So, this is it. It’s almost a year since my PhD was awarded and I’m branching out into my own uncareer – a hodgepodge of things that earn money and don’t, with the main nexus being creative writing, and archaeology.* It’s taken me a while to get my head around how creative writing and archaeology might work together and they’ve seemed like two essentially different things pulling in different directions. I interlaced a Birkbeck creative writing grad certificate with an OU classical studies MA,** then plumped for completing the MA and firmly set course with a PhD at King’s College London without any of this much connecting any threads between creative writing or archaeology.

Over the summer it’s started to seem much more possible to combine the writing with the archaeology in some very satisfying ways. My academic book has cleared peer review and I now need to respond and get on with getting that published, and I’ve agreed to a couple of chapters in academic books. More commercially, I’ve acquired an agent for two non-fiction picture books, the first of which is out with publishers and has some interest, and I’ve completed a children’s novel that I’m now ready to pitch. Time and again though all of my writing brings me back to what I love most, the materiality that is life – sorry Shakespeare we are not such stuff as dreams are made of, even if you are right about our little lives and death.

In actual fact I love archaeology that has writing on it – the Vindolanda writing tablets, Latin inscriptions on stone. Curse tablets. Anything really with writing. That’s just what I personally like though. Maybe more important is that the books I still find most satisfying now are those that firmly ground themselves in things.  If the objects – magical or mundane – are real, the world and the people in it are real too. These are real, the real things that I try to bring into my writing world. As one of my creative writing tutors said, quiddity itself is “the thinginess of things.” There no longer seems to be a conflict between writing creatively and archaeology because for me at least, the very essence of writing, fiction or not, is conjuring a material world, and it sits perfectly on that nexus point with archaeology.

*I have support from my partner and do some things, mostly social-media based/wfh consultancy, for an income while I try to get this going. These are based on things I did before my PhD, as is the house I live in and are where the obvious economic privileges I now have come from. I spent a large part of my earlier career trying to work out how people did the things I was interested in doing, while needing to pay the bread-and-butter bills, and realising other people were either doing other things too, or in lots of cases, had family money (we don’t). If you’re looking for a ‘how do you’: this is my ‘Act II’ and it’s taken me years to get to this starting point.

** I do not recommend doing this, especially not when you’re working fulltime as I was during the MA and Grad Cert; it’s exhausting, and you don’t get the most from your education. Postgraduate education was also cheaper when I started – my MA cost me about the same as a cheap gym membership.