Contributors
The hagsharlotsheroines operating team are: Helen Wilkinson, Laura Wilkinson, Kim Rooney and Diane Laidlaw.
Our regular contributors are a diverse and interesting bunch. They are: Katie Allen, Hannah Davey, Nicola Davies, Laura Kayne, Linda McCann,, Janet Powell, Sarah Tanburn, Anne Welsh and Marian Jane Williams.
Operating Team
Laura Wilkinson is a founding member of hagsharlotsheroines.com and writes fiction and non-fiction.
You can read more about what makes Laura tick here.
She is the lead spokesperson for hagsharlotsheroines.com, responsible for its marketing and communications, as well as working as editor. Laura has spent a large chunk of her life writing. She’s worked as a journalist, a copywriter, specialising in work for charities and the third sector, and as a contributor to a variety of publications. Laura loves short fiction and is currently working on a novel.
KIM ROONEY
Assistant editor, Kim Rooney, is a graduate of the University of East Anglia's MA in Life Writing. It's how she came write about poets, George Barker and Anne Sexton, and the Victorian heroine, Grace Darling. She also writes fiction, although 'nothing', she says, 'that yet wants to stray into anything lengthy'. She was long listed for the 2006 Fish One Page Short Story Prize. Kim also reviews for the cultural magazine Aesthetica. Trained as an online journalist at the BBC, she also works as a content editor for an educational organisation. You can read more about her writer's journey here.
Kim is keen to promote hagsharlotsheroines as a virtual 'room of one's own' for authors writing wondrously about women, so if you would like to write a review or feature email her at kim@weasel-word.com.
Helen Wilkinson is one of the original founders of hagsharlotsheroines.com. You can read her biography and personal motivation here. Helen's personal website, www.helenwilkinson.com also has more information about her work as an ideas entrepreneur. Helen is currently on sabbatical and nurturing a few pet projects, one of which is hagsharlotsheroines. The other is top secret - not least because she doesn't know if she can do it!
Working with Laura, the main founder of hagsharlotsheroines, Helen is responsible for partnership development and ideas generation for future projects, events, and potential partners, and associates as well as future product development for the hagsharlotsheroines.com brand. A range of ideas are currently in development and she is always interested to explore ideas and the potential for collaboration so please do make contact. She is particularly interested in exploring website sponsorship and cause related marketing projects with companies and organisations interested in the hagsharlotsheroines.com brand, and its audience, and network. She also supports Laura in bringing hagsharlotsheroines to a wider audience and contributes articles and reviews in the Writer's Toolkit of the site. She can be commissionned for articles, features and book reviews. Alongside Laura, Helen can also act as a spokesperson for hagsharlotsheroines.com and related Genderquake themes.
Our London based lass Diane, also known as Miss Laidlaw in the music world, is our brand new webmistress and tech person for the brand new hagsharlotsheroines.com.
As well as helping us develop our other websites, Diane is also the website owner of Female Beatmakers; which is a motivational website for women in the music industry. She currently is working on an album called ‘The Beatmaking Housewife’ with a range of artists globally while working on her debut novel about love and romance in the 20th century called ‘ Memoirs of a Black Barbarella’.
Music producer, web developer, events co-ordinator and aspiring novelist, Diane states;
"In reality all I want to do is marry and be a housewife that writes books and makes music’
Diane continues to move people inspirationally through her development website, workshops and music.
Miss Laidlaw has a keen interest in computers, writing, crocheting, sauna’s, yoga, reading and watching live bands. Her favourite music is jazz, funk, and lounge music; her favourite authors are Deepak Chopra, Brett Easton Ellis, Shakespeare and Stephen King
Contributors
Sarah Tanburn lives on her boat Roaring Girl, with her partner, Pip. Roaring Girl gets her name from Moll Cutpurse, real life heroine of a Jacobean play, beautifully rewritten as a lesbian love story by Ellen Galford. In the heyday of the British sailing Navy, some women worked as sailors, disguised as men. These women were sometimes known as the 'roaring girls'. Sarah says, "it's a good name for our ship of dreams, as we wander where the wind and our curiosity take us."
Sarah writes short stories and is working on her first novel. She enjoys science fiction, and has written a spirited defence of the genre here. Her novel-in-progress is an exploration of challenge, knowledge and the meaning of 'home'. It's got quite a lot of boats in it, several strong women and a spirited polar bear.
Another project is a series of short stories based on the lives of real women who went to sea under sail. You can read about the Polynesian navigator Paintapu, here. The next one, about the black woman who sailed in the Royal Navy in the early nineteenth century, known only as William Brown, is in preparation.
Sarah also writes book reviews for www.hagsharlotsheroines.com">www.hagsharlotsheroines.com and other publications. Unfortunately, all this is not enough to live on, so Sarah works three or four months a year in Britain as a management consultant. Her business website is at www.workthewind.com. She keeps that side of things under tight control, so she can pursue the real life of sailing and writing.
You can contact Sarah on sarah.tanburn@workthewind.com. In the winter she replies quite quickly, but in the summer it can take longer.
Katie Allen lives in a flat on Hove seafront and works full-time as Assistant Editor on Knitting and The Dolls' House Magazine, based in nearby Lewes. It's her first job since completing a degree in English Studies and then a post-graduate journalism course.
In her spare time, Katie keeps afloat the leaking coracle that is her freelance career by writing the Arts pages and occasional restaurant review for local glossy free magazine NC, and reviewing for www.hagsharlotsheroines.com She is also launching her own alternative fiction magazine, New Blood, in cahoots with associate freelancer Danny. See www.myspace.com/newbloodbooks. If you would like to write for New Blood email newbloodbooks@hotmail.co.uk. Katie likes to write about books, art, feminist and alternative issues, and one day wants to work for Bust magazine in the US.
Katie's other hobbies include jive-dancing, both traditional 50s rock 'n' roll and modern jive. She also likes rockabilly nights, knitting, dress-making, visiting museums and galleries and going to gigs. However reading has been her passion ever since she wanted to go to Malory Towers, grumble with Jo March, smash slates with Anne Shirley and solve crimes with Nancy Drew. Her literary heroes tend to be female, with Margaret Atwood and Angela Carter topping the list. Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively is her late night read although she is always partial to a (long) indulgent afternoon with lots of tea and a copy of Gone With The Wind.
Anne has always written short stories and poems, which she began sending out in 2005. Since then, her work has been published, sometimes under the name Bailey, in journals, including Agenda Broadsheet, English: the Journal of the English Association, Smoke: a London Peculiar and Poetry Scotland. Online sites featuring her work include Nthposition, The Argotist Online and, www.hagsharlotsheroines.com
A lifelong fan of Jane Austen, Anne's other heroines include Aphra Behn, Mary Wollstonecraft and Jeanette Winterson. As a child she revelled in her Scottish grannies' tales of witchcraft. Her current research interest is in first-hand drug accounts.
Anne read English at St Andrews and Information at Aberystwyth. A special collections librarian for over a decade, she currently works for a leading drugs charity. She has also published widely and spoken at international level on taxonomy design and drugs information.
Having roamed the Internet's free web-spaces, Anne is settled, for the moment, at http://annewelsh.wordpress.com where you can see her online cuttings book and most recent ramblings.
Nicola is Brighton born and bred and educated at Varndean School (where she was head girl) and BHASVIC (also attended by Jamie Theakston). However, despite a clutch of certificates and a strong penchant for literature she ensured her immediate post-college years were lost to boys and booze. She then briefly flirted with a career at Personal Telephone Fund-raising, a project managing campaigns for some of the UK's biggest charities and not-for-profit organisations, before again turning her attention to writing. Ignoring the allure of corporate promotion, Nicola got a bank loan instead and returned to college to obtain a NCTJ qualification in Magazine Journalism.
Since April 2006 she has written the Barlife column for the Brighton What's On Guide, book reviews for www.hagsharlotsheroines.com, and ad hoc features for NC Brighton magazine, including interviews with actress Juliette Lewis, ('lovely') and the bass player from Razorlight ('not an awful lot to say for himself'). She's also had a column in NC about sex toys.
Nicola currently works in the Communications team for charity Sightsavers International, where she is involved in press work, and writing for the website and in-house publications.
Marian married young and raised two daughters between full-time work as a model, shop assistant, librarian, local politician and carer for the elderly. She even worked in the motor industry. Now, she puts her feet up most days.
Home is a market town in North Wales, close to the English border. Not quite the picturesque Wales of Snowdonia and the Clwyd Valley but still rich in history and folk-lore. It suits Marian just fine.
Reading is a passion she's had all her life. And though she's not read as many pre-20th century classics as she would have liked, her knowledge and love of contemporary works, especially speculative and historical fiction, is expansive and passionate.
When she's not writing, reading or reviewing, Marian potters around her garden, and has recently taken up bird watching. Of course, the book, the spade and the binoculars are all connected. When a visitor to Wordsworth's house asked to see his study, a servant indicated the garden saying, "Here is his library, his study is out of doors".
And if the weather is too unkind in the garden, Marion snuggles down to make soft furnishings, although she's no genteel domestic goddess. One of her favourite heroines is Betty Boop, the 1930s cartoon starlet. Sexy but sassy and self-aware, Betty Boop knew how to handle a man with mischief on his mind triumphantly declaring: "He couldn't take my boop-oop-a-doop away!"
Hannah Davey currently lives in the Welsh hills, just south of Snowdonia National Park. She dwells in a wooden, one-roomed house on stilts, in an intentional community on-site at the Centre for Alternative Technology.
Hannah had the advantage of a hybrid Sussex upbringing: part seaside-town girl and part countryside farm-kid. Then she was beckoned by the neon glamour of London and stayed there, quite dazzled, for a decade. Recently she has been an editor, writer, and cocktail bartender - sometimes all at once. She spent the middle years in communications at a health charity. In the beginning, when the lights were brightest, she styled-up mannequins (plastic and flesh); span out fashion PR stories for peanuts; and ran around for Alexander McQueen for nothing. Always, she has scribbled down stories, and descriptions of the pictures in her head.
Hannah intended to begin writing fiction in earnest at the start of 2005, but only really managed it in the summer of 2006. After a few short stories, she began her novel-in-progress: a speculative fiction story about losing touch with the natural world; finding it again; the confusion of being; zombies; an indigenous race of pre-humanity earth dwellers; a little bit of love; and a whole load of other stuff. For hagsharlotsheroines, she has written book reviews, an exploratory piece about sex scenes, and currently writes a monthly diary column.
Hannah likes reading speculative and historical fiction; poetry for its succinct imagery; and beat prose for its rhythm and unconventional narrative.
Last updated by My Heroines Feb. 8, 2009.
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