Idly looking online about literary prizes & found a new post on the Barbellion Prize! Sorry if I'm very slow to find this, I couldn't see a date but after a bit of a hiatus (following brilliant @lettymchugh.bsky.social winning with Book of Hours) whoop for more news soon! www.thebarbellionprize.com

This month artist Lydia Catterall presented a curated selection titled ‘The Ones that Fizz'. Included in this selection is 'Anchorage', 2022 by Letty McHugh. Explore the selected works here: buff.ly/j5wA4xZ, and see more of Letty's work here: buff.ly/C0JoQ3u

March 20th is the feast day of Saint Cuthbert and there’s no better way to celebrate than reading about why I just can’t stop writing about him. open.substack.com/pub/lettymch...

Two weeks today! (Out in the US at the end of April) Meet Emma. Emma is sick. Just not in the way you think. Available to pre-order here and on Amazon/Waterstones etc. uk.bookshop.org/p/books/sick...

I don’t want AI suggestions to ‘help’ me draft this poem thanks word document.

It’s high time we start being honest about what’s behind a lot of the push towards “wellness”. It’s ableism and eugenics. Its scared people who can’t face the fact that they could lose their health at any moment. It’s people who desperately need to cling to control. 🧵

I am so, so tired. And I know you are, too. Here's “Death blowing bubbles,” 18th century. The bubbles symbolize life's fragility. This plaster work appears on the ceiling of Holy Grave Chapel in Michaelsberg Abbey, Bamberg, Germany. After the monastery’s dissolution, it became a hospital.

For someone who rarely cooks, I spend way too much time thinking about what I would make if I were challenged to create a round-the-world tasting menu while working as a luxury yacht chef on the reality TV classic Below Deck.

We all know GB News is fash nonsense but that doesn't mean they should get away with it. You don't need to watch the video (it's vile) - what he says is as stated in the description below. Please sign and share to pressure Ofcom into action.

Fantastic piece of writing from @lettymchugh.bsky.social.

I feel like my brain is broken right now, though not for reasons related to my illness. Nevertheless, I think I shall head over to read this to try and fill a small moment of my day with something about creativity vs destruction.

I'm officially on substack. My first post is about radiator paint, but also MS, ADHD, and making art when you feel like your brain is broken substack.com/@lettymchugh...

I would really like someone to write a book called ‘A history of the apocalypse’ and it would be about how and why as humans we have so often been convinced the world is about to end. (I realise I’m a writer and could write that book, but I want to read it tonight)

Conversations can be so weird when you are chronically ill, because you so often end up feeling like you have nothing to say in response to standard polite questions. I’m experimenting with just telling the truth like ‘I’m pretty sick, but also enjoying my hyper focus on the towers of Bologna.’

CW!!!

I never got to use one, but often think fondly of fax machines, noisy enigma of my childhood. The mystery, the glamour, the unnecessary size. Just one time I would have liked to say ‘sure I’ll have someone fax that right over’ and then have someone fax that right over.

Every time I see millennial grey discourse I remember my Grandma E getting a new carpet a few years a go, which she described as ‘a lovely grey colour, right modern, just like something off Homes Under the Hammer’

Every timeline is improved by ethically sourced cat content.

20 year old Letty: I never want to move back to West Yorkshire. I will endanger my physical and mental health to avoid it. 30 year old Letty: West Yorkshire is the greatest place on earth. I will never leave. When I die burry me here so my bones can feed the scientifically significant moss.

My WiFi has been down for 2 days and I’m nearly out of data on my phone. I don’t know what will happen to me if I can’t stream trashy reality TV and/ or Christmas movies for another day. This is why I wouldn’t want to survive the apocalypse.

I take some meds every month by injection that make me feel pretty rough for a few days. As I was getting the dose out of the fridge I imagined the thing in horror films where they mange to get the bad guy with a syringe and how ineffective it would be and I can’t explain how funny that is to me.

I keep looking at starter packs, thinking, ‘I won't follow everyone, I want to make deliberate choices in this new place’ then getting distracted, putting my phone down and losing the list. 70% of the people I follow have names in the first five letters of the alphabet.

POV: Mary Oliver wrote Wild Geese about how much she loves cheese as a musical genre.

When Lucy Steele sends her brake-up letter to Edward in Sense and Sensibility and asks him to ‘destroy my scribbles’ - that's the Jane Austen equivalent of asking him to delete her nudes, isn't it?

MS fatigue is unexpectedly high today*. Can I add be kind and patient please my brain has been replaced with soup to my email signature? *unexpected in the sense this happens every winter like clockwork but in still shocked every year.

I've been reading about Louise Bourgeois recently, specifically about how often she destroyed her own work. Thinking how sad she couldn't see the value in what she made, what a waste, while very deliberately ignoring the parallel with my own habit of deleting the writing I just spent hours on.

Well Boney M left this out of the song.

Maybe I’ll send this frozen lasagna’s cooking instructions next time I’m asked for an Acsess rider, because I also need to rest to be at my best.

Letty McHugh's Barbellion Prize Winning 'Book of Hours' is now available: "Borrowing wisdom from Anglo-Saxon hermits, contemporary artists & The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. Book of Hours is a collection of lyric essay & poetry..and how to take solace in small joys." www.lettymchugh.co.uk/books

I wrote this in my journal in 2020 then but it in Book of Hours. I’ve been feeling for a few years like Twitter has been bad for my brain and increasingly bad for the world. Maybe four years later it really is time.

On everything abt writing & being written abt #chronicillness #disability - brilliant funny piece by Letty McHugh - on more than & also Living with Dignity "...isn’t chronic illness sad? (I feel so much better about my own life having read this)" #AssistedDying disabilityarts.online/magazine/opi...