This site belongs to writer, maker and workshop facilitator Claire Dean. And now a switch to the first person because it always feels a bit peculiar to talk about myself in third...
My short stories have been widely published in anthologies and magazines including The Best British Short Stories, The Year's Best Weird Fiction, Best British Horror, Thought X, Spindles, Beta-Life, Murmurations: an Anthology of Uncanny Stories about Birds , Still , Patricide, Shadows & Tall Trees and Cabinet des Fées. The Museum of Shadows and Reflections, a collection of my short stories with illustrations by Laura Rae, is published by Unsettling Wonder. Four of my stories, 'Bremen', 'The Unwish', 'Marionettes' and 'Into the Penny Arcade', are published as limited-edition chapbooks by Nightjar Press.
I've recently been making handmade digital stories that respond to readers or their environments and more info about this work can be found here. I've lectuered in creative writing at universities in North West England and I completed a PhD in Design and Computing at Lancaster University in 2018. I'm interested in material writing practice, the ways writing practices and technologies can shape stories, and environmental science communication. I'm writer-in-residence for Ensemble, an EPSRC-funded project investigating the role of digital technologies in understanding, mitigating and adapting to environmental changes.
For the last ten years, I've worked with children, families and adults of all ages in a wide variety of community and educational settings, encouraging them to make stories and sharing my passion for fairy tales, folklore, and science communication through story. I run workshops and activities, give talks and create projects that explore wonder and seek out the hidden extraordinary in the places we live.
I originally trained as an actor at East 15 and have an MA in Creative Writing from Edge Hill University. I've worked as a bookseller, editor, project manager, festival coordinator, family learning tutor and lecturer. I was co-founding editor of Paraxis and founding editor of New Fairy Tales.
I live in Lancashire, in the north of England, with my family.
The inspiration for using 'Gathering Scraps' as a blog title comes from playwright August Strindberg's description of his characters as...
'conglomerations of past and present stages of civilization, bits from books and newspapers, scraps of humanity, rags and tatters of fine clothing, patched together as is the human soul'
Photo by Jonathan Bean at Beanphoto.