I am a husband, father and grandfather. I seem to have had a busy life, but have always found space for writing, art and music. I read a lot, walk a lot, and work hard. I don't watch things on screens, like TV and films, and sometimes wonder how people find the time.
I grew up in a mining village in NE Derbyshire. My father was a wages clerk at the pit, and NUM branch secretary. My mother was an electrophobic Luddite, washing by hand, cooking on an open fire, always busy looking after me and my three brothers. I worked as a butcher's errand boy, on one of those bikes with a tiny front wheel and an enormous wicker basket, until I was old enough to work on farms in the holidays. I did that until I left university, with a couple of spells as short-order chef at Butlins Bognor Regis. I studied sciences in the sixth form, volunteered in a centre for physically challenged young people at weekends, sometimes edited the school's student-driven literary magazine, and was the school's first and last head boy to be elected by the sixth form, in which role I was a disaster. I played guitar and bass in Old MacDog's 12-Bar Farmyard Blues Band, whose greatest gig, in one sense at least, involved playing one song non-stop for an hour: Bob Dylan's Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands. Some people lasted the course, some left, some snoozed.
Between school and uni I had a gap year, as a UNA volunteer. I worked on the home farm in a Camphill village for mentally challenged adults, in Baden-Württemberg.
I read Philosophy, Psychology and Anthropology at Durham. My main interests outside study were poetry and music. The poetry was published in Makaris, the University literary mag. I submitted under many pseudonyms, with a not very serious ambition of one day filling the whole magazine with my own work. I wrote music and lyrics for, and played in, an improvisational rock band called Ahimsa. With friends, we founded the Durham Domefest, an annual free festival that ran from 1973 to 1980.
After uni I had a haircut and went to work in software design. Through the late 1970s and 80s I developed design methodologies for the early on-line systems, and trained hundreds (thousands?) of people in their use. Alongside my day job, I was involved in running a whole-food co-op from home, until the spread of health food shops made it unnecessary. I was still writing, as a hobby, and in 1984 went on an Arvon Foundation course at Totleigh Barton, 'Writing for Children'. I met my first serious partner there. We soon had a child of our own to try out our stories and poems on, and keep us busy.
In the mid 80s I was involved in R&D in artificial intelligence, developing a methodology for identifying applications that were tractable with the technology then available, and touring India for the British Council, lecturing and consulting on what we saw as good practice. I came home from that tour to find my marriage was over, and entered a rather dark period. My ex and I are still friends, though, and meet quite often over grandchildren.
In the early 90s I started an educational software company, with a sailing friend. I spent a lot of time in schools, and became more and more interested in how children learn, and how good teachers help them.
In 1995 I married a linguist/artist/teacher. Our family has grown from my daughter and my wife's two sons, to three lovely couples who are our good friends, and three beautifully strong-minded grand-daughters. Though circumstances dictated that my wife earned a living as a teacher, her passion was the visual arts and she is now a respected environmental and conceptual artist*.
Also in 1995 I sold my stake in the software company and enrolled on an MSc in Educational Research Methods at Oxford University, working part-time as a classroom assistant. I went on to complete a doctorate in which I looked at the cultural changes in teaching and learning that followed the introduction of the National Curriculum in 1989. My special focus was on science in primary schools, which everyone, teachers included, thought was going to be a disaster, but which turned out to be one of the successes of the reforms. As part of the research I developed a methodology integrating qualitative and quantitative methods in a socio-cultural approach to educational research, which was disseminated through several universities' masters programmes**.
Alongside my doctoral research I co-founded VAEST, the Virtual Association of European Science Teachers, with Prof Joan Solomon. I set up a web site in raw HTML, the only way to do it at the time, and organised non-virtual conferences in nice places like Porto. At home I was active in Green politics, editing the North Oxford Green View for several years, and helping to elect our ward's first Green councillor.
From 2000 I worked as a research fellow, teacher and lecturer, mostly at the Open University, mostly with Prof Patricia Murphy. On 7th July 2005, en route to Kings College, London, to talk at a conference, I found myself in a tube crash that was part of the Edgeware Road nightmare: bombed, derailed, trapped underground in smoke and total darkness for an hour, with no idea of what had happened, and terrible cries coming from somewhere. We couldn't see anything, couldn't get out of the carriage. I sat on the floor, holding three tiny terrified Japanese women. When help came, we were led out past hundreds of bleeding, bandaged people. In a daze, I bought an A-Z, walked across the city to my conference, and delivered my paper, not realising I was covered in soot. I didn't find out what had happened until the conference broke for lunch. It was a morning that changed the lives it didn't end.
Alongside my OU work, I was a founding director and, for one tough year, chair of Westmill Wind Farm Co-op, the first community-owned wind farm in southern England.
As a committed green since stumbling on the Ehrlichs' Population Resources Environment in the school library in 1970, I continue to engage in environmental campaigns, most recently on the 'Ox-Cam Growth Arc' and on sewage pollution in the Thames catchment. I also love hands-on projects like monitoring water vole populations, coppicing and hedge-laying. This environmental agenda is the driving force behind my first novel.
I left the OU at the end of 2011, to 'focus' on writing, music and art, until it became all too clear that I couldn't sing, was a hopeless visual artist, and hadn't really understood what focus meant. In 2016/17, both my wife and I had brushes with cancer. We got through slightly scathed but are both still clear. It was another life-changing experience. Since then I've better understood what focus means, and now put all my creative energy into learning how to write, and doing it.
In 2017-18 I did a Creative Writing course in Oxford's External Studies department, run by Elizabeth Garner, who continues to act as a mentor. I am part of two informal writing groups, both involving published writers, and am an active member of Jericho Writers, The Word Factory, and (intermittently) Alex Keegan's Boot Camp and Moniack Mhor in Scotland.
I completed the first draft of my novel Dead Shark Shuffle late in 2019. It has gone through multiple rounds of editing, informed by mentors, first readers and a paid-for appraisal by a JW editor, and is now as good as I can make it without engaged professional support. I am determined that this year will see Dead Shark Shuffle published, or well on the road to publication, one way or another. I'm not looking to publication as an end in itself, though: I want the book to be a success, in terms of readers and sales. I will do anything to make this happen - change the title, change the plot, change the narrative voices, change my name, change the characters' names, change the characters' characters, change the characters' motivations, voices, ages, genders, ethnicities, looks, make the book longer, shorter, funnier, darker, more romantic, less romantic. Anything.
I have plotted and drafted parts of a sequel to Dead Shark Shuffle, which is on hold pending publication of the first book, and am developing another story that would not depend on the success of the first one.
I have written a dozen short stories, some of which I have recently submitted to competitions and publishers: one so far has been long-listed.
All my writing is informed by deep concerns about the state of the world: climate change, bio-diversity loss and extinction; the rise of fascism; the self-consuming logic of free market capitalism; the devaluing of truth and honour; and the continuing ravages of poverty, misogyny, speciesism, ablism, religion and racism. But through the many years since I was one myself, I have always believed that 'the kids are all right'. I find grounds for great optimism in the clarity and moral sense of the current generation of young people.
* For more on my wife's work, see www.imogenrigden.art.
** For more on research methodology, see Lunn SA (2003), What we think we can safely say, British Educational Research Journal 28(5) p649-672, ISSN 0141-1926
