Hannah Moore
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Achievements (39)
Stories (282)
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The Writing Circle. Top Story - August 2023.
It seems we are called, of late, to self-reflection. The Vocal challenges on offer at present have created, for me, a kind of momentum. A natural progression perhaps, from reflecting on the work of others, through the impact of others’ work on our own lives, into consideration of what drives us to create our own work, and how that evolves. We each have our own reasons for being here, sharing pieces of ourselves. And I think mine become clear as I reflect on my writing journey.
By Hannah Moore3 years ago in Writers
Nasty, disturbing, uncomfortable things.
There are books in my library, such that it is, which have held within them excitement, knowledge, curiosity and anguish. There are books between whose covers I have found yearning, disgust, loyalty and contempt. There are many which have brought pleasure, a few with the strange gift of boredom, and some, just a handful, which have changed my life. Not in the way that all things do, each new experience making minor adjustments, but in the way that shows, decades later, in the makeup of my world. The first of these are lost to me. I am told I was besotted with a particular ABC, and the illustrations of Shirley Hughes continued throughout my own children’s early years, to resemble my idealised family life to a suspicious degree. The Maggie B, by Irene Haas may well underscore my concept of cosy, and I dare say the smallfolk I nearly glimpse beneath the trees in dappled sunlight have been seen first on a page, from the haven of my mother’s lap. One, likely some, of these early books has changed my life, turning me into a reader and lover of stories before I can remember otherwise. But I want to talk here about the first clear memory, the lucid revelation, of the world I build my life in.
By Hannah Moore3 years ago in BookClub
Never Let Me Go
As ever, reading Ishiguro is like spending a genteel evening in pleasant, company. The talk is sometimes funny, occasionally a little sorrowful, always engaging. Only when he bids you goodnight, and you close the book, do you look down to find yourself stripped naked and gazing at your own innards.
By Hannah Moore3 years ago in Critique
One hundred years of solitude
Inside the cover of this book, a family tree should have bid me beware, but this “greatest novel” carried such accolades that I embarked heedlessly, since when I have been continuously confused by a dense meandering text- punctuated, yes, by paragraphs of brilliance- in which everyone carries the same name.
By Hannah Moore3 years ago in Critique
How the Mermaid got her Tale
At the back of beyond, and a little bit farther, in a time further back than memory, but nearer than lost, a woman with golden hair and a voice like a heart’s sigh lived in a small stone house, on a tussocked slope, just beyond reach of the storm spray which swept in from the sea on the worst winter’s night. The woman was married – is married – to a man who loved her in the calm, certain way in which she loved him, and they built the house together, when they recognised that they needed nothing more from the world beyond the bay in which it nestled. Each evening, the woman sat on a stool and brushed her hair with one hundred strokes, while the man checked his nets with salt toughened hands, inspecting the strings through eyes like the sea. When they had finished, they would lay down together in the bed, and entwine themselves, as tenderly and as inexorably as the roots of twinned trees.
By Hannah Moore3 years ago in Fiction
A Woman of Independent Means
Dear Sir, Thank you for your letter of 15th August, 1882, in which you declined my application for the position of saleswoman. I confess to feeling most disappointed at your response, as I have long held your establishment in the highest regard, and indeed have made several purchases with which I have been very pleased. I am aware that many of your girls arrive at your doors with little experience but with recommendations from gentlemen known to them, and that I carry no such recommendation with me, and it is this that has prompted me to write again in the hope that you might allow me to recommend myself.
By Hannah Moore3 years ago in History
