


Kirsten MacQuarrie
- Dec 17, 2021
- 3 min
Three reasons why Kathleen Raine’s 'The Story of Three Water Drops' is a Christmas classic
1. The book is beautiful, inside and out Published 75 years ago in 1946, The Story of Three Water Drops was written well before Kathleen Raine became internationally renowned as a world-leading William Blake expert, yet the first of her two children’s books bears many beautiful Blakean influences. The story is as simple as it is profound, narrating the fable-like adventures of three sibling water drops ‘whose home was in the great ocean’, and the book was also delicately



Kirsten MacQuarrie
- Dec 9, 2021
- 3 min
Easel at the Ocean's Edge
She looks still while she is sleeping, but I know better. Head nestled on a makeshift pillow improvised from a rolled-up jumper and flat, second-hand sofa cushion – even now, diagnosis confirmed, she refuses to take to her bed during the day – Joan’s breathing steadies as she slips deeper into slumber. Unconsciousness is necessary to give her body relief from the gnawing pain that I can tell, however hard she fights to disguise it, increasingly ravages her while awake. In sle


Kirsten MacQuarrie
- Dec 7, 2021
- 2 min
Writing Our Space: an LGBTQ+ Anthology from Arkbound
‘I am Queer. I have fallen from the stars in a burning ball of light… the world made me feel like I was too much. I am not... I am not too much for my universe - or for yours.’ (Renée Gerald, Fallen from the Stars). Arkbound is a charity publisher and social enterprise that aims to promote social inclusion, community development and artistic talent: three inspiring aims that are greatly in evidence in their 2021 LGBTQ+ Anthology Writing Our Space. Edited with a light yet imag