Tag Archives: creativity

Shane O’Mara talking walking

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Andrew Stuck is peppering Shane O’Mara with a number of questions as we pace around Queens Square in Bloomsbury London

As a professor of experimental brain research with a couple of best selling books on Walking and on talking this Dublin resident must be one of the most eligible guests on a Talking Walking episode.

Shane is also very familiar with Bloomsbury and this square in particular, as it is home both to the Institute of Neurology and to the Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience where he has many colleagues and friends to discuss his research findings with.

As a listener to this podcast, you are probably only too aware that walking is good for coming up with creative thoughts and resolving problems, but like me, you may be unaware of how that happens and thankfully Shane has got the answers.

34’58” 16.4 MB

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Linda Cracknell talking walking

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Linda Cracknell is an author who at the time of the interview was about to have published “Doubling Back–Ten paths trodden in memory” a moving memoir where she retraces ten walks undertaken by others, from the Highlands of Scotland to the Swiss Alps and Kenya.  It had been chosen as a Book of the Week on BBC Radio 4 that was broadcast in the last week of May 2014.

To order a copy of Doubling Back – click on the image

Our interview explores how she sets out to write a narrative of a journey on foot, what she leaves out and how she draws in the reader to the journey or story she tells.  Now living in Scotland, her surroundings offer her plenty of variety for walks, short or long, in the surrounding countryside, much of which is devoid of people since the Highland Clearances. Nature and isolation are both important elements in her writing, as are memories conjured or animated by other walks, some personal, some collective some political. Linda has been influenced by the land artist movement, and especially by Richard Long and Hamish Fulton, but is also stirred by the romance of ‘setting off’, as captured in the writing of Robert Louis Stevenson and Laurie Lee. This interview was recorded over the Internet. 29’31” 13.8MB

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What Linda has been doing since our interview

Linda is now writing a quarterly column for Walk Highlands magazine, and an example of her pieces check out  “Putting walks into words” for great tips on how to write about walking (March 2017).

 

Photo credit: Phil Horey  Book jacket credit: Freight Books