Glimpses Beneath launch, June 15th, Dublin
Really looking forward to this – four books, one evening! Delighted to be one of Silver Locust Press’s inaugural stable of chapbooks with my little book of flash fiction.
Sparks launch, May 14th, Belfast
May 12th, 2026
An artist sends a drawing. A writer responds only to what she sees. No context. No explanation.
A great director once told me it’s what’s between the lines that gives the actor space to act. In a similar way, the 23 wonderfully detailed observational drawings My friend, Belfast artist Margaret Woods Moore, sent me over a three-week period gave me the space to create tiny stories that range from wryly comic to quietly devastating – sometimes within the same piece.
I had a ball writing these, but they were also a way of supporting each other creatively during a difficult time. Margeret was caring for her mother who had dementia and Alzheimer’s, while I was learning to walk after four months non-weight bearing after the second of four leg ops. Then there was Covid. Ireland had just gone into its third lockdown.
But the joy of sharing our work and the surprising stories that came from each piece! I genuinely have no idea where some of the voices in this collection came from. I mean, I wrote from the point of view of a pavement slab – that’s new for me! Not to mention swooping crow low over a bloodied field and aiming for Cromwell’s eye.
Must be my ‘too vivid an imagination‘ at play again!
But any of Margaret’s pictures could have spawned a dozen, two dozen different stories. And within each of these stories, there could have been any number of voices, of beginnings and endings.
This is why we’ve added pairings of blank pages to the book. This collaboration gave us so much joy, it really was creative therapy.
And we want other people to continue the collaboration.
We did numbers 1-23, so numbers 24-28 are for you.
Artists, writers, doodlers, scribblers, people have never written in their life or drawn since school, we want them to add their work, to pass it on, to be inspired by each other…
But without expectation. To experiment, to play with colours and words.
Simply for the joy of creating something new.
Launch is at 6pm on May 14th in the Conn Auld Gallery, Holywood Library, Sullivan Building, 86-88 High Street, Holywood Down, Belfast BT189AE. Margaret’s exhibition, Do You Mind if I Draw You is on in the Gallery until May 23rd.
Clouds Above
May 3rd, 2026
On April 29th, my first piece of creative non-fiction, Clouds, Above was published in the American literary journal, Citron Review. I haven’t entered stories for competitions in more than 20 years – and had decided it really wasn’t in my skillset – so it was wonderful news to be accepted.
I’d finished the latest draft of a memoir called The Kimono in the Bottom Drawer. This book is about my parents, and myself, and about the stories my mother used to tell, but also the gap between story and memory, which is where the truth sometimes lies.
During two weeks in the magical and remote Cill Riallaig artists retreat, I had broken it out of chapters and into a series of 32 stories with flash fiction pieces in between. Beta readers were hugely positive but I decided I needed to prove the concept because it isn’t an easy book to summarise. I started polishing the stories to remove the interlinking threads and submitting them to literary magazines and competitions.
Another story has been picked for an anthology being published in July, but more of that later.
Clouds Above is about my mother, and this is how it begins…
CLOUDS, ABOVE
Cirrocumulus. Cumulonimbus. Altocumulus.
Up the Dell Road, through St Fintan’s estate. Past the gallery in the white house and down onto Carrickbrack Road. My mother tells me the names of plants we pass, of trees, stories from her past.
In sun or wind and rain, she names the clouds.
Cirrus. Cumulus.
It is 1942. My mother is in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF), based in a camp in Millom in the Lake District. When news comes through that they are recruiting officers, she is encouraged to put herself forward. Reluctantly, she does, with one job in her sights. It’s a top-secret job that looks glamorous on screen — where slim WAAF officers push planes and boats and troops into place across a map of the war spread across an enormous table.
It is to this room that news comes of troop movements, the success or failure of strategies almost in real time, where the theatre of the war can be seen. This, she feels, is the beating heart of the war effort – but also safely distant from the individual, the personal, the visible cost.
Some days, especially those when I feel an urgent need to fill the pages with words and don’t know where to start, my keyboard becomes an adversary. Rows of tombs for words beginning with C, V, B, N; the shift key for upwards, the caps lock to condemn them to hell.
Hell, Dell.
Couldn’t be farther from a leafy glade.
On Being Typecast…
May 1, 2026
As a writer, I’ve always resisted being pigeonholed. Stories demand to be told in the medium that suits them – and not always the one you thought they would fit into.
My blog began as me and a snail (called Percival, adopted from my daughter Libby) in my shed out back. I was working solely as a screenwriter, but the books were simmering away in the background.
As an experiment, I started turning my family films into novels because I missed the characters and wanted other people to meet them. ‘Jessie Jones is Nearly Ten’ became my first book, Dad’s Red Dress.
Now there are seven books out there, three more joining them this year and several morein the pipeline. I’m going to try and make sesne of the chaos of making a living by creating worlds and characters, while teaching others what I have learnt and mentoring newer writers – what could be better?
While I get this going, here is is a link to my original blog: This Writer’s Crazy Life.
There are pages of tips from some of the greats, like David Mamet and Gill Dennis. There are links to trailers and one of my short films, Barzakh.
And if there is anything you’d like me to write about, contact me via the form below. I’m all ears!
Lindsay J. Sedgwick 