Lucy Sheerman is currently an artist in residence at Metal Peterborough where she is co-creating a new Evensong for Peterborough Cathedral using interview material drawn from couples who were asked whether they could travel to the Moon together on an extended trip.
She has been working on a series of fan fiction versions of iconic novels including Rebecca (Dancing Girl Press) and Jane Eyre. Her writing and reviews have been published in Long Poem Magazine, Nine Arches Press, Shearsman Magazine, Oystercatcher Press, Litmus, PN Review and Poetry Wales.
Two plays, including a collaboration with the Apollo astronaut and poet Al Worden have been commissioned by Menagerie.
Before taking up writing full time she worked at the Arts Council supporting the development of artists and arts organisations. She has a PhD from the University of Cambridge, on Language Writing.
VI
I must sharpen the pencils. Almost all of them blunt or broken. Relics of lost lists or amendments. The tedium of forms. You had told me to forget the past, and I wanted to forget it. Gouging the paper. I left the indented words on the blank sheet. Shuffled the papers and it was all gone. Lost. I wanted it to lie there. I could obliterate it, score through the words or crumple the entire sheet. Instead I kept it. Outside was all around us seeping in. She took the lilac, as I was doing, and put the sprigs one by one in the white vase. Why should the way I do it always be wrong? Top heavy, too dense, overblown. The scent filled the room. Hidden for a while until it surfaced like a haunting in our correspondence. Finding the past present would rob us of that moment. This was no time for subtlety. I wanted nothing more than to walk into a room without fear so I took the book and made it mine. She must have wandered out into the garden, as I did, carrying in her hands the scissors that I carried now. The sense of calm in the room was all a fiction. Fearful you might notice the trembling. I was finding my bearings, taking note.