Stories Within Stories

I am a working-class writer, author, and creative storyteller based in the UNESCO City of Literature, Norwich.

I write a lot about East Anglia because this is where I was born and raised. I still live here in Norwich. As I’ve aged I have grown to appreciate its deep history and how much the city and region are steeped in stories. I have walked the squeaky pebbles on Sheringham beach, kicked up the leaf litter of Thetford forest, paddled in the Wensum, spoken to the sheep grazing on the fens of the Norfolk broads. The chalk is literally in my bones.

The Curiosity Crushing Machine

I was a prolific writer as a child. One of those kids who hides away in their bedroom and wrote pages of facts from the books I read and created stories from anything that inspired me. It was a difficult upbringing. I did not realise back then. It was just life on a council estate with parents who were nothing like the nice parents other people seemed to have in the stories I read.

I was torn from my writing at far too young an age. The curiosity crushing machine of the UK education system did its best to put me in my place and the reality of being working class and the grind of living in survival mode did the rest. I started searching for an escape hatch to find a way out to something better, and have never really stopped.

Detours in Survival Mode

I spent quite a few years studying science. Interdisciplinary at first from ecology and human biology to chemistry and physics. I specialised in Chemistry at uni. I joined the RSC (not that RSC – the Royal Society of Chemistry). Then I worked in a lab for a short period. I was disappointed there was no cutting edge excitement or making discoveries, as I had hoped when I started out. Instead I discovered yet another job that was pitifully low-waged, with draconian management and repetitive, factory-line chemical analysis on repeat, ad nauseam.

I went back to uni and studied Computer Science. Again, I wanted to learn something that would change my world, and give me a tidy little income (survival mode again) but learning to program seat booking systems for airplanes or bank accounts bored that aspiration out of me pretty quickly. I was drawn to the creativity of marketing instead. I wish learning to create AI had been an option back then. I kept reaching out for education. But the education system made learning so… well, uninspiring.

After various other boring, bullshit jobs and student loans weighing me down, I took acting lessons to learn to mask my way through job interviews in the hope of finding work that was less soulcrushing and more me. However, I fell in love with the acting itself as I felt the creative neural pathways reopen. I decided I wanted to do that instead.

I could not find acting work. Turns out every man and their dog wants to do that. I found the gatekeeping in the arts excruciating and exclusive against the working class and anyone who cannot give up their time for free. There was a structural bias built in that I just did not, and do not still, fully understand. Where someone who knows someone seems to get in, and those who don’t, don’t.

So, I went back to uni (to accrue even more student debt) to do an MA in Creative Entrepreneurship. My lecturer told me to write my own work. I stubbornly argued that I was “an actor, not a writer.” Life had bound the writer inside me in chains, put me inside a box stamped “Not For You” and thrown it into the ocean.

Circling back and Coming Home

Not knowing what else to write my thesis on, I dipped my toe back in and started to write a play… Even without being taught how, it just felt right. It was like sliding into a hot bath after a lifetime of wallowing in filth. I was back home. And here I have stayed.

The Spiral Widens…

It turns out my work travels quite a bit now. Even a little further out than Ipswich. My short play Best Day Ever had its first international production in Miami this summer, discovered by a director who found it on New Play Exchange (No gatekeeper required). My short story The Weave was shortlisted for the Aesthetica International Creative Writing Award.

It used to feel that life had chained my opportunities tightly inside a box stamped ‘Not For You’ and yeeted it in the ocean. But I learned in chemistry that once exposed, metals oxidise and corrode. Chains fall away. Dyes dissolve and fade. But the stories? The stories remain.

If you want to work with me for commissions, productions, collaborations , that all lives here at Empathic. If you want to know who’s behind it all, well, hi there. Here I am.