Cherry Potts, Writer

Category: Inspirations

  • Remembering Lilian Mohin

    Remembering Lilian Mohin

    I’ve just read in yesterday’s Guardian Other Lives, that Lilian Mohin has died, age 81, although the online version is dated March, so lockdown and Covid-enlarged deathrate must have pushed her off the paper version initially. I don’t think she’d be pleased. We argued, the first time Lilian and I met, and for a while…

  • Pretending poetry, songs of liberty and Ursula le Guin

    The thing about running your own business is that holidays become almost entirely theoretical. It’s a holiday to leave the computer for long enough to hang out the washing on a sunny day, it’s a holiday to take the long way to the post office, it’s a holiday to read something that isn’t for work,…

  • Inspirations – Deja Vu

    I’ve always been fascinated by the concept of Déjâ Vu, and this story originated in something I wrote when I was still at school, a highly melodramatic piece about walking into one’s own past. That story remains as just one scene, as Lucy/Hilary steps out of the train at a station, and goes to a…

  • Inspirations – Russian Fairytales, illustrations and London Bridge

    Two stories came from the same picture, which I have been completely unable to trace. I think it is from an edition of The Snow Queen, and the illustrator might have been Kay Neilsen or Edmund Dulac or possibly Arthur Rackham, but as I’ve been unable to track it down I can’t confirm; maybe, like…

  • Inspirations – Dancing in the Darkroom

    Getting a book ready for publication (Typesetting, proofreading) even second time round and twenty years later, does send me back to the roots of the stories, and with so many of the stories in Mosaic of Air I can remember exactly where and when the idea first stuck its claws into me. Ladies Pleasure, the…

  • Inspirations – The Archetypal Good Wife

    The first story I ever got published, Penelope is no Longer Waiting ( A Very, Very long time ago) came from my finally reading Homer (not in the original Greek, comprehensive schooling isn’t that kind of comprehensive) as opposed to interpretations of… and I found that what I thought I knew about the Odyssey was…

  • Inspirations – claustrophobia in the closet

    To celebrate HM the Queen’s royal assent on Gay Marriage, some thoughts about what it used to be like when I was first coming out in 1982… when I wrote Trying to Tell You… A story about coming out,  not to straight colleagues or family, but to the only Visible Lesbian ( this is my…

  • Inspirations – Marvell and computers

    The short story Mosaic of Air, (title story of my first collection and republished this coming September)  began life in a computer literacy class in the late 1980’s. I was bored, the class was going slowly, and I’d been given some BASIC code to play with.  I started to imagine what would happen if the…

  • Notes from a Permanent Exhibition

    More (and the last for the time being, until I find time to go again) from my National Gallery series, but not so much about angels. The National has two Filippino Lippi Virgin & Child paintings, one with St John as a child, 1480 the other with Saints Jerome and Dominic 1485: in each she…

  • On the side of the Angels, Part 8: Memling

    Another in a series of observations of early medieval paintings in the National Gallery London, an endless source of inspiration and amusement. Intended to show how I find stories in a painting, not my opinion of the subject matter nor its creator. Nothing replaces seeing the real thing! Virgins and Children, with Donors and Angels…