Author: Reena Bakir

I wake in morning, in the ruins of myself, in a tangle and un- tangle of small destructions, (and greater ones) and these destructions, they run machine-like, calculated, soldier-march their way into the roadwork of my grandfather’s veins I wake in morning, to black tea and all the newspapers,     to the stories of Nablus, of back-home      of home, he says, that is much more home     than this skeleton one will ever be my grandfather, he speaks of dust, of bombs, of the houses they took and all the bodies, but my grandfather, he also speaks of weddings, of singing and of fields, ...

We’ve all been here before: it’s the dreaded stare at a blank document. The pacing around your single-bed dorm room at 2 a.m. The fingers hovering over the keyboard. You’ve been sitting here for hours and hours, but the words just won’t come.  If you’ve ever found yourself in any of these situations, congratulations – you’ve experienced the bane of every student’s existence: writer’s block. I reached out to some of the most experienced on the matter, Royal Holloway’s Writing Society, to try and crack the code behind the debilitating curse of this creative slowdown.  You might be wondering: what exactly is writer’s block? Cathy Snarey, Treasurer of Writing Soc, describes it as that feeling of being up against a deadline, but there’s simply nothing valuable on your mind. ‘Yo...