Creative nonfiction essays
A personal essay that recounts my hopes and fears as I awaited the birth of my first grandchild. It was published in Wild Willow Magazine's issue on mums. You can read it at https://wildwillowmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/wwm-issue-6.pdf or click on the image to read it here.
A short personal essay about farewelling my mother, published in Short Reads in November 2025. https://www.short-reads.org/out-the-front-door/
This piece, published in Sad Girl Diaries recounts how it took me all afternoon to get ready for the fourth form social. You can read it at https://www.sadgirldiaries.com/post/to-the-dance-beverley-stevens
This essay about working for the BBC World Service in London in the unit that scheduled transmissions to exotic and contested places was published in the literary journal Dorothy Parker's Ashes. You can read it at https://www.dorothyparkersashes.com/work/on-the-same-wavelength
This craft essay, published on the Brevity Blog, tracks some of my reading and learning about writing memoir and, in particular, references Dinty Moore's concept of the magnetic river that needs to run through a story. Read it at https://brevity.wordpress.com/2025/01/29/a-river-runs/
In this article published on the Brevity Blog, I explore how much to reveal and publish about family dramas and difficult relationships in the memoir pieces and personal essays I write. Read it at https://brevity.wordpress.com/2024/03/08/not-telling-it-all/
"I didn’t like Katherine Mansfield; she was a dreadful girl", my grandmother told me. This essay, originally published in the Katherine Mansfield Society newsletter in August 2023, explores her attitude, and that of her family, to the woman who would become a highly acclaimed short story writer. Click on the photo to read it.
Published online in the literary journal Dorothy's Parker's Ashes, this piece was submitted in response to a call for submissions on the theme 'mother'. My mother is seated in the bottom row, first on the left. Read it at http://www.dorothyparkersashes.com/mother/gone
A personal essay, first published by Headland in issue 16, November 2021 and included, with some changes, in a forthcoming anthology 'Loving Arrangements: Stories about Modern Living and Loving' to be published by Rutgers University Press in 2026. Click on the photo to read it.
Pink things are sneaking into my bathroom and stealing into my bedroom, insinuating themselves uninvited. In the bathroom, a pink toothbrush and soapdish, a pink pot plant container for the maidenhair fern and a pink spray bottle to keep it misted and moist. By day, I wear sober blues and sombre blacks. At night, I … Continue reading Pretty pink things
Fragments of an ordinary life 