Mary & Martha & Alison & Arthur.

I’ve wanted to have this conversation with

Alison Acheson

, in this way, for more than a year.

We’ve overcome timezones, timetables and wildfires to make it happen, and I’m so glad we did.

It’s the kind of conversation that I’m privileged to experience regularly in private, with generative entrepreneurs like writers, performers and founders who I admire and am pleased to call acquaintances.

I’ve been nervous about attempting to do something like this with a public outcome cos I feared that it might change the tone.

Well it did, in some ways, I think - for the shorter, clearer and better.

It was like a beautiful dance, for me to get to talk to someone whose writing I admire so much about the inspiration and process and circumstances that create that admiration in me.

Rather than revealing the magic trick and ‘spoiling’ it - which can happen sometimes when we explore ‘how the sausage is made’ , our conversation created in me new and deeper appreciations of what Alison has achieved in her book Dance Me to the End: Ten Months and Ten Days with ALS, and as a writer of adult, young adult, and childrens’ books, AND as a teacher of writing; and most importantly, as a person experiencing and reflecting on the agonies, ecstasies and day-to-day drudgeries of life in that extraordinary way that some of us can and do: by putting them into words.

I hope you enjoy it.

Thank you for watching, listening or reading - however you do this.

Welcome to Alison’s subscribers who have made the journey over here to spend time with her cool thinking.

And thank you all - especially to my paid subscribers who afford me the time and motivation to plan ahead and make more of these interesting multimedia wrightings happen.

O yeah, I’ve introduced another interesting way to be part of this Substack.

If you’re a paid subscriber, you’ll receive a personalised copy of a handwritten letter each month. Direct to your mailbox. It’ll be creative.

So if you’d like to be there for the first one, which will be posted in a week or so, and you’re not a paid subscriber, become one today!

If becoming a paid subscriber is not something that’s right for you right now, that’s cool too. Thank you for getting all the way here.