Maitland, Sara – The Bell Bookshop

Writer’s Way: A Complete Guide to Creative Writing with 40 Inspirational Project

Emma — Mon, 01 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Whether you are a total beginner or looking to improve your skills, 'The Writer's Way' offers clear and no-nonsense guidance on the art of creative writing. Award-winning author Sara Maitland is the perfect companion on this journey - providing practical advice and motivation to help hone your craft.

Gossip From The Forest

Emma — Thu, 06 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Fairytales are one of our earliest and most vital cultural forms, and forests one of our most ancient landscapes. Both evoke a similar sensation in us – we find them beautiful and magical, but also spooky, sometimes horrifying. In this fascinating book, Maitland argues that the two forms are intimately connected: the mysterious secrets and silences, gifts and perils of the forests were both the background and the source of the fairytales made famous by the Grimms and Hans Christian Andersen. Yet both forests and fairy stories are at risk and their loss deprives us of our cultural lifeblood. Maitland visits forests through the seasons, from the exquisite green of a beechwood in spring, to the muffled stillness of a snowy pine wood in winter. She camps with her son Adam, whose beautiful photographs are included in the book; she takes a barefoot walk through Epping Forest with Robert Macfarlane; she walks with a mushroom expert through an oak wood, and with a miner through the Forest of Dean. Maitland ends each chapter with a unique, imaginitive re-telling of a fairytale. Written with Maitland’s wonderful clarity and conversational grace, Gossip from the Forest is a magical and unique blend of nature writing, history and imaginative fiction.

Book Of Silence

Emma — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000

After a noisy upbringing as one of six children, and adulthood as a vocal feminist and mother, Sara Maitland began to crave silence. Over the past five years, she has spent periods of silence in the Sinai Desert and the Australian bush and on the Isle of Skye. She interweaves these experiences with the history of silence told through fairy tale and myth, Western and Eastern religious traditions, the Enlightenment and psychoanalysis, up to the ambivalence towards silence in contemporary society. Maitland has built a hermitage on an isolated Scottish moor, and the book culminates powerfully with her experiences of silence in this new home.