A Reading Life, A Writing Life, with Sally Bayley
Episodes
River Ruminations
30 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
‘Writing for me is always an embodied experience of flow…’ This week we join Sally at home, as she prepares to start her day, thinking in partic...
The Choreography of Writing
16 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
‘A kind of choreography of intimacy, which I return to again and again…’ This week, we join Sally on a cold winter’s morning, as she tries to ...
Arrivals
04 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
‘She brought so little personality with her that she seemed scarcely to disturb the air…’ This week, marking the arrival of Autumn, Sally has be...
A Conversation on Difficulty and Ambiguity
20 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
‘From Waterloo Station to the small country town of Ramsgard in Dorset is a journey of not more than three or four hours, but having by good luck fo...
Mrs Parsons
13 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
‘The fate of the writer is to dwell in that realm of shadows and apparitions and half-seen thoughts…’ This week, we join Sally sketching a scene...
A Conversation on Objects and Symbols
03 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
‘He stood still in the gloom of the hall, trying to catch the air that the voice was singing and gazing up at his wife. There was grace and mystery ...
The Other Side of the Fire
18 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
For Gabriella Kelly Davies. ‘On the last day of summer Mrs Bohannon fell in love. The poplars, fallaciously pathetic, looked horrified, their branch...
The 27th Kingdom
03 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
‘Mrs Mason looked now through Aunt Irene’s rich windows, sparking like spring water and framing fat pink shrubs that grew with child-like health i...
The Green Lady
14 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
For Miss Braithwaite, who gave me eloquence. ‘I need to summon the spirits of place…’ This week, we join Sally in rehearsal for a performance,...
Being Handy
01 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
‘Enid’s hands are always kept busy caring for other people…’ This week, Sally continues her theme of developing characters from objects by pre...
Katherine Mansfield
19 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
‘His straw hat hurt him, it pinched his forehead and started a dull ache in the two bones just over the temples…’ This week, Sally has been read...
A Fragment of May
02 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
For 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 fr...
Mrs Dalloway
27 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
‘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 i...
Sightlines
04 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
‘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, a...
Rhapsody
11 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
‘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...
The Painter
01 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
‘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...
Blithe
12 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
‘Blithe came to me, not in flashing red or pink neon, but in pastels… in soft, painterly tones…’ This week, Sally has been inspired by a dream...
On Rhythm
11 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
‘Rhythm seems to be the first or formal relation of part to part in any whole…’ This week, Sally has been thinking about rhythms, in her life, w...
Orphan Power
23 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
This week, Sally has been reflecting on her ‘orphan power’, a phrase once applied to her by Will Self, and her relationship with orphaned literary...
Playing in the Sun
15 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
This week, we join Sally at home, on a sunny autumn day. Listen for a meditation on play, weather, and our relationships with everyday objects. The pa...
Calpurnia's Dream
29 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
‘Caesar, I never stood on ceremonies, / Yet now they fright me.’ This week, we join Sally in the early morning, after a Shakespearean dream. Liste...
On Walking
19 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
‘I hate walking, it seems so pointless to me…’ This week, Sally has been musing on the importance of mobility, reflecting on the increasing role...
A European Postcard
08 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
This week, Sally offers us a series of vignettes from her travels, both past and present. Follow her on a journey around Europe, through the eyes of t...
Poppies in October
17 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
‘A gift, a love gift / Utterly unasked for / By a sky’ This week, Sally has been reading Sylvia Plath’s ‘Poppies in October’ (1963). Join he...
The Painted Veil
09 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
‘There’s always hope where there’s poetry…’ This week, Sally is preparing for her narrowboat, Cerian, to journey upriver for maintenance....
Sadler's Birthday
20 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
‘Silence, quietness, that’s a way of living…’ This week, we join Sally in the attic room of her family home, where she has been reading Rose T...
The Gleaners
09 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
‘But the darkness is a kind of blanket, and she comforts me…’ This week, we join Sally on a sleepless night, on a journey through Millet’s The...
Bleak House
03 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
‘London. Michaelmas Term lately over and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall…’ This week, Sally has been reading and teaching Ch...
The Weatherhouse
18 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
‘I’m wondering what happiness sounds like, these days…’ This week, Sally has been reading Nan Shepherd’s The Weatherhouse, and reflecting on...
Pond Man Beneath the Date Palm Tree
27 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
This week Sally is experimenting with location and atmosphere for her character Pond Man. She asks her friend Dylan, to come and join her, as they imp...
Mary Crow
11 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
“She glanced up at the great broken tower-columns of the vanished nave of the Abbey Church….” This week, Sally continues to read John Cowper P...
Cloud Patterns
02 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
“On this particular day the weather conditions had assumed a cloud-pattern…” This week, Sally continues to read John Cowper Powys’ 1932 novel,...
A Glastonbury Romance
22 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
‘There’s no life that frees anyone so completely from unhappiness as does the mystic life…’ This week, Sally has been reading John Cowper Powy...
Pond Man's Day, Pond Man's Night
04 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
"What is it this material life we find ourselves captured by?" This week Sally is developing her character, Pond Man as she considers the opening li...
Pond Man
25 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
‘You see, I go and live with Pond Man when the pain becomes too much…’ This week, we join Sally at home, as she tries to live with a pain that h...
The Dog of Tears
12 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
‘We have forgotten what it is to look at one another and to notice.’ What does it mean to really see? This week, Sally is meditating on the pow...
A Reading Life, A Writing Life in Conversation
07 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
A special episode this week, as we join Sally at Brasenose College in a conversation titled ‘A Reading Life, A Writing Life’, with fellow writers ...
Blindness
24 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
‘If you shut your eyes and are a lucky one…’ This week, Sally has been reading José Saramago’s Blindness, and thinking about the ways we see,...
The Face in the Mirror
16 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
‘Where do images come from?’ This week, Sally is thinking about the importance of sound and rhythm to writing. Join her for a discussion of George...
Writing and Holding
08 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
‘Let words pass through you in a small contained space’ This week, we join Sally for a meditation on creating and inhabiting a space in which to w...
Insomnia
31 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
‘Perhaps she's a daytime sleeper.’ This week, Sally is reading Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘Insomnia’, a poem full of shifting, uncertain geograph...
The White Rabbit
17 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
‘I shall be late!’ Sally has been following the White Rabbit this week, from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and reflecting on the ever-increa...
New Year’s Night
03 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
‘How do you remember people first?’ We join Sally on New Year’s Night, staying with a relative in Chichester, a familiar city from her childhood...
In the Bleak Midwinter
20 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
This week, we join Sally in the middle of a winter night. Follow her reflections on festive traditions, via Christina Rossetti, and on seeing the worl...
A Difficult Balance With Pain
13 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
For Demi. ‘And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating / Of dark habits, / keeping their difficult balance.’ This week, Sally has been living w...
What are Days For?
29 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
For Keyang. ‘Where can we live but days?’ This week, Sally has been reading and living with Philip Larkin’s poem ‘Days’, from The Whitsun We...
The Narrow Passage
22 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
‘This is how I prefer to live…inside a narrow passage…’ Sally is still living with Wuthering Heights this week, as she meditates on the nature...
An Announcement, and a Story
15 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
‘I can’t live without story now…it feels like breathing.’ This week, Sally is travelling to Sicily, for a conversation with Marina Warner on ‘...
Wuthering Heights
08 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
‘Are you brave enough to follow me there?’ This week, Sally has been reading Emily Bronte’s 1847 novel, Wuthering Heights. Fixated on the dreams...
Shoreham
04 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
For Alice Colquhoun. In this episode, Sally muses on J.M.W. Turner’s famous 1830 painting, Shoreham. Join her for reflections on art, life, and on w...
Searching for Verity
02 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
‘A writer’s notebook is full of the sound of atmosphere…’ This week, Sally is teaching a course on detective fiction. Emerging from her medita...
Sea of Troubles
28 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Continuing this week’s Shakespearean theme, Sally describes a recent trip to a screening of a new cinematic adaptation of Kenneth Macmillan’s 1988...
Finding Your Part
25 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
‘All the world’s a stage…’ Sally is thinking this week about a photograph of her foster grandmother in Shakespearean costume. Who is she? How ...
The Red Poppy
21 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
‘Feelings: oh, I have those; they govern me.’ In this special episode, Sally reflects on the work of the late poet Louise Glück as she travels ar...
Peter Pan
18 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
"In the end she grew up of her own free will a day quicker than other girls." Sally and her neighbour discuss tree spirits and magical bracelets on he...
Bonus Episode: The Lady Stalker
12 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In this special bonus episode, follow Sally on an adventure of mistaken identity, Marmite ice cream, and Miss Cull. This episode was edited and produc...
Daniel Martin
11 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
‘Is there a plot to life?’ This week, Sally has been reading Daniel Martin, by John Fowles. Follow her musings as she considers the relationship b...
Miss Cull
04 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
‘How do you face the void?’ This week, Sally presents a series of linked meditations around the character of Miss Cull, illustrating how character...
Inhabit the Garden
28 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
‘Other echoes inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?’ This week, Sally is reading T. S. Eliot in preparation for her performance at the Oxford Ch...
Froggie and the Golden Ball
23 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
‘For all the Froggies of the World...' Inspired by her amphibian lifestyle, Sally offers an everyday fable of the writer. Froggie and the Golden Bal...
The Farrier
07 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Sally has just finished a lesson with a student who is writing a story in the vein of Thomas Hardy about a young man on a farm. Searching for visual r...
A Field Guide to Reality
29 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Sally is reading A Field Guide to Reality, the debut novel by the Granta Best of Young British author Joanna Kavenna, originally published in 2016 and...
The Chosen
28 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Starting a new book is like starting a new relationship, and Sally is reading Elizabeth Lowry's The Chosen, a ghost story and a love story about Thoma...
Sally talks to Will Self Part Two
23 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
This is the second half of the chat between Sally and Will Self, held at Blackwell's Bookshop in Oxford, in which they discuss the German emigré writ...
A short announcement and a live event
22 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Just a short announcement by Sally about an exciting event coming up - recorded with the help of Magnificent Maeve Magnus.
Mrs Robinson
26 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
This episode is a meditation, inspired by the themes and characters of Sally's latest book, The Green Lady; it's Sally's elegy for Mrs Robinson, a wom...
The Exquisite Melodrama of the Writer
25 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
It's the launch day for Sally's new book, The Green Lady, and Sally is feeling the pressure, especially as her neighbours have left her alone on the b...
Sally talks to Will Self: Part 1
23 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Something different for this episode - Sally interviews writer Will Self about his latest book of essays, Why Read. They discuss not just why we read,...
Haunted
13 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, Sally reads extracts from her forthcoming book, the Green Lady, released next week. The Green Lady is the third part of a literary co...
Sunshine of the Heart
29 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Sally treads old familiar pathways through fields of corn and wheat in Sussex, very close to the place she grew up. Her thoughts are with Charlotte Br...
A Bright Metal World
14 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
"Why do we write?" Sally asks herself this week, as she reads a novella by the 20th century writer DH Lawrence, a story of longing, dreams, desire and...
The Body in the Library
31 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
This week, Sally is entertaining a visitor to the narrowboat - her eight-year-old neighbour Maeve Magnus - for their regular evening ritual of watchin...
The Girls of Slender Means
16 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
This week, Sally is reading The Girls of Slender Means, a novella by one of her favourite writers, Scottish novelist, poet and essayist Muriel Spark (...
Almost Being Said
11 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Sally starts the podcast with a brief poem by Philip Larkin, a complex poem of springtime, grief, and renewal. The trees all around the boat take Sall...
A Retreat
01 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Sally reads Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem Frost at Midnight, and reflects on the importance of finding ways to escape, now and again, from a stress...
Baby David
10 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Sally starts by telling us the tale of the Boiler That Went Bang in the Night, and the Bird That Never Was. She’s preparing a zoom class for some sc...
The Wind In The Willows
29 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Sally does her washing on the narrowboat, and with spring in the air, her thoughts turn to the past. She reads from an old favourite, the children’s...
The Devil Lives Among Us
22 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, released on the anniversary of the invasion of Ukraine, Sally reads the works of great Ukrainian writers and poets of previous genera...
A Country Doctor
07 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In this special, double-length episode, Sally leaves her boat to seek refuge at a friend’s house on another island in Oxford, as the rains have floo...
Pond Life
24 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Sally wakes up at dawn and thinks about the book she's currently writing – Pond Life, a fictional biography of two women who live on the south coast...
Evelyn
17 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Sally takes time off from trying to unblock her sink to conduct a creative writing lesson with her student, Evelyn. They discuss a single sentence in ...
Reading Jean Rhys
10 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Sally takes a trip on her shiny blue electric scooter to Oxford Public Library, where she picks up a novel by the iconic British modernist writer Jean...
Let Me In
03 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Temperatures on the narrowboat dip below zero, so Sally takes the advice of Virginia Woolf and stays in bed to read poetry. She immerses herself in Th...
The Green Lady
27 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
On a cold boat, Sally is warmed by her fire, the sound of her neighbours, and the cathartic practice of “speaking in tongues”, a technique she l...
These Words Will Not Wait
20 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Sally leaves a frosty boat and travels to Gloucestershire to meet her friend and fellow author Alice Jolly. They talk about Alice’s epic experimenta...
Sweet Airs
13 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Sally takes a swim in the river after a few days’ absence from the boat, reflecting on how her natural surroundings fuel her writing. Her thoughts t...
Cerian
07 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
A robin visits Sally’s boat, and she reflects on the importance of quietness and concentration in the creative process. Inspecting a patch of the me...
A Reading Life, A Writing Life with Sally Bayley
02 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Sally 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...