A Reading Life, A Writing Life, with Sally Bayley

‘Silence, quietness, that’s a way of living…’

This week, we join Sally in the attic room of her family home, where she has been reading Rose Tremain's first novel Sadler’s Birthday (1976). Follow her…

‘London. Michaelmas Term lately over and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall…’

This week, Sally has been reading and teaching Charles Dickens’ Bleak House (1852). Follow her on a journe…

‘I’m wondering what happiness sounds like, these days…’

This week, Sally has been reading Nan Shepherd’s The Weatherhouse, and reflecting on her relationship with happiness and contentment. Join her …

This week Sally is experimenting with location and atmosphere for her character Pond Man. She asks her friend Dylan, to come and join her, as they improvise their way into Pond Man's world. This epis…

“She glanced up at the great broken tower-columns of the vanished nave of the Abbey Church….” 

This week, Sally continues to read John Cowper Powys’ 1932 novel A Glastonbury Romance, dwelling on the …

“On this particular day the weather conditions had assumed a cloud-pattern…”

This week, Sally continues to read John Cowper Powys’ 1932 novel, A Glastonbury Romance, asking: how does writing produce …

‘There’s no life that frees anyone so completely from unhappiness as does the mystic life…’

This week, Sally has been reading John Cowper Powys’ 1932 novel, A Glastonbury Romance. Join her for a medi…

"What is it this material life we find ourselves captured by?" 

This week Sally is developing her character, Pond Man as she considers the opening line of James Joyce's experimental epic, Ulysses, an…

‘You see, I go and live with Pond Man when the pain becomes too much…’

This week, we join Sally at home, as she tries to live with a pain that has become familiar with the help of imagination, commun…

‘We have forgotten what it is to look at one another and to notice.’

What does it mean to really see? This week, Sally is meditating on the power of images to connect us in a busy world. Join her a…

A special episode this week, as we join Sally at Brasenose College in a conversation titled ‘A Reading Life, A Writing Life’, with fellow writers Aida Edemariam and Joanna Kavenna. Join them for a di…

‘If you shut your eyes and are a lucky one…’

This week, Sally has been reading José Saramago’s Blindness, and thinking about the ways we see, or don’t see, the world around us. Drawing on J.M. Barrie…

‘Where do images come from?’

This week, Sally is thinking about the importance of sound and rhythm to writing. Join her for a discussion of George Orwell’s Coming Up for Air (1939) and a reflection o…

‘Let words pass through you in a small contained space’

This week, we join Sally for a meditation on creating and inhabiting a space in which to write, and to be held, via the work of the novelist V.…

‘Perhaps she's a daytime sleeper.’

This week, Sally is reading Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘Insomnia’, a poem full of shifting, uncertain geographies and marvellous depths. How do we navigate the strange la…

‘I shall be late!’

Sally has been following the White Rabbit this week, from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and reflecting on the ever-increasing demands on the writer’s time. Follow her down the …

‘How do you remember people first?’

We join Sally on New Year’s Night, staying with a relative in Chichester, a familiar city from her childhood. Join her for a meditation on embodiment, memory, and …

This week, we join Sally in the middle of a winter night. Follow her reflections on festive traditions, via Christina Rossetti, and on seeing the world through illness, with Emily Brontë, and John Mi…

For Demi.

‘And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating / Of dark habits, / keeping their difficult balance.’

This week, Sally has been living with Richard Wilbur’s ‘Love Calls Us to the Things of t…