Richard Skinner – författare

Erik Satie - composer, dandy, eccentric - is dead. Told to select one memory to take with him into the afterlife, he finds himself in limbo with a community of the deceased, looking back at his fifty-nine years for their most precious moments. Evenings of absinthe at the Chat Noir? Friendships with Debussy, Duchamp and Man Ray? What of his great musical triumphs and disasters? How will he choose his own legacy before silent whiteness descends?Venice, 1511. In the convent of Sant' Alvise, Oliva is about to take the veil and become a bride of Christ. When her world is shaken - first, literally, by an earthquake, and then, spiritually, by forces that threaten to change the convent for ever - she begins to ask questions about her faith and her future. When she agrees to sit for Signor Avílo, the renowned portrait painter, he brings with him a diabolical object: a mirror. And reflections can be dangerous.Told with playful elegance, these are two utterly original tales of art and devotion, of religious and creative fervour. They contemplate the eternal in different ways - one examining a life only just beginning, tentatively; the other a life lived without compromise as it reaches its close.

A new edition of Richard Skinner's classic novel about the life of Mati Hari, released to coincide with the 100-year anniversary of her death, October 2017.When Margaretha Zelle, a young woman living in The Hague, answers a lonely hearts advertisement she becomes drawn into a relationship with an army captain twice her age. After a hasty wedding, they depart for Indonesia, where the marriage collapses amid infidelity and violence. Seeking a new life, Margaretha returns to Europe and travels to Paris, where she adopts the stage name Mata Hari, reinventing herself as an exotic dancer. In her new role she attracts the attention of numerous admirers, many of whom are officers, ready to share their secrets with a woman of notorious allure and intrigue, as Europe lurches towards explosive conflict.

A novel is a relationship, a place outside of time where both reader and writer are challenged and validated, stretched and rewarded. Richard Skinner believes it is your duty as a novelist to bring your whole self to the page; to find your story, not force it; to meet your reader in a spirit of openness. In Writing a Novel he offers up frameworks, strategies and stimuli to help you meet that duty, drawingon his deep experience as one of the UK's leading creative writing teachers. He covers the essentials - narrators, character, setting - with charm and rigour. But Writing a Novel is not a set of instructions: it is a way of thinking, a conversation, a relationship in itself.

Where Richard Skinner’s previous pamphlets, Invisible Sun and Dream into Play, were primarily concerned with the play of light and playfulness respectively, White Noise Machine is mainly concerned with sound. A white noise machine is a device that produces a noise that calms the listener, which in many cases sounds like a rushing waterfall or wind blowing through trees, and other serene or nature-like sounds and Skinner has used this idea to try to create this effect in many of the poems.

Vade Mecum brings together Richard Skinner's best essays, reviews and interviews from 1992-2014. There are close critical engagements with writers (Kazuo Ishiguro, Italo Calvino, Shakespeare's The Tempest) and composers (Erik Satie, Iannis Xenakis, Luc Ferrari), meditations on films and filmmakers (Antonioni, Krzysztof Kieslowski, Chinatown) and idiosyncratic reflections on Werner Herzog's Of Walking in Ice and Steely Dan.

How to change fundamental reality by not thinking; an over-enthusiastic production of a play for Easter; getting lost on Dartmoor; the Health and Safety Officer of the afterlife; a dodgy group therapist; a steeplechase for saints and theologians; a Welsh football match; the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse going AWOL.

The subject matter of Richard Skinner’s poetry starts with the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden and concludes with the events of the first Easter, taking in on the way Julian of Norwich’s hazelnut, Mastermind, God as a blizzard, and the eighth deadly sin. A psalm based on the New Testament and a modern take on Epiphany are included, along with a dozen new ‘Invocations’. Both witty and reflective, the poems will appeal to a wide range of readers.Colliding with God,and wearing no seat-belt,he suffered extensive injuries to his life.They say he is not the same mansince the accident.God, too, did not escape unscathed, but received nasty woundsto his hands and feet,and a deep laceration in his side.His condition is said to be critical,and a full recoveryis unlikely.Neither partyis covered by insurance.About the author:A Londoner by upbringing, Richard moved to Devon in 1975 to write a novel which remains as unpublishable now as it was then. Several collections of his poetry have, however, been published, including Invocations (WGP 2005). A former member of Cambridge University Footlights, he also occasionally writes and performs sketch-based comedy; and in recent years he has enjoyed a collaboration with composer Nigel Walsh, being the lyricist for their musical Bethlehem!, several liturgical pieces, and a number of songs. He and his wife are members of the Anglican parish of Central Exeter.

From earthworms  to CD-ROMs, from starfish to blizzards, from electrons to garden forks, from doubt to a shout of laughter … In the tradition of liturgical chants such as the ‘Advent Antiphons’, Richard Skinner has created invocations inspired by creatures, conditions and objects in the world around us which reflect and are a metaphor for aspects of God or the Divine. Although the author comes from a Christian background and is most at home with the iconography and language of Christianity, these invocations, which incorporate symbolism from creation, science, technology and human psychology, and point to the God in all things, will resonate with individuals and groups of any or no particular religious or spiritual allegiance.Richard Skinner is a writer, performer, comedian and counsellor. His previous publications include Echoes of Eckhart, published by Arthur James in association with Jim Cotter’s Cairns Publications and The Logic of Whistling (Cairns, 2002). A cradle Baptist, he is now heavily involved in the life of a city-centre Anglican church, where considerable lay participation occurs. He is deeply influenced by the medieval mystics, particularly Meister Eckhart and Julian of Norwich.