Heather Parry's Blog

It is December 31st, 2022, and here I sit with the Last Mince Pie and my last coffee of the year, cobbling together the scattered, mad pieces of a scattered, mad year. Actually—it’s not a mince pie. It’s the remnants of a traditional Italian Christmas bis...

I almost didn’t write this blog this year. What’s usually a nice, calm little tradition for no one, really, but me (mince pie, coffee, an hour or so to look back on the year, settle 2021 in my head before 2022 starts) seemed more of a stress than anything else. I’m increasingly reticent to put ...

Normally, when I sit down at the end of a year to write this blog, it’s with a mince pie and a coffee and a sense of sweeping my eye over the last twelve months, to recall with gentle affection the books that were pressed into my hands by friends, the ones I picked up in a library or bookshop and the ones I bought at laun...

I could start this blog by reiterating quite how shit this year has been, socially and politically, and in fact every instinct tell me to do so. But today, right now, sitting with a coffee and the last of the mince pies, I want to celebrate the good things about 2019, because there have been some, buried deep down in the midst of everything awful, and we need to start out 2020 determined and inspired. And where better to start than with books?

It’s become a habit of mine to sit down at the end o...

So here we are, finally, at the end of the longest year in recorded history. January feels like several decades ago, and still 2018 limps on, serving up bigger and bigger piles of political shit. Christ, we’ve done well to survive it.

But survive it we have, and I don’t know about you, but I only did so because I read a metric shit ton of books.

At the end of every year I like to take a wee while to look over the books I’ve read and take stock of the previous twelve months. This number is grow...

"Dream that my little baby came to life again; that it had only been cold, and that we rubbed it before the fire, and it lives."

Mary Shelley, who wrote the above in a diary entry in 1815, may not be the first person you think of when you start reading Julian Gough's new novel Connect. You might instead think of Philip K Dick and his protagonists; writers and characters that more specifically explore the advances of future tech and their implications. But to my mind, it's Mary Shelley that forms ...

Profiteroles
In any large quantity. No self-control. Jesus Christ. 

My Gromma's coffee cake
Made with the cheap instant stuff and produced at a rate of at least one per family per week (my Gromma had six kids and each one of them had children too). I would often feign or overstate illness to be able to go to her house and lick the bowl while we sat in a blanket-and-dining-chairs den watching VHS tapes of Dad's Army or Open All Hours. In my twenties, thinking I knew better, I tried to recreate this...

As Stephen King acknowledges in his seminal book On Writing, it's the reader that makes the writer; you simply cannot become a writer without having a ceaseless capacity for and love of reading. Every single writer was a book-loving child, and then a book-loving teen, and is a book-loving adult. You cannot be one without the other; it's just not possible. 

Considering who you are as a writer, then, necessitates a rumination of those you've read—and for International Women's Day, I thought I'd tak...

I love my little ritual of writing this blog, as it gives me a way to look over the year in full. Coffee, truffles (Christmas present), memories. I read a book title and remember who lent it to me, or where I read it, or what a friend responded when I told them that I loved or hated it. Here's the book that I read walking on the streets of Toronto in July; here's the book I read to my partner in the bath, tears running down my face; here are the four books I borrowed from my friend's shelves whi...

Finishing things. It’s difficult, isn’t it?

Starting is always easy. Ideas come to you in the bath, in bed, in middle of a conversation with someone you should be listening to. You scrabble for a notepad, and BOOM. A start.

But the finish. The finish is ethereal. Untouchable. Seen only through a forest of struggle and stamina.

I am famously quite rubbish at finishing things. Sometimes I can’t even finish a sentence without starting the next one. My head runs off before my mouth and can catch up, an...