As this year's trip draws into it's final week, we decided to take a short trip to Battambang. This is an important secondary city with about 100,000 people and a close history with France and China, especially in its architecture. Remnants of that history can be...

Last year, I wrote posts here and here about the dredging and widening of the Siem Reap River and how it led to mass evacuations of the people living and working along its shores. A new village had been planned to accommodate the evacuees but it was nowhere near...

Literally 15 minutes after I arrived at my guest house in Siem Reap a month ago, I had my first meeting of my stay. It was with the writer, John Burgess, who was here promoting his new novel, A Woman of Angkor. I have now finished reading it, and I have to say, I am...

Me giving my IntroAs promised, here are some more photos from the launch party. If you missed the main post about the event, you can find it here:The view from the podium and the back ofour 1st 2 readers, Chuut and Vecheka. This was their 1st time, so they reada group...

getting ready for the show to begin at the Shinta Mani HotelLast night was the launch party for the 5th issue of the Anjali House young adults creative writing magazine, Imagination is the Best Power -- all 50 pages of it! It was quite an event. The beautiful space...

As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words.  Well, not always, but maybe this time:Magazine Launch 5th Edition of the Anjali House Creative Writing                                                      Magazine     With the Creative Writing Program’s Founder and...

My husband and I have a silly joke: I ask, "What is it about time?"  He answers, "It flies."  Well, I've been looking forward  to retuning to Phnom Penh for two years, and now the trip has come and gone. It's been action-packed, but all business. No sightseeing. No...

Siem Reap is full of markets: The Old Market, The Central Market, Psa Lou Market, the original Night Market plus the batch of new ones that seem to keep cropping up every year. But the first Saturday of every month has a new street market dedicated to all things made...

In Siem Reap, just a 10 minute walk through the mayhem of traffic and over broken pavement tiles, is one of my favourite places on earth. It's a monastery called Wat Damnak, an oasis in the middle of Siem Reap chaos. Wat Damnak is home to a school, a dormitory for...

courtesy of rationalpreparednessYesterday, a truck on the way from Battambang to Siem Reap crashed into a power line carrying power from Thailand to much of northern Cambodia, especially Siem Reap. The result? Much of the city is without power. Unless you have a...

Gentrification -- I've seen it everywhere I've lived from New York to Cambodia, and everywhere in between. We all have. And I've struggled to know what to feel about it. Of course, in some ways, it is a signal of progress. In other ways, it can be a ruthless sweeping...

Saturday night in Siem Reap...actually, any night in Siem Reap near the Old Market, is a big night. But this past Saturday night was something special. Over the past few years, an annual Giant Puppet Parade has been staged which has now become one of THE events of the...

And so it begins.  Arriving for my first day of the workshops is always the same and different. There is always an excitement, knowing that something new will happen -- new kids to meet, old ones to see, wondering what changes will greet me. This is what I found when...

The Sunday before my workshops started, I went with an Australian volunteer/friend and two of my Khmer students to watch the sunset at the Western Baray. This is a reservoir made during the time of the Angkor kings (so they say). It has turned into a sort of beach...

This is what I remembered:Breakfast of jackfruit, watermelon, pineapple and mango (very Khmer) beside a plate of fried egg and toast, with coffee (not very Khmer).The street view from my breakfast table.The immediate sense of heat.The aromas of flowers mixed with...

I wasn't going to blog today. I spent the morning packing for 6 weeks away -- I have an entire suitcase just for medicine! Then I went for a Valentine's Day lunch with my wonderful husband. It is a bit weird to be flying away for so long on Valentine's Day. The plan...

I'm in overdrive at the moment, getting ready for my annual trip to Cambodia and the kids of Anjali House. As chance would have it, I've been offered the perfect way to get myself into the Cambodian feel, namely to write about a new novel, set in the ancient history...

It's been a very busy week. But a highlight was definitely my trip to the Folkestone campus of Canterbury Christ Church University, to discuss my poetry play, Dreams of May, with one of the classes there. The poet and Victorian scholar, Carolyn Oulton, has put the...

I'm stumbling out of (or is it through?)  my jet-lagged haze to write down some random thoughts about writing poetry. The impetus for this is the recent blog written on the subject by the wonderfully talented, Vanessa Gebbie. You can find it here. In this post she...

Today, I am in New York City. In a couple of days, I will be in Boston. After that, I will be back in London, briefly, and then I will be in Bangkok for a day before arriving in Siem Reap, Cambodia, where I will happily stay for six weeks.Yes, this is the busy travel...

This week I've come across two posts which I thought I'd share with you. Both important in different ways. Both aimed towards writers, but of equal relevance to others, as well.First, the writer, Lauri Kuibitsile, has written a clear, concise, well-reasoned and...

 A couple of weeks ago, here, I talked about how I've come up with a new approach to organising my work day so that I do more writing and less admin...well, maybe not less admin, but at least a bit less compulsive admin. I'm here to say so far so good. Since that blog...

I often do, and it's not always for my writing. Sometimes I need some inspiration in order to just get on with it, and when I do, I often turn to my old friend TED. TED talks are wonderful things and every now and again I post one here. It's my dream to give one of...

It has always been my aim in this blog to state the reality of my experience of writing. I've tried to discuss problems, little victories, unforeseen consequences. And now I'm about to start a new big project and I've decided to record that experience as well,...

With the new year has come some thinking about my work day, and I can say with some surety that something has gotten seriously out of whack. I find that I have been waking up with a long list of to-do's in my head, all of which are either about promotion or...

Well, the holidays are over and I'm back at work. Now first things first: this article appeared right before Christmas and several people asked me to post it here, so here it is. It basically describes the whys and wherefores of what I've been doing the past couple of...

I'm heading to the States in a few days, so I thought I'd take a moment now just to wish all my friends a Merry Christmas, a Happy Chanukah, and if you don't celebrate either of those, a happy break. This blog post actually is my 500th post! That's a lot of words, so...

It's been a good year -- lots of wonderful books, many written by real honest-to-goodness friends. I even decided to reorganise my bookcase so that I have a shelf dedicated to books written by friends. Alas, you can't take a picture of an ebook and I must admit, I do...

In my recent post here about character development, I touched on the idea of "giving permission." Tania Hershman wrote about this a short while ago here and her post really made me think. She was teaching an Arvon course, and said that an important idea came up in...

courtesy of adhocactorsAs part of my activities as Writer-in-Residence at  SOAS, I am sometimes asked to help figure out ways to get students thinking outside of the box. One problem we have been discussing is how 1st year language students can be taught to use the...