Amy Sackville, Novelist and Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing in the School of English, has written a piece for the Guardian entitled ‘I am not reading. I am not writing. This is not normal‘.
In the piece, Amy reflects on the difficulties of trying to write during the COVID-19 lockdown.
‘I work at a university and the last months have been the busiest I’ve known, as we respond and support and adapt and plan’, writes Amy. ‘This is not about having an excess of time on my hands to be idled away, and wondering what I might do with it. It’s about what I’ve been doing in the time that I do have, when I’m not doing that job; and whatever that has been, it is not writing. This is all just distraction. From everything. From what’s beyond the flat, the garden, and from this sudden circumscription to those bounds. From writing, and the fact that I am not writing. Because I have not done any writing. (Writing this, here, is terrifying.) Why can’t I write?’
The full article is available on the Guardian‘s website, here:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jul/14/writer-lockdown-diary-amy-sackville-creative-writing