Sandra Jensen
LightNews LightNews
banner
sandrajensen.bsky.social
Sandra Jensen
@sandrajensen.bsky.social
270 followers 550 following 71 posts
Published in World Literature Today, AGNI, Wasafiri, Cutleaf Journal, Hobart etc. Bunch of short and long listings. Bridport novel prize winner. ME/CFS/late stage Lyme etc. http://www.sandrajensen.net
Posts Replies Media Videos
sandrajensen.bsky.social
Super proud an essay of mine, “Invisible“, set in a Berlin sauna, was published in @underthesunonline.bsky.social. Thank you Under the Sun, especially editor Miriam Mandel Levi!
#cnf #creativenonfiction #writing
@writingcommunity.bsky.social
#essay #memoir
underthesunlitmag.com/invisible-sa...
A screenshot of Under the Sun literary magazine's page/logo with Sandra Jensen's personal essay title "Invisible" and image of a sauna
July 17, 2025 at 1:25 PM
sandrajensen.bsky.social
Hard to believe that I’m actually posting a photograph of something that isn’t Ronan, i.e. within the four walls of our apartment. Got out this week 😁David treated us to a sauna. This is what greeted us as we left…. All wonky but that is how it is these days.
Photo of Brighton’s i360 Tower, clouds and blue sky
February 21, 2025 at 11:40 AM
sandrajensen.bsky.social
Wolf moon…
Photo of a nearly full moon and some houses
January 12, 2025 at 10:35 PM
sandrajensen.bsky.social
That time of year again…. Brrrrr. So hard to imagine the tragic fires in California. We have very dear friends who have had to evacuate. I love Los Angeles. I can’t bear that this has happened. I feel very privileged to simply be cold
Photograph of women in her 60s outside wearing a hooded coat with lots of fake fur around the edge
January 11, 2025 at 6:03 PM
sandrajensen.bsky.social
Snip from my WIP, A Force of Nature, a hybrid memoir in essays....

#AmWriting #WritingCommunity #Writers #Authors #WriteSky #WritingPrompts #WIPSnips
Snip from my WIP, a hybrid memoir in essays titled A Force of Nature: "Frida wore plaster corsets for most of her life and being Frida Kahlo she painted them: drawings of birds, tigers, a blood-red hammer and sickle. In one, an open circle is carved into the plaster near the heart like a skylight. My mother did not paint the plaster cast that encased her after the accident, nor did she carve into it. I doubt she could have if she’d tried, as the cast restricted movement in her arms. Think of Kahlo’s painting, The Two Fridas. Think of the white, stiff-collared dress worn by the Frida on the left. Not a plaster cast no, but it is strangely similar in design to my mother’s cast."
January 9, 2025 at 10:29 PM
sandrajensen.bsky.social
Snip from the Bridport Prize winning novel I'm shopping around "At Least We're In This Together":

#AmWriting #WritingPrompts #WriteSky #writers #authors #WritingCommunity
#WIPSnips #bridportprize
Snip from the Bridport Prize winning novel I'm shopping around, titled "At Least We're In This Together": "Normally Mum asks me for a list of what I want for Christmas but the only lists going from my direction to hers are grocery lists. Other lists just go in one direction, from Mum to Mum. Lists for what needs to be built/torn down here and at the craft centre and lists for things needed to buy to do all this. Mum’s been driving like a maniac back and forth to the craft centre to keep an eye on the builders. The bloody builders, she always calls them, as if this is actually what they’re called. A special construction outfit, The Bloody Builders."
January 8, 2025 at 4:55 PM
sandrajensen.bsky.social
Snip from my WIP, A Force of Nature, a hybrid memoir in essays.... #AmWriting #WriteSky #Writers #Authors #WritingCommunity #WritingPrompts #WIPSnips
snip from my WIP A Force of Nature, a hybrid memoir in essays: "My mother may not have wanted a lifetime career as a sculptor, but it’s clear she needed to do things. She had the ability to write books, articles even, and did, but she did not have the inclination to pursue writing as a vocation. Not physical enough? I think of the words of Henri Moore she quoted: vitality, pent up energy, physical action. An intense life of its own. If my mother wanted an intense life, it is certainly what she got, her inner world private to everyone except perhaps myself: Feeling insecure, lonely, unloved, unsafe is something one has to accept as part of everyone’s life, she wrote to me. I suffer from those feelings ALL the time I am not being ‘busy’. My mother didn’t need to tell me she’d wake in the night weeping. It was as if it were me doing the waking and weeping for no matter how far from her I lived, her pain was palpable. Her loneliness and anger, the furious mettle of her. "
January 3, 2025 at 5:22 PM
sandrajensen.bsky.social
#AmWriting #WritingCommunity #WriteSky #Writers #Authors #WritingPrompts #WIPSnips
Snip from my WIP "A Force of Nature", a hybrid memoir in essays
Snip from my WIP "A Force of Nature": I see my seven-year-old self curled together with my brother, my father driving, my mother beside. The seat behind holding the American, Costas my mother’s lover and the American’s girlfriend. A large car, the Volkswagen Cortina station wagon my mother bought in Dusseldorf, the one Charles drove us to Greece with. I remember the singing, Σιγά σιγά, slowly slowly. I remember the American and the line of blood along his forearm. I remember my brother saying, Don’t look. I remember the sound of crickets, the hiss of the Volkswagen’s engine. I remember the house opposite, the elderly Greek couple standing rigid in their black clothes, wailing. I was not wailing. Greeks are good at wailing, not me. Not then, not at the hospital where Manolis took me by the elbow as we navigated the stairs down, Είσαι καλά? Are you okay? I pulled away. I didn’t want to be touched, not by anyone but my mother but she was in the operating theatre. The Greeks were good at touching children. Not like that, no. But they’d reach out and squeeze my cheek, caress my hair and pet my head without hesitation or invitation, as if I was their child and not my mother’s.
January 2, 2025 at 10:03 PM
sandrajensen.bsky.social
From my hybrid memoir in essays "A Force of Nature"
#WIPSnips #Writing #Authors #AmWriting #WritingCommunity
A photo of a snip from my WIP that has the word 'government' in it ... "A woman ahead of her time, ahead of anyone’s time. I don’t know who made her, who or what sculpted such a woman. How would you grow up if you had an alcoholic for a mother and a chauvinist for a father, parents who sent you away from home and not the boy who raped you? Would you weld rather than knit? If her reasons for making art, for building houses with her own two hands, slapping on concrete as if it were jam were not solely to keep busy, was it because she was born into a country where Black women and men risked imprisonment or worse if they sat on a park bench engraved with the words Slegs Vir Blankes? Was she the sort of woman who certainly wasn’t going to knit when Blacks were being tortured? Better to light a fire if only in your own studio, better to assist the Blacks mixing that concrete rather than order them to do so, better to slice and dice metal, to hammer it into submission at least if not the government."
January 1, 2025 at 3:41 PM
sandrajensen.bsky.social
Last selfies of 2025… here’s to truly seeing each other, truly listening, truly seeing, truly being there in the way we each most need. A beautiful new year to all, holding you in my heart ❤️
.
.
#2025
Photo of long haired white woman Photo of a black cat with white hair in his ears
January 1, 2025 at 12:11 AM
sandrajensen.bsky.social
From A Force of Nature
#WIPSnips
#Writing
#Authors
#AmWriting
#WritingCommunity
Quote from WIP, A Force of Nature: What he did do is pay for the trip to Klosters, where we stayed in the Swiss doctor’s summer cottage, a My Fair Lady house, a room for each of his five children, drawers neatly labelled Unterwäsche, Blusen, Socken, drawers I’d slide open in wonder. Even the knickers were folded. My brother’s interest was focussed on the bomb shelter where the doctor was required by law to keep enough supplies in case of war, and even more on the fact that roads and bridges were mined and ready to be blown up. There were guns, he tells me on WhatsApp. We all learned to ski—my mother now freed from her straight-jacket—i.e. I spend a large amount of time on my bottom careening down the slopes and my mother spends a large amount of time flirting with our ski instructor.
December 28, 2024 at 1:38 PM
sandrajensen.bsky.social
“Santa? Down the chimney? Is there going to be something for ME?!”
#cats
December 24, 2024 at 9:31 PM
sandrajensen.bsky.social
Snip from my WIP - A Force of Nature - a hybrid memoir in essays about my relationship with my once-famous sculptor mother, trauma, illness, female artists and why we do what we do.... #WIPsnips #writingcommunity #writer #writesky
December 23, 2024 at 8:58 PM
sandrajensen.bsky.social
Our beautiful boy turned 15 sometime in the last month… we don’t know specifically what day because he was found in the side of the road in Ireland, a tiny, starving kitten. May he live MANY more years, my little soul mate 🐈‍⬛
November 27, 2024 at 10:15 PM
sandrajensen.bsky.social
A look of pure adoration, or just a worried post-vomit gaze?!
Black cat lying beside a woman and looking up at her
November 21, 2024 at 9:43 PM
sandrajensen.bsky.social
Either my cat is plotting to kill me or he’s musing on his own beauty 🐈‍⬛
Black cat
November 16, 2024 at 8:17 PM
sandrajensen.bsky.social
Kinda blue sky?
November 15, 2024 at 10:08 PM