Podcast
A Reading Life, A Writing Life, with Sally Bayley
Hosted by Sally Bayley, Andrew Smith · EN
Acclaimed writer Sally Bayley lives on a narrowboat, surrounded by the sights and sounds of nature, sustained by reading and writing. In this series, she invites us into her life, showing us how books have the power to change your life. Sally has recently been diagnosed with an auto-immune disease, but this is not a misery memoir podcast; she shows us how literature and connection to nature can console and give courage and insight. The series is produced by Andrew Smith, James Bowen, Lucie Richter-Mahr, and Dylan Gwalia.
To find out more about Sally please visit: https://sallybayley.com.
27episodes
Episodes
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A Fragment of May
May 2, 202500:11:00Tap to summarizeFor Emilie: may you always sing. We return this week, for a special micro-episode, to Mrs Dalloway’s London. Listen for a brief meditation on the fragmentation of life, interruption, and finding meaning in art. This episode was edited and produced by James Bowen. Special thanks to Andrew Smith, Violet Henderson, Kris Dyer, and Maeve Magnus.
Transcribe →Mrs Dalloway
Apr 27, 202500:23:48Tap to summarize‘Now it was time to move, and, as a woman gathers her things together, her cloak, her gloves, her opera-glasses, and gets up to out of the theatre into the street, she rose from the sofa and went to Peter…’ This week, we join Sally reflecting on the arrangement of character. Listen for a journey, via Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) through perspectives, cityscapes, and the means by which we navigate everyday life. The music accompanying the initial discussion of Mrs Dalloway is ‘Friday’, by Paul Seba. More about Paul and his work can be found here. This episode was edited and produced by James Bowen. Special thanks to Andrew Smith, Violet Henderson, Kris Dyer, and Maeve Magnus.
Transcribe →Sightlines
Apr 4, 202500:30:38Tap to summarize‘Sightlines produce a story, an avenue, a walkway, a space to move through…’ This week, we join Sally reflecting on the idea of the sightline, and the stories they structure. Listen for a meditation on narrative, childhood, and a unique perspective of and from The Dreaming Spires… The text of the Sylvia Plath poem Sally references can be found here. This episode was edited and produced by James Bowen. Special thanks to Andrew Smith, Violet Henderson, Kris Dyer, and Maeve Magnus.
Transcribe →Rhapsody
Mar 11, 202500:29:01Tap to summarize‘I try to live my life as though I were stitching together a book of songs.’ This week, Sally offers us a tour through the stitched-together songs of her life, reflecting on the form of rhapsody. Join her for a series of vignettes on art, education, memory, and connection. This text of this episode is based on an address Sally gave at Wadham College Chapel, part of an evening of ‘Taking Heart in Poetry & Song’ for St David's Day. More information can be found here. The full text of Dylan Thomas’ poem, ‘The force that through the green fuse drives the flower’, quoted early in the episode can be found here. The wonderful piano music in the opening and closing sections is, respectively, ‘Tuesday’ and ‘Saturday’ by Paul Sebastian. This episode was edited and produced by James Bowen. Special thanks to Andrew Smith, Violet Henderson, Kris Dyer, and Maeve Magnus.
Transcribe →The Painter
Feb 1, 202500:21:27Tap to summarize‘I see that she is thinking most of her canvas, and how she will get there…’ This week, we join Sally after visiting her friend, the artist Emma Neuberg. Listen for a reflection of friendship, travel, and the connections art offers us. More information on Emma and her work can be found here. She can also be found on Instagram @emmaneuberg. The beautiful piano music in the closing section is ‘Tuesday’, by Paul Sebastian. This episode was edited and produced by James Bowen. Special thanks to Andrew Smith, Violet Henderson, Kris Dyer, and Maeve Magnus.
Transcribe →A Reading Life, A Writing Life in Conversation
Mar 7, 2024Tap to summarizeA special episode this week, as we join Sally at Brasenose College in a conversation titled ‘A Reading Life, A Writing Life’, with fellow writers Aida Edemariam and Joanna Kavenna. Join them for a discussion on memory, storytelling, and the porous boundaries between reality and fiction. Aida is a writer and journalist whose debut book The Wife’s Tale received the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Award. More information on her and her work can be found here: https://www.rcwlitagency.com/authors/edemariam-aida/ Joanna, whose 2016 novel A Field Guide to Reality has appeared in a previous episode, is a novelist, essayist and current Frankland Visitor at Brasenose College, Oxford. More information can be found on her website: http://www.joannakavenna.com/ This episode was edited and produced by James Bowen. Special thanks to Andrew Smith, Violet Henderson, Kris Dyer, and Maeve Magnus.
Transcribe →A Reading Life, A Writing Life with Sally Bayley
Dec 2, 2022Tap to summarizeSally invites us into her life on the boat, a life lived in close connection to nature, powered by sunlight from her solar panels. We hear how a water pump works, and witness a daddy long legs making its slow way across a rainy porthole. Sally is reading the diaries and journals of Virgina Woolf, a modernist “stream-of-consciousness” writer, who intensively recorded her own thoughts and observations, transforming them into enduring art. Sally responds to the events of the day by writing her own piece of poetic prose, on how we think, and who we really are. Further Reading: Sally talks about a classic short story by Virginia Woolf, The Death of a Moth. In this story, Woolf’s narrator watches the world outside through her window, fascinated by the energy that comes to her from the natural world, “rolling in from the fields and the down beyond … in at the open window and driving its way through so many narrow and intricate corridors in my own brain and in those of other human beings”. She watches a moth crawling across the window, impelled by the same natural energy; but she also realises that the moth is dying. The story was published posthumously, in 1942, the year after Woolf’s death: https://www.sanjuan.edu/cms/lib8/CA01902727/Centricity/Domain/3981/Death%20of%20A%20Moth-Virginia%20Woolf%20copy.pdf Sally also quotes from an essay by Woolf, called On Being Ill, in which Woolf meditates on her changed consciousness and perceptions during her frequent bouts of illness. Woolf thinks about Hamlet, Shakespeare’s most famous tragic protagonist, who has inspired thousands of books of criticism and analysis which take contradictory positions on what is known as “The Hamlet Problem”: who is Hamlet, and what compels him to act and feel the way he does? It’s one of the most elusive and important questions in all of literature; and it’s a question we can ask about ourselves and others. You can read Woolf's essay, published in 1926, here: https://thenewcriterion1926.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/woolf-on-being-ill.pdf When Sally quotes "To be or not to be", this is of course a reference to Hamlet's third soliloquy, in Act 3, Scene 2, perhaps the most famous line in all of English literature, as Hamlet debates the biggest questions of all; life or death, thinking or acting, becoming or "letting be". Sally also quotes the phrase, "The heart of light, the silence." This is from T.S. Eliot's modernist masterpiece The Waste Land; a spot in time when, in a famously complex poem, Eliot's narrator meets "the hyacinth girl". It's a quintessentially modernist moment, sometimes called an epiphany, when the narrator is transported, transfigured or changed by the vision, which in The Waste Land takes place in the natural world of the "Hyacinth garden". You can read the full poem here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47311/the-waste-land To find out more about Sally and her work, please visit: https://sallybayley.com/ The producer is Andrew Smith: https://www.fleetingyearfilms.com The extra voice in this episode is Emma Fielding. We are currently raising funds to pay to keep the podcast going. If you would like to support us, please visit - https://gofund.me/d5bef397 Thanks to everyone who has supported us so far. Special thanks also go to Violet Henderson, Kris Dyer, and Lady Ronia.
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