Biography
I’m a writer, designer and teacher who works in a range of forms: print and online, fiction and non-fiction, prose and poetry. These different avenues have led to life of working in the Humanities and the Arts (“all the doss subjects”, as my friend’s nan once put it, because Essex is full of people who sound like Dot Cotton and think like Ayn Rand).
As with most recession-era millennials, I spent three years living it up as taxpayer-funded scum while gaining a BA in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University. I won the BSU 2012 Poetry Prize and had my work published at Bath Literature Festival that year. Riding high off my own sense of hubris, I applied to do an MA straight after and quickly found out that funding your own education without preferential lending rates is impossible. Don’t get me wrong — there was only one scholarship available at the time, but it wasn’t about to be given to a fresh-faced middle-class kid no matter how black he was.
Once I realised my degree didn’t lead to the six-figure salaries and ortolan dishes that had been advertised in the prospectus, I started doing freelance work, writing for a range of now-defunct publications with names like University Business, Otaku Opera, Not For Your Eyes and Bristol Property Live. Some of this stuff was actual journalism — reviews, interviews and so on — but most of it involved rewriting press releases (as reviews, interviews and so on) to create the illusion that we’d been paid to do actual journalism. I was good at it: met my deadlines, hit the word count exactly, took high-resolution well-lit photos. But it was precarious work with low pay, no pension and no employment benefits. Plus, at least once a month, I’d have to engage in this Kafkaesque thing called invoicing, where I would complete the work and send a formal request to be paid, only to have the accounts team go radio silent for two months, to the point where I sometimes found myself wondering if there was any nutritional value in eating cavity wall insulation.
And the funniest part is that any budding journalist in their 20s is probably reading this and thinking, “You got paid?”
I tried to make up for the soulless nature of writing advertorials by volunteering at bookshops, helping kids who were functionally illiterate learn how to read, and working with a local community journalism co-operative called The Bristol Cable. Eventually, I started to realise that teaching the kids to read was the only thing that felt tangible to me — I wanted to be able to come home at the end of the day and explain the direct impact that my work was having on the lives of others. Instead, I’d be on my way to a night shift as a waiter while telling my girlfriend about the horoscopes I was asked to make up for Irish Dancing Magazine.
So I decided to do what many over-entitled middle-class postgrads have done before: I applied to join a neoliberal cult called Teach First. I, too, wanted to be one of those wide-eyed postgrads with a Blairite messiah complex who gets sent to an inner-city school — the kind of place that’s given up on a behaviour policy in favour of letting teachers cry while kids set things on fire. Instead, I was placed at Burnt Mill Academy, one of the most improved academy schools at the time. And guess what? It turns out that teaching is actually really enjoyable when you’re at a school that knows what it’s doing. I not only felt I was doing something useful; I actually found myself liking it.
Still, I thought secondary teaching would merely be a step on my way to becoming a university lecturer in Creative Writing, so I carried on working towards that goal by writing in the snatches of spare time I had. In 2017, I had an unexpected moment of grace when my story “Shapeshifting” was shortlisted for the Bristol Short Story Prize. Around the same time, the government introduced the Postgraduate Loan, so I decided to quit my job at the end of that school year so that I could go back to Bath Spa to study for an MA in Creative Writing while tutoring on the side.
I hear my PhD in the Fallacy of Sunk Costs is in the mail.
While I don’t regret doing the Master’s course at BSU, I will say that being placed with an intransigent manuscript advisor, seeing the university lay off a third of its lecturers, and designing an entire out-of-print anthology — they demanded we pulp it due to a single toothless cease-and-desist letter — really made me rethink my view of higher education. On top of that, COVID-19 arrived before I was given my degree, which was a kind of half-divine, half-malign intervention. Like most people, the pandemic made me recalibrate how I approached my life; finding myself almost unemployed for the first time, I realised that I didn’t want to work in higher education after all, and I didn’t want to spend my whole life waiting for other people to publish my stuff.
That’s why you’re reading this. I landed back on my feet with a great job, one that actually provides me with some time to write. During the golden age of the Internet, before the rise of social media and Google Analytics in the 2010s, you used to be able to stumble across blogs and websites that were the work of individuals who held down day jobs while writing in their spare time. I want to bring some of that anarchistic spirit back to the web. So here it is: I hope you enjoy it.
Ethics and Morality
Everything on this website is available completely for free. I don’t make any money from it — so if you would like to donate some money to me, just know that I can’t give you anything in return, because it goes against my deeply held moral beliefs, whatever those are.
For real though, it’s important to have corners of the internet that stay true to the spirit of the web’s early days, where people built communities, designed websites, wrote blogs and made art without ever caring about whether they could make any money from it. I mean, it’s all well and good saying that artists need to put food on the table through sponsorships and Google AdSense, but there’s gotta be a way to do it without propping up the next generation of technofeudalist supersoldiers who can shoot lasers from their eyes.
Besides, I literally wouldn’t be in the job that I have today, without having access to free resources like Wikipedia, Stack Exchange, the Internet Archive, Khan Academy, IMSLP Petrucci Music Library, Songsterr, Butterick’s Practical Typography, Alan W. Pollack’s Notes on The Beatles, Mark Kennedy’s Temple of the Seven Golden Camels, Alan Sepinwall’s What’s Alan Watching, and Roger Bourland’s defunct blog, among many others. This website, then, is me paying it forward to the next generation of readers. As Lewis Hyde points out in his books The Gift and Common As Air, “The more we allow [ . . . ] commodity art to define and control our gifts, the less gifted we will become, as individuals and as a society”.
Artificial Intelligence
Despite my love of em dashes, correlative clauses and the occasional minor sentence, I have not and will never use generative AI to produce any of the text or images on this website — not even for editing. Every word and image is either my original work or — in the case of quotations and certain images — the work of the person it is attributed to.
Having said that, I’m not going to be one of those people who pretends they don’t use any AI at all — particularly not in an era where chatbots and predictive answers are sewn into the fabric of most websites. With this in mind, there are two situations where I have used AI to create the site:
- Creating workarounds in CSS, PHP or JavaScript. I currently lack the depth of knowledge that I’d need to have to troubleshoot any problem in those programming languages, and I often bump up against traditional solutions still not working due to there being some clash with the existing code for my website’s theme. While I always try to search for an off-the-rack answer from Stack Exchange or Reddit first, there are times when I can’t solve it on my own, and in those instances, I turn to AI for help. I’d like to get to the point where I know those programming languages well enough that I don’t have to rely on AI, but there’s only so much time for learning new skills when your job is teaching old ones.
- Trying to categorise information with a niche linguistic definition. Since language is so mutable, it can be hard to get down to brass tacks when it comes to working out whether something fits in group A or B, since it is a point of conjecture and usually relies on the type of huge dataset analysis done in corpus linguistics. For example, it’s not easy to identify whether the word “running” is a gerund or past participle in a grammatically ambiguous minor sentence. In these situations, the dataset and predictive capabilities of large language models are simply incomparable to human analysis — the machine will be able to look through millions of text strings, find a pattern and reach a consensus in the time it will take me to exhale. Using AI for this purpose is actually less energy-intensive than the time I would spend searching through various websites and pages hosted in data centres looking for an answer.
That’s it in terms of AI usage. If anyone is interested in replacing AI by becoming my go-to consigliere when it comes to knotty questions about programming, linguistics and art theory, then please do get in touch. Just be prepared for me phoning you at 3am crying about brute force attacks and plug-in vulnerabilities.
Copyright
All the content on here is published under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. This means that it has to be shared in the same way you found it: you can’t adapt or change the work in any way, and you can’t sell it or use it for any commercial profit-making purpose. However, you can download, copy and share the work wherever you want entirely for free.
There’s just one catch. You must credit me as the creator and copyright holder. In practice, this means adding my name to the filename and including author details within the document (usually in a prominent recurring location like the header/footer). That way, I’m credited whether they look at it or download it. While the team at Creative Commons encourage people to give proper credit by including title the TITLE, the AUTHOR, the SOURCE with a hyperlink to the original , and the LICENSE — known by the initialism TASL — I’m happy to waive the TITLE part of this, along with the need for a hyperlink. The reason for this is simply cosmetic: photographers tend to give things descriptive titles to help with search engine optimisation (SEO), but whenever I’m writing my own Creative Commons attributions for this site, I’ve found that these gargantuan titles and underlined hyperlinks get in the way of harmonious typesetting. It’s like looking at a table you’ve made from reclaimed wood and realising that someone’s scratched “Dave woz ere” into one of the legs.
Privacy
Since this is a personal website, I try to keep data collection to a minimum. Don’t get me wrong — cookies have their place when it comes to advertising and buying things online. But sharing your data with a for-profit business when you’ve been kind enough to engage with my creative work for free feels a bit like making you cry so I can gather your tears and sell them to a witch.
The info laid out below is written in accordance with EU GDPR laws even though I’m based in the UK, since the European Union’s laws are the most stringent when it comes to protecting users. It’s almost as if something happened in 2016 that made these liberal democracies realise they need to avoid letting their citizens be manipulated into making bad decisions.
Cookies
The only cookies used by this site are essential ones, which means you don’t have to give your permission for them to be collected, since they don’t reveal any personal information about you. If you would like to decline these cookies, you can do it through your individual browser settings. I’m going to assume that if you care that much about online privacy, you probably already know how to do it.
For my site in particular, the data from these cookies is used by WP Statistics, a plug-in for WordPress that provides me with info about traffic to the site. This includes:
- which pages you visit the most
- what time of day you visit them
- which country you’re accessing the site from
- whether you’re looking at the site on a computer or mobile
- how many people you’ve killed that day
As I mentioned before, none of this information can be used to identify you personally, and it’s all stored locally on their server without being shared with third parties. They even anonymise your IP address through cryptographic hashing so that it can’t be accessed in the event of a data breach. If you have questions or concerns about WP Statistics and their analytics, please review their own Data Privacy guide.
Contact info and comments
There are only two situations where the site collects other data; both of these come under the GDPR framework of consent and require you to opt-in.
- If you use my contact form to email me, it will collect your name and email address. I will only use this data to reply to your inquiry and send you copies of my family newsletter at Christmas.
- If you leave a comment on a page or post, you are required to enter a username and email address, and you will have the option of creating an avatar. While the avatar, comment and username are public, your email address will not be visible to anyone other than you. Gravatar, the organisation that provides the comment service, will turn your e-mail into a cryptographic string to safeguard your privacy. You can find their Privacy Policy here.
- Please note that WordPress also offers you the choice save your name, email address and website in cookies so that you don’t have to fill in your details again when you leave another comment. These cookies will last for one year, which seems unnecessary long, which is why I’d advise against doing this in the first place.
- When visitors leave comments on the site, Cloudflare collects the data shown in the comments form, along the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection. The comments then go through an automated spam detection service that looks for key words, phrases or links that tend to appear in spam comments. None of this data is retained long-term; it’s used for this purpose and this purpose alone.
- If you leave a comment, the comment and any metadata related to it (like the date and time was posted) are retained indefinitely. This is normal for any comments section — you can usually see when comments were posted and who posted them. The main reason for internally retaining this info is so that WordPress can recognise and approve any follow-up comments automatically instead of holding them in a moderation queue.
If you have any issues with this, check out the data hoarding section below to find out what your rights are.
Links and Embedded content
Articles on this site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, music, images) and/or links that take you to other websites. Every website has its own privacy policy, and I can’t be held responsible for what they do with your data. These websites might collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, lay eggs in your brain, and carry out all kinds of corporate malfeasance. If you care about this stuff, you will need to solve it at the level of your software; make sure you use a browser that blocks inessential cookies and doesn’t just autofill all your account details.
Data hoarding
This website stores your personal information for a limited time only:
- Contact form messages are kept for as long as it takes to complete our conversation.
- Comments are kept indefinitely so that subsequent comments can be approved automatically.
- Analytics records are automatically deleted after 30 days.
If you are located in the EU or UK, you hold the following statutory rights regarding your data:
- You can request a copy of the data I hold about you.
- You can ask me to update or fix inaccurate information.
- You can withdraw permission for me to use your data at any time.
- You can ask me to erase your personal data (known as the “right to be forgotten”).
To exercise any of these rights, please email me directly using the contact form below. Try to keep the email cordial; you catch more flies with honey than you do with verbal diarrhoea.
Complaints
If you have any reason to believe that I’m using your data incorrectly, please contact me using the form below as your first port of call to see if I can fix it, since I genuinely believe that caring about cybersecurity is one of the ways that we can prevent the internet from just becoming a megaphone for oligarchs.
If for any reason you feel the need to lodge a formal complaint, you can do this through your local Data Protection Authority. In the UK, this is Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).
Contact
When I’m not teaching, I’m available for workshops, readings, editorial advice and other creative projects. I have a current DBS certificate and plenty of experience working with children of all ages, along with educating adults too. Like most British people who read books, eat tofu and believe in wacky ideas like climate change and women’s rights, I’m based in Bristol, a mythical land created on a foundation of underground music, gourmet food and slavery. If you’d like to get in touch with me, use the contact form below.