I have always been a writer.
For most of my life, writing has been something I have constantly returned to, even when other things got in the way. I have written books, articles, poems, and personal musings which are frankly embarrassing at best. I have had ideas that went nowhere, projects I abandoned, and manuscripts that started with hope and ended in despair.
I have also accumulated a rather impressive collection of rejection letters.
My first book took ten years to write. I sent it to publishers and literary agents and, eventually, the rejection letters filled nearly a whole drawer in my desk. At some point I decided that waiting to be discovered was probably not a particularly effective career strategy.
So I tried self-publishing.
I put my book on Smashwords, sat back and waited for the fame and fortune to arrive. It didn’t. I sold three copies and I gave up and went back to writing about dog shows and school fetes for my job as a local journalist.
It wasn’t quite the literary life I had imagined. But I didn’t stop writing.
I went to university as a mature student (very mature, the oldest in my cohort by about 20 years) and studied English Literature, immersing myself in books, writers and ideas that had fascinated me for years. Following that, I studied for a Master’s degree in Creative Writing.
Those experiences changed the way I thought about writing. I began to realise that writing isn’t simply about producing something that can be published. It can be a way of thinking. A way of asking questions. A way of looking at something that has happened to us and trying to understand what it might mean. And the more I read, the more I became interested in the relationship between literature and life.
Why do certain books stay with us for decades?
Why can a fictional character sometimes make us feel less alone?
Why are we drawn to paintings that disturb us?
Why do certain stories find us at exactly the moment we need them?
And why, when we are struggling to put something into words, can a novel, a poem or an image sometimes seem to say it for us?
Those questions are at the heart of Art in the Shadows.
This isn’t a site about having all the answers. Nor is it a guide to becoming a successful writer, although I have learned a considerable amount about that particular struggle along the way.
It is a place to explore literature, art and writing — and the ways in which they can help us look more closely at ourselves and the world we inhabit.
Here you’ll find books and writers, paintings and artists, thoughts about creativity and reflections on some of the quieter and more complicated aspects of being human: loneliness, grief, identity, change, failure, uncertainty, creativity and starting again.
Some of what I write comes from literature. Some comes from art. Some comes from my own experience of being a writer who has spent a surprisingly long time trying to work out what I am doing.
I still write. I still self-publish from time to time, always under pen names. I still have ideas. And I am still trying to find my way through the strange and creative business of putting words together to make something wonderful. Perhaps that is why Art in the Shadows feels less like a finished project and more like another chapter.
There is something I’ve learned along the way: you don’t necessarily have to know where you’re going before you begin again. New chapters, new beginnings – there is never a moment when it is too late to open a fresh new page.
Sometimes you simply start with what you have — a book you’ve loved, a painting you can’t stop thinking about, an unfinished piece of writing, or a question that refuses to go away — and see where it takes you.
That’s what I’m doing here.
You are very welcome to come along.
Tracey Bisdee