generosity means so much. Until the next dispatch x Nora

Follow along on Instagram: @thewrittencorner.

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The streetlights flicker on earlier as darkness drapes itself over the city; winter carries anticipation, and conversations turn to festive plans. As the season approaches the holidays - preparing wish lists, wandering stores like a never-ending maze - this page is one for all the creatives, small businesses, and freelancers. It is a brief page, yet in a fast-paced, tech-driven, and consumerist world, it seeks to illuminate the human touch of all creators. This reflection is not meant to replace acts of volunteering or charitable giving, of course, but rather to serve as a quiet letter to and about the makers: an invitation for those planning and privileged enough to participate in holiday gifting to pause, reflect, and consider the story behind the gift this year - a subtle call to slow down, notice, and appreciate human creativity.

Gifts are an opportunity to connect with people, not with objects emptied of meaning. The intention behind the gift matters more than the material itself, and is the core of the story. Giving for the sake of giving can become a sharing of thoughtful presents that unfold into cherished moments - small stories we write together. Giving and receiving are human acts; small businesses and freelancers are real people with dreams, hands, and stories woven into their creations. Not everyone has the privilege to gift, and this is a gentle reminder for those who do: in choosing a gift, we choose a life, a voice, a labor of care. Each thoughtful gift carries not just an object, but a trace of human intention, a story that lingers long after the wrapping is set aside.

Consideration turns a gift into a living story. The thoughtfulness of the giver, chosen with care for the recipient, inscribes a moment into memory - a trace of connection that lingers like the scent of cinnamon and pine curling through a winter kitchen. Creators work from a place of authenticity; their energy, care, and attention are literally entwined with each piece. Thus, a gift becomes more than a transaction - it is supporting ongoing creativity rather than merely transferring an object.

Supporting small businesses, creatives, and freelancers often connects naturally to slower, ethical, and considered consumption. To select a gift with care is to step into a gentler rhythm of life - less hurried, more attuned to the human heart, and far removed from the algorithms of online giants. It is, hence, a gift to ourselves - reclaiming our own time, and to plan a little ahead rather than rushing into last-minute purchases.

Gifts - though certainly not to overlook the beautiful, tangible creations of artists - can also stretch beyond the physical, inviting us to think outside the (gift) box: from gifting a Substack subscription, to purchasing concert tickets, to a dance class, or other forms of creative patronage, each gift becomes a gesture that sustains an individual’s life. This post is not meant to promote my own work, but I want to thank the lovely readers who suggested highlighting that a Substack subscription is indeed possible to gift for those who seek a quiet moment and a moment to read - thank you! And of course, this is just one of many ways that creative endeavors can become gifts; each is an opportunity to support a maker and share a story; even the smallest support can make a meaningful difference. The holiday season offers a rare pause - a perfect moment to reconnect with our peers and the humans behind the work. Gifting creativity itself can feel like a quiet revolution - claiming inner peace, nurturing connection, and embracing a slower, more considered approach to giving.

The whisper that keeps returning to my journal, like frost tracing delicate patterns on the early winter mornings, is simple yet profound: a meaningful gift is never just one gift - it is a double gift, perhaps even triple. To the receiver, it becomes not merely an object, but a moment of thoughtfulness and care. To the creator, it is the gift of support, recognition, and often financial means to continue their work. And to the giver, it is a gift of reflection, a deliberate choice, a quiet patronage of the arts - and in its fragility, a reminder of the importance of human connection. Each gift, in all creative its forms, becomes a story. A story that connects us, and so it is best shared.

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🖋 Dear Readers, many of you have already written to me, sharing what you’d love to read next in this and other series - thank you for that. Please keep doing so, or leave a note in the comments.

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If you’d rather continue with the main series, the archive awaits with pages to unfold:

Read This Winter Letter

P.S. Thank you to everyone reading, sharing, and liking! A special thanks to those who already support The Written Corner - it helps grow and sustain this project, and your generosity means so much. Until the next dispatch x Nora

Follow along on Instagram: @thewrittencorner.

Subscribe now