It’s a feeling that books often echo: we live inside their shadows and stories, but part of us also yearns to bring that intensity into our own lives. I lose myself in their stories and lyrics like the haunting pull of Loreena McKennitt’s lyrical version of The Lady of Shalott, in poems like Yeats’s The Stolen Child and Rossetti’s Echo, and in John William Waterhouse’s paintings of Tennyson’s verses, where the themes of

The Lady of Shalott is a poem of tragedy and yearning, but also of freedom. Tennyson’s words trace her journey from the stillness of her tower to the fatal moment she dares to look directly at life, love and beauty. Waterhouse’s paintings bring those verses to life: the Lady bent over her loom, bound by shadows and thread; the sudden, defiant moment she turns toward the window, her face lit with both fear and longing; her fragile figure adrift in the boat, together, the poem and the paintings capture that haunting tension between captivity and freedom, between desire and doom, between the beauty of choosing life and the inevitability of loss. It’s a story that still lingers because it mirrors our own yearnings: the risk of breaking free and the cost of chasing what feels real.

Writing & Reading Life: Why the Romantics Still Speak to Me

When I’m not writing or painting, I find myself reaching back to the poets who first taught me to fall in love with words. Tennyson, with his haunting Lady of Shalott, makes me feel the ache of longing and the weight of shadows. John Clare, the “peasant poet,” reminds me of the raw beauty in simple things  a hedgerow, a skylark, the fleeting moment of a season.

The Romantics, to me, are about more than flowers and wistful sighs. They were rebels of their age, unafraid to show feeling in a world that demanded restraint. I carry that same spirit into my writing  weaving together history, myth, and emotion in ways that blur the line between the ordinary and the extraordinary.

Right now, my desk holds a mix of old and new:

• In Memoriam by Tennyson (a comfort in grief, even centuries later).

• A well-thumbed collection of John Clare’s poems.

• And beside them, a few newer voices in fantasy, reminding me how much the genre keeps growing and reshaping itself

For me, stories are a garden: part wild, part cultivated. Just like in my real garden, where roses climb alongside herbs and unruly weeds, I love when poetry and fiction entwine with a little disorder, a touch of grit.

And always nearby are my two little Pomeranian companions, Cookie and Jack-Jack (yes, after the chaos baby from Incredibles 2). They like to think of themselves as my furry muses though in reality, they spend more time barking furiously at the postman than inspiring my next great sentence.