Author Archives: Beth Wren
Summer Reading List
As the days get longer, brighter and, hopefully, warmer (it’s the UK here, you never know), this year I have set myself the challenge of reading five very different books of different genres. Here’s my run-down: The Classic: The Mill on the Floss, George Eliot I’ve read about 50 pages of this but didn’t get much further and […]
Poetry Corner | Poem #18: Take Me to the Mountains
Because I only feel at home when I can see, and feel, just how small I really am. Everyone needs to go and stand in the shadows of the mountains every once in a while and breathe. It does wonders to your perspective.
Travels 2016: South Island, New Zealand
Picton → Christchurch → Dunedin → Invercargill → Queenstown → Wanaka → Tekapo → Christchurch And so we reach the end of our journey, and the end of the story of our three-month trip around the world. Let’s pretend that this part didn’t take me two months to write… New Zealand’s South Island is mountainous, wild, and basically just completely epic. We traipsed […]
Review: Burial Rites, Hannah Kent
Northern Iceland, 1829. A woman condemned to death for murdering her lover. A family forced to take her in. A priest tasked with absolving her. But all is not as it seems, and time is running out: winter is coming, and with it the execution date. Only she can know the truth. This is Agnes’s […]
Poetry Corner | Poem #17
Who says that writing isn’t like giving birth? And a little bit like self-destruction too. I do my best work while the rest of the world is asleep, apparently, and it’s always going to be worth it.
How to Deal with the Post-Travel Blues
This post goes out to anyone who has ever been travelling for any good length of time, and you know exactly what I mean when I say Post-Travel Blues. It’s a real thing, guys. But there are ways you can counter the symptoms and learn to live a well-balanced, mindful and happy life back in […]
Poetry Corner | Poem #16: Blackbird
Spring has sprung and life, it blooms. I’ve just been thinking about the beauty in the everyday and the little moments which make up happiness, and I think I managed to capture this one on paper. I guess I don’t need kangaroos or koala bears after all, just the humble old blackbird.
Review: Room, Emma Donoghue
Jack is five. He lives with his Ma. They live in a single, locked room. They don’t have the key. Jack and Ma are prisoners. Room by Emma Donoghue is an extraordinarily powerful story of a mother and child kept in isolation, and the desire for, and price of, freedom. Room had been on my […]
Travels 2016: Wellington
Wellington was our last stop on New Zealand’s North Island, and asides from being a very small capital with only just more than 200,000 residents, we found it to be a very cool, relaxed and fun city. In our two days we did a walking tour of the city, took the cable car from Lambton […]
Bethany Wren 