Roll Up! Roll Up! The Circus Is Coming to Town!

 

There’s been a significant change in my working life lately – if you follow me on Twitter you probably already know about it – but for those of you who don’t: I resigned from a 12 year career as a secondary school teacher to embark upon a PhD in Creative Writing. I’ll let you know in due course whether this was genius or foolish! The reason I’m posting about it is two-fold.

Firstly, it’ll mean a slight change to this blog. The focus of my PhD thesis is representations of gender in circus and sideshow literature, which means I’ll be reading lots of novels and non-fiction set in the world of circus entertainment and many books on gender and feminism. It makes sense to me to review these books (the ones written by women at least) as it’ll help with my thought process and bring a slightly different focus to the blog alongside my usual reviews and Sunday’s In the Media round-up. There are two new menu tabs at the top of the page to reflect this.

Secondly, with a bit of encouragement from some blogger friends who also write, I’ve set up a new blog, Sideshow, where I’ll be writing about my experience doing the PhD and writing a book while juggling two part-time jobs and the school run. My first post ‘Why?‘ is up now.