A Life in Progress

On Writing, Work and Becoming

Words have always been where my thinking begins.

I write about the questions that shape our lives. They rarely belong to a single discipline. Instead they move across culture, politics, community, economics, memory and imagination. They sit in the space between private experience and public life.

This is the space that intrigues me. It is where writing begins and where conversations often deepen.

I am less interested in definitive answers than in understanding. Answers shift depending on context, experience and perspective. What matters more to me is the process of connecting ideas, asking better questions and seeing where those conversations lead. Because how we think shapes how we act.

Much of my writing happens in my study, which was once the shepherd’s sleeping area in my thirteenth century farmhouse in County Durham. From my desk I can look over the edge into the kitchen below, keeping an eye on the fire and the quiet domestic negotiations between cats and dogs competing for the best place by the hearth.

My own path into writing and public dialogue has never been linear.

I wrote my first novel at eleven years old. I think I still have it somewhere. But before writing and speaking became central to my work, I spent many years supporting voluntary organisations across the world to access and use European and statutory funding. That work placed me inside complex systems and alongside small communities, often at the intersection of policy and lived reality. The perspective I gained there continues to shape how I think.

Alongside that professional life ran other threads. Textiles. Foraging. Herbal medicine. A long-standing curiosity about how we use what the earth offers us, and what responsibility that use carries.

Eco-printing began as a personal practice and later became a business rooted in second-hand garments, circular thinking and a refusal to accept greenwashing at face value. That work deepened my interest in sustainability, culture and the language we use to describe both.

But my thinking has been shaped as much by private experience as by professional work.

A diagnosis of breast cancer. Months of treatment and recovery. Years spent caring for my husband as he lived with serious mental health conditions. And, in the summer of 2025, widowhood.

These experiences have altered the questions I ask and the way I listen. They have sharpened my attention to fragility, responsibility and the ways our private lives intersect with wider systems and cultural narratives.

Today my work brings together writing, keynote speaking and consultancy. Across each of these spaces I return to the same central concern: how we live, how we think and how we take responsibility for the worlds we help create.