Deborah Vass

Galley Beggar Ghost Stories – The Signalman by Charles Dickens and The Old Nurse’s Story by Elizabeth Gaskell Back in winter 2024, the independent publisher Gallery Beggar Press issued a small bundle of ghost stories called Pocket Ghosts, comprising three beautifully produced slim volumes, each containing …

‘…she looked so cold, & grey, & stony, as if she had never loved or cared for anyone; and I don’t suppose she did care for anyone, except her mistress; &, owing to the great deafness of the latter, Mrs. Stark treated her very much as if she were a child.’ 💙📚

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Here's my Barn Owl linoprint again, its details, textures and delightful inconsistencies, full of chance and happenstance, no AI here. And here are the stages that my human mind, eyes and hands went through in making it, back to the pencil drawing made from a real Barn Owl.
handmadebyhaggy.etsy.com

Thank you, Tina, yes they do. It is often a bit of a struggle to make the deadline!

Sometimes it is hard to see what others see but there is a strength and fragility in this.

There has been something odd going on with me and this linoprint. I finished it over a week ago but I haven't wanted to share it. It's like the fragile ghostly ethereal Owl is an equally fragile part of me and I'm scared to let it out into the dark night sky of the world. But the time has come....

Tina, this is really lovely.

The Stepdaughter by Caroline Blackwood Born into an aristocratic Anglo-Irish family, Lady Caroline Blackwood was, for many years, largely known as a socialite and muse. Her marriages to the artist Lucian Freud, the pianist Israel Citkow…

'She reminded me of some tea-pot with a missing spout, a compass that had lost its hands, an old-fashioned record that had had all its grooves badly scratched. She had a tense, half- apologetic, half-defiant expression on her face...' #BookSky 💙📚

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1/3 I'm writing a book about Nigel Farage for Headline.

Some of his pals are blanking me.

Is it because after I reported on the killing of a Polish man in Essex in 2016, he said that I had caused him "more misery than any other in 25 years in politics"?

Do get in touch: johnsweeney.co.uk

I wrote a book called Nature’s Acre — an Irish garden memoir about wildlife, community, and making a place where life can grow.

If that sounds like your kind of book, I’d love you to read it. And if you’d share this, I’d be very grateful.
🌱 #climateaction #spéirgorm

gardeningwell.ie/natures-acre

The Contrary Life and Times of Lucie Aldridge From Bright Young Thing to the village of Great Bardfield, to the joys of radio drama and The Lark by E Nesbit

This week's post took an unexpected direction. This painting of Lucie Aldridge , by her husband John, is not the picture it seems. #womenartists open.substack.com/pub/stillske...

The Contrary Life and Times of Lucie Aldridge From Bright Young Thing to the village of Great Bardfield, to the joys of radio drama and The Lark by E Nesbit

In this week's post the thread of research did not follow the expected path. I would love to know what you think. #womensart #textileart #GreatBardfield
open.substack.com/pub/stillske...

And doesn't she make it sound divine!

Virginia Woolf podcast with Karina Jakubowicz. Excellent new podcast with Ann Kennedy Smith on women in 19th and 20thC Cambridge. Free on our website.

www.literaturecambridge.co.uk/podcasts

1/ And they’re off! 📢 Our BTO satellite-tagged Cuckoos are on the move! 🌍

Follow their migrations via our interactive map ➡️ www.bto.org/cuckoos #Ornithology 🪶

It's insane that only 7000 people have signed this.

I do hope so...

Thank you very much, Tina! I didn't know of it and so pleased you let me know.

Thank you so much to everyone who has taken the time to read my blog and for all of your wonderful, engaging comments. I have really enjoyed it and am so grateful to you all.🖤

You will be very welcome!

The ghost of Jane Harrison The woman who haunts Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own

The ghost of the Cambridge classical scholar Jane Harrison haunts the pages of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One's Own (1929). Here's my post on the layers of connections, for over 30 years, these two writers shared.

It might help if I added the link...

open.substack.com/pub/stillske...

This week I look at the women whose work was barely noticed and how Winifred Nicholson helped to change that. #ragrugs #womenartists

Mostly dahlias, watercolour and indian ink
#floral #watercolour

Such a joyful, light filled watercolour.

Thank goodness, you weren't facing it when it happened. I do hope you are getting sorted out quickly.

Thank goodness you are okay. It must have been a terrible shock.

I’m an Ambassador for this brilliant charity, Bookbanks, giving away books with food parcels at food banks. There are two part-time jobs going for Regional Leads in London and East Anglia.

Link below.

Please share far and wide :)

Just saved the recipe for tomorrow - thank you!

This week I look at the story behind a single painting: Farm at Watendlath by Dora Carrington open.substack.com/pub/stillske... #landscape #womensart

The Waterfall by Margaret Drabble Alongside my ongoing aim of reading Anita Brookner’s novels in publication order, roughly one every six months, I’m trying to do the same with Margaret Drabble, albeit more slowly. Drabble’s first …

'It won’t, of course, do: as an account, I mean, of what took place. I tried, I tried for so long to reconcile, to find a style that would express it, to find a system that would excuse me, to construct a new meaning, having kicked the old one out..' #BookSky
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