To start, a little story. A friend of mine recently shared that he’d set up his own website. He’s a fellow writer, and I was incredibly proud of him for ‘doing the thing’, as we millennials say. With a mix of horror and amusement, I realised he had indeed set up his website. With the same damn template as mine. What started as panic and some kind of feminist frustration that he, a man, would have the audacity to choose the same template as me (don’t overthink it, I didn’t), turned into a moment of realisation. My former website was set up under ‘former me’. She even had a different initial in the middle of her names. So maybe it was a time for a change. If you listen to the Instagram therapy influencers, they’ll tell you that when a girl starts returning to pink, it’s because she’s healing. Well here I am, healed as hell, with a brand new pink website. How about that?
In other news, I’ve had two recent publication successes that I’ve neglected to share with you all. The first was with The Sheffield Review, formerly known as Route 57, my third time featuring in this magazine. However, this one felt like a big deal, because it was my first creative non-fiction piece, called ‘Extremely Profound Healing’. It’s my take on the ‘I met my younger self for coffee’ viral poem written by Jennae Cecelia. You can read it here.
The second, with Twisted Ink magazine, another South Yorkshire based mag. This one felt like a return, because I submitted some of my weird (read: unhinged) writing from the early part of my MA, when I was letting myself go in abstract words because I wasn’t yet ready to tell them in prose. Of my Extract from Fable, editor Heather writes: “Harley E. Ryley’s Fable is […] wonderfully weird, and you should take this opportunity to sit with her and languor in, and attempt to deconstruct, her world.” You can go langour in my world here.
Harley E. Ryley 
Leave a comment