Entre Les Lignes: Between The Lines

Isabelle Bigot peint. Susanna Crossman écrit. Un jour, lors d’une rencontre entre stylo et pinceau, between pen and brush, elles se sont posées la question: what will we find between the lines, entre les mots, dans l’espace serré d’un souffle, hors cadre, dans le gribouillage, la marge ? Comment naviguer dans ces moments faits de minutes rebelles qui ne respectent plus le temps prescrits par l’horloge ? Dans un basculement entre la peinture et le texte, lors d’allers et retours synesthésiques, elles ont trouvé le manque, les secrets, le destin, l’amour, la folie et bien d’autres choses…

Collaborative project with Isabelle Bigot, painter. 

Visual Verse: Stay Steady

I published a piece on Visual Verse this month, a flash fiction crime story, Stay Steady. It's inspired by an infamous Grant Wood painting. You can read it here

Do Men Love More Than Women? Blue Fifth Review

My short story, Do Men Love More Than Women? was published in Blue Fifth Review this month. You can read it here. Really happy to have contributed to the collaboration issue of this journal, featuring work by artists and writers. My personal favorite is the text by Tina Barry.

No Surrender: East End drifting, reading and watching...

       My holiday reading and watching was wide-spread, flitting between high-brow and  entertainment. All necessary. All good. I've been reading (in no particular order) Witch Hunt, a thriller by Ian Rankin, The Cuckoo's Call by Robert Galbraith and In Balance by Adam Phillips. All three are worth delving into for entirely different reasons. I also started to read The Prince by Machaevelli after watching this documentary. 

          Screen-wise, I got all addicted to the Imagine BBC series of documentaries, including this brilliant film on artist's Gilbert and George. They live in a street that I know ever so well. My great-uncle in-law frequented them and Stanley lived in an identical East End flat ( albeit less renovated) just around the corner from the artists. Whatever time of day we arrived at Stanley's bachelor three-storey apartment ( a dusty residence topped by an abandoned tailor's workshop), he instantly produced a plate of food - normally a round of smoked salmon sandwiches - from the drawer of a wooden cabinet. We ate at a huge polished table, next to a stack of three or four TV's, surrounded by sofas and the black and white wedding photos of his eleven siblings.

         Stanley was a militant urban rambler; in a psycho-geographic fashion he wandered around country and town and read the East End like the palm of his hand. The Gilbert and George documentary is called No Surrender. Stanley would have appreciated those words, it's good advice for 2016!

The next one

Time ticks. Been reading, writing, working, being so busy. I've also been watching The Bridge Series Three, which was brilliant, both in plot and characters. Saga's new male policeman side-kick is a fascinating, flawed partner-in-crime: a grieving, drug-addicted, hallucinating cop. The cast-iron story holds tight, steely, gripping the viewer with a series of eerie "staged" murders.  The third series is much stronger than Season Two.  

Also watched London Spy, which was endearing and beautiful, but patchy; stretching thin in the wide gap between conspiracy theory and Ken Loach. Great acting, but inconsistent episodes...

In-between shorts and a film project, I am starting work on the next book in my noir detective series. I'm following my heroine Parisian-based Prudence across the Channel, to Londres, into a plot-driven adventure involving vicious blackmail, entrepreneurs, art and tea-shops. Am off to London for Christmas to do some research.... and all the merry rest...

Bonnes fêtes!

Visual Verse: The Fire Triangle

Have a flash fiction piece up on Visual Verse, The Fire Triangle.

"I kissed Francois. Black-body radiation. Organic matter glowed. Life burnt"

You can read it here.

Paris

There are events which render us speechless. How do we react to the senseless brutality of the attacks on the 13th November in Paris? What can we say? What can we write? Where should we write? Here in France, we shift nervously, our world out of kilter. Etat d'urgence. State of Emergency. I collect people's comments in my mind, catch them as they fall. My daughters. The childminder. Colleagues. The café owner. Many people know someone who knows someone who was in the Bataclan or on the street. We write, we speak, we type and text in attempts to connect and hopefully unearth and rebuild some truth from the rubble, to find a shared pattern, to make peace from disaster.