Tanya Shadrick
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tanyashadrick.bsky.social
Tanya Shadrick
@tanyashadrick.bsky.social
4.4K followers 1.3K following 170 posts
Author The Cure for Sleep (W&N, 2022) a Waterstones & Evening Standard book of the year | Creator Wild Patience mile of writing, #BirdsOfFirle & #ConcentratesOfPlace | Founder Selkie Press | Fellow Royal Society of Arts
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tanyashadrick.bsky.social
I called out from the East Sussex library system store their copy of Aristotle’s The Nichomachean Ethics. Had tears come when I opened it and found its first readers took it out during the Second World War, when this area was often bombed. And yet people went out to get this text on how to live…
Photo shows the issue stamp page of an East Sussex County Library copy of Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics. The first issue dates are from the years of the Second World War when this area of the UK was often being bombed
October 24, 2025 at 3:29 PM
tanyashadrick.bsky.social
Well-worn: Husband & Wife

Was going about my quiet day alone at home, thirty years married, when the sight of our clothes without us had me stop and fill with feeling. Always-there but never-noticed: his habitual outfit, mine, hanging together on the basement door.
A white wooden door is open to a dark basement. On the door is a yellow handpainted coat rack. On the lefthand hook is a man’s khaki gardening hat, and a faded blue workjacket. On the centre hook, beside it, is a woman’s blue-and-white-spotted headscarf and a navy apron. Portrait of a long marriage as workwear.
August 6, 2025 at 10:18 AM
tanyashadrick.bsky.social
“Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!”

In memoriam
#VirginiaWoolf #DOTD
28 March 1941

📷 Starlings over the River Ouse at Southease, near Woolf’s last home - Monks House, Rodmell, Sussex
March 28, 2025 at 7:50 AM
tanyashadrick.bsky.social
Like my mentor #DavidNash, I make work with long timespans: It’s also the art I’m most drawn to…

If that speaks to you too, here’s a starter pack of others engaged in serious noticing - through repetition, return, time series & other forms of slow art…

go.bsky.app/V6j8hdS
Join the conversation - slow art: artists who work with time and repetition. A Bluesky starter pack created by artist and author Tanya Shadrick
November 29, 2024 at 10:36 AM
tanyashadrick.bsky.social
Colours and textures collected on the path from #VirginiaWoolf house at Rodmell to the river at Southease

Part of the durational #ConcentratesOfPlace project by @tanyashadrick.bsky.social - which invites others to make and share them using the hashtag

www.ernestjournal.co.uk/blog/2022/1/...
In front left of frame is a Golden Virginia tobacco tin held open to view, with lid facing frame above the open tin. In the tin are pieces of bark and chalk stone collected by writer Tanya Shadrick as she walks from Virginia Woolf’s house in Rodmell Sussex to the river at Southease where Woolf ended her life. In the background are the Sussex Downs looking towards Mount Cabirn. Shadrick was in residence at Woolf’s house in 2019. The tin is one of a durational series - 2016 to end of life - that the artist began on the tenth anniversary of her sudden near death.
November 25, 2024 at 8:30 AM
tanyashadrick.bsky.social
‘This was just a crow. / That never fit in anywhere in its life, / or did anything worth mentioning. / It sat there on the branch for a few minutes. / Then picked up and flew beautifully / out of my life.’ - #RayCarver

📷 from #BirdsOfFirle series by @tanyashadrick.bsky.social
A black and white photograph of a rook in flight, wings outstretched, just feet off the ground after swooping down for food. The image is divided in the middle into a bottom half of foreground - Firle Beacon, a high point on the Sussex Downs - and the valley stretching out into light grey in the upper half. An image from the durational Birds of Firle series by Tanya Shadrick
November 24, 2024 at 7:56 PM
tanyashadrick.bsky.social
Storm-shook rook

#BirdsOfFirle
A black and white image of a rook trying to fly down, wings up and splayed, to land in high wind on the top of Firle Beacon Sussex. The valley stretches out into the distance. Photo from the durational Birds of Firle series
November 23, 2024 at 7:58 PM
tanyashadrick.bsky.social
One of the most generous online souls I’ve ever encountered…

@theunhurriedreader.bsky.social’s book reviews - which began on her exquisite instagram - are now in beautiful new long form on Substack.

Love this one of @annelouiseavery.bsky.social’s Reynard the Fox

open.substack.com/pub/theunhur...
Image is of ‘Blue Girl Reading’ by August Macke, 1912 (detail), used on Instagram, Bluesky and Substack as image profile for the much-loved book reviewer The Unhurried Reader
November 22, 2024 at 8:29 PM
tanyashadrick.bsky.social
‘I only know that a rook / Ordering its black feathers can so shine / As to seize my senses, haul /My eyelids up, and grant /A brief respite from fear’ — Black Rook in Rainy Weather, #SylviaPlath

📷 from #BirdsOfFirle series by @tanyashadrick.bsky.social
A high contrast grainy black and white photo of a rook landing on a barbed wire fence in the left hand midsection of the image. To the right is a cross-like finger post, blurred by rain. From the durational #BirdsOfFirle series by Tanya Shadrick A high contrast grainy black and white photo of a rook on a fence post in the left hand midsection of the image. It looks to be pecking at a large blurred raindrop -which was on the nearby car window of the photographer. From the durational #BirdsOfFirle series by Tanya Shadrick
November 21, 2024 at 10:45 AM
tanyashadrick.bsky.social
“As a child in farming country, I’d learnt long ago the parts of animals ­­but only as things dead or diagrammed…

I’d been incurious to them as living creatures in relation to one another…

Now I couldn’t stop looking.”

#BirdsOfFirle

www.littletoller.co.uk/the-clearing...
A high contrast, lo-res black and white image of a rook flying from left to right above a barbed wire fence. Taken from the longitudinal Birds of Firle series by artist and writer Tanya Shadrick
November 21, 2024 at 8:24 AM
tanyashadrick.bsky.social
‘Bits of burnt paper wheeling in a blown sky.’ — #SylviaPlath
A black and white high contrast image of rooks flinging themselves around before nightfall & roosting time. Image by Tanya Shadrick.
November 17, 2024 at 5:59 PM
tanyashadrick.bsky.social
“…the gaps are the thing. The gaps are the spirit’s one home, the altitudes and latitudes so dazzingly spare and clean that the spirit can discover itself like a once-blind man unbound…Go up into the gaps.” — #AnnieDillard

Image from #BirdsOfFirle by Tanya Shadrick
A black and white high contrast photo of wave-like cloud cover. In the top right hand quadrant a rook is heading - wings spread, tail fanned - out of frame. From the artist and author Tanya Shadrick’s durational Birds of Firle project.
November 17, 2024 at 4:50 PM
tanyashadrick.bsky.social
“I recorded the rooks for hours, months. At first light and last. In sun and storm. Following them on days when my chronic pain lifted just enough for me to track them from Beacon to Bottom; most days using the car as hide.”

#BirdsOfFirle

www.littletoller.co.uk/the-clearing...
A black and white image of a rook, wings spread along the diagonal of the frame. White background. From Tanya Shadrick’s Birds Of Firle project
November 17, 2024 at 8:58 AM
tanyashadrick.bsky.social
For those I’ve just met here, an intro

After a sudden near-death at 33, I determined to live with more risk & generosity.

I became a hospice scribe…then a performance artist writing a mile in public…& a publisher of others’ words…now author of The Cure for Sleep, which holds these stories, more
A woman working at a written scroll, while knelt at a low writing table looking out over an outdoor swimming pool. You can see her bare feet and the books she has piled beside her. This is the writer Tanya Shadrick at work on her two-year public undertaking the Wild Patience Scrolls: a mile of writing. Image taken by Steve Creffield “a mile of writing. This is how I’d do it: expand my life at last, even while it continued to be bounded by town and the school run, morning and afternoon. On my home ground, inch by bloody inch. I wasn’t able to wander my country like Whitman and all the other travelling writers I admired, so I must make something from my constraints instead. Stake a claim to a small, fixed spot under the youngest hornbeam tree beside the outdoor pool and be a prospector of stories, all spring and summer. What I’d done in private with hospice patients, I’d call forth now from swimmers and sunbathers, mining too my own memories of the wild and free. How exciting it was. To have an idea. Thrilling as the first days of falling in love when you find yourself reciprocated, the universe seeming to see and smile on your desire.” — The Cure for Sleep by Tanya Shadrick “where does it begin, our turn away from risk and adventure? Why do so many of us hide in routine, shrink from opportunity? What I asked in that luxurious last minute of living, my fear disappearing into wonder even as I was laid awake on the operating table. Where does it begin? What I ask again, in this story of my life before then, and since. For if the events which wake us are sudden, what leads to a sleep of soul and possibility is harder to trace. We have to go back through all the tales told to us (or by us) about the world and its workings: that bramble thicket in which we lost our will and way.” — The Cure for Sleep by Tanya Shadrick a headscarved woman knelt at a low writing table at which she is working at a scroll that is unwound for many metres to the left and right of her. This is the writer Tanya Shadrick finished her two-year mile of writing as an inaugural resident of the Jan Michalski Foundation in Switzerland.
November 15, 2024 at 10:21 PM
tanyashadrick.bsky.social
The bird cyanotypes of @deborahparkin.bsky.social are indeed beautiful. She is also a powerful writer - here is her incredible essay for my decade-long collective project #BirdsOfFirle… (more on that project in my pinned post)

selkiepress.com/2022/03/03/d...
A cyanotype of two jackdaws on a branch by British photographer Deborah Parkin. This image used to accompany her Selkie Press essay for the Birds of Firle project. Copyright Deborah Parkin.
November 15, 2024 at 11:18 AM
tanyashadrick.bsky.social
Still miss this jackdaw, my friend for two years. Would sit beside me and bite my thumb when I only fed it, wanting instead to turn pages in my book and have me read to it. Must verbal bird I’ve ever encountered - its own fluency, and appetite for sound, both
November 15, 2024 at 11:08 AM
tanyashadrick.bsky.social
Still miss this jackdaw, my friend for two years. Would sit beside me and bite my thumb when I only fed it, wanting instead to turn pages in my book and have me read to it. Must verbal bird I’ve ever encountered - its own fluency, and appetite for sound, both
November 15, 2024 at 11:08 AM
tanyashadrick.bsky.social
“The first bird surprised me… Engraved in memory: black leather legs, rictal bristles on the beak, an aluminium eye, and every wing-feather filigreed by white light so I could feel the hooks and barbules holding each one together, a chain mail”

#NatureWriting

www.littletoller.co.uk/the-clearing...
November 15, 2024 at 10:11 AM
tanyashadrick.bsky.social
‘Understand how much time it takes for a work, or a path, or a life to take shape’

A sculptor’s advice for art & life:

David Nash is perhaps best known for his living art piece the Ash Dome - planted in the 70s for the next millennium. He has literally grown a meaningful life. Here is his advice
Image of the Ash Dome by sculptor David Nash: a ring of Ash trees planted in the 70s and tended ever since into this dancing intertwined shape. Their location in Wales remains secret. “the sculptor’s advice for art and life Always give your ideas ‘molecules’, quickly, before they fade: just a title is enough, or a sketch, or a few notes on scrap paper, sellotaped up and kept in view. In this way, a thing beyond your time, resources, or abilities now, is far more likely to happen in future. Be professional and serious in your work, however late and tentative your endeavours. Measure success not by the number of people who respond to what you make but be motivated instead by that one necessary person you might meet, whenever you risk putting a well-intentioned work into the world. Be moved, also, by the possibility of becoming that person to others. Tell a true, ongoing story of your life as well as your art. Even if you receive no reward or notice for what you do, you still gain meaning from this, and purpose. Understand how much time it takes for a work, or a path, or a life to take shape. Be alert to the teachings of chance.” — The Cure for Sleep by Tanya Shadrick
November 14, 2024 at 8:29 AM
tanyashadrick.bsky.social
‘I once had a winter that was wordless’

In 2020 @littletollerbooks.bsky.social published my #BirdsOfFirle: origin story of a decade-long collective project on hope & grief as the things with feathers. I used Twitter to reach people; hope to relaunch here soon

www.littletoller.co.uk/the-clearing...
November 13, 2024 at 11:22 PM
tanyashadrick.bsky.social
#ConcentratesOfPlace (2016 to end-of-life)

A personal practice of collecting artefacts from places of emotional importance, begun on the 10th anniversary of my sudden near-death.

I invite you to make & share some using the hashtag…

More on project:

www.ernestjournal.co.uk/blog/2022/1/...
November 13, 2024 at 10:46 PM
tanyashadrick.bsky.social
A chance to (re)gather online with people whose ways of seeing & being inspire me. Already finding those who were becoming hard to see and learn from elsewhere. As a first post from me, linking to @radiolento.bsky.social's soulful podcast of field recordings...

podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/r...
A forest path with the followin podcast title & description: Radio Lento 189 episodes: Surround yourself with somewhere else. Captured quiet from natural palces. Put the 'outside on' with headphones.
September 20, 2023 at 6:38 AM