Welcome to justthoughtsnstuff

I started posting to jtns on 20 February 2010 with just one word, 'Mosaic'. This seemed an appropriate introduction to a blog that would juxtapose fragments of memoir and life-writing. Since 1996, I'd been coming to terms with the consequences of emotional and economic abuse that had begun in childhood, and which, amongst other things, had sought to stifle self-expression. While I'd explored some aspects of my life through fiction and, to a lesser extent, journalism, it was only in 2010 that I felt confident enough to write openly about myself. I believed this was an important part of the healing process. Yet within weeks, the final scenes of my family's fifty-year nightmare started to play themselves out and the purpose of the blog became one of survival through writing. Although some posts are about my family's suffering - most explicitly, Life-Writing Talk, with Reference to Trust: A family story - the majority are about happier subjects (including, Bampton in rural west Oxfordshire, where I live, Oxford, where I work, the seasons and the countryside, walking and cycling) and I hope that these, together with their accompanying photos, are enjoyable and positive. Note: In February 2020, on jtns' tenth birthday, I stopped posting to this blog. It is now a contained work of life-writing about ten years of my life. Frank, 21 February 2020.

New blog: morethoughtsnstuff.com.

Saturday 1 April 2017

sunday 9th april, 100th anniversary of edward thomas's death; a conscious englishman by margaret keeping























Sunday 9th April will mark the 100th anniversary of the death of the poet Edward Thomas, who was killed in action at the Battle of Arras in 1917.

A Conscious Englishman by Margaret Keeping, which was first published by StreetBooks in 2013, is a wonderful novel about the last four years of Thomas's life. It tells the story from both his point of view and that of Helen, his wife.

It is available from Amazon (link is for UK site - though the book is available from their sites worldwide) in paperback and as a Kindle ebook. The paperback is also available from other online bookshops.

Here are three of many quotations about the book:

'[Margaret Keeping's] inhabitation of Edward, Robert, Helen and their world is tender and subtle...A lovely novel.'  Robert Macfarlane

'[Margaret Keeping's] writing is very assured and she has the necessary eye for place, detail, weather and seasons to write about Edward Thomas...I hope the book will reach the wide audience it deserves and feel sure that many others will enjoy it as much as I have.'  Linda Newbery, author of Set in Stone

'A Conscious Englishman...turns its subject into a twentieth-century equivalent of the old-fashioned notion of Keats: a poet misvalued by his times and cruelly cut down...'  Peter McDonald, The Times Literary Supplement

And here are links to some jtns posts about the novel:

113 cowley road, edward thomas, helen thomas, richard emeny, edward thomas fellowship, margaret keeping, richard morley, in parenthesis, the word, dh lawrence, george orwell - Saturday, 16 May 2015

nettles, tall nettles by edward thomas, 113 cowley road, plaque, unveiling - Sunday, 10 May 2015

willow wands, purity, regrowth, yellow flag, in pursuit of spring, edward thomas, a conscious englishman by margaret keeping, guardian books - Friday, 29 March 2013

a conscious englishman by margaret keeping published today - Thursday, 7 February 2013

moon, crows and snowdrops, ribs, a conscious englishman, edward thomas, publishing my edward thomas - Sunday, 3 February 2013
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