Pond Life
In a digital age, Pond Life asks who will record the lives that do not appear on screen. Enter Edith Cull, unmarried and working as an occasional coverteacher. Edith’s life lacks biography. Her chief pleasure and source of excitement is the cinema. Encouraged by on-screen fantasies, Edith attaches herself to the local chemist, the stalwart Mr. Jarvis. In the same town lives Dorothy Fortescue married to the noble Henry. Behind her manor walls, Dorothy lives out another form of spectral existence. As lady of the manor, Dorothy summons “Pond Man” who arrives to build her a garden pond; and upon the surface of her pond Dorothy projects the all the scenery of her boredom and grief. The lives of these two women reflect and illuminate one another and in a crucial moment of misreading their lives intertwine…
Sally Bayley
Sally Bayley is the author of a series of groundbreaking books which defy category and genre. All explore the relationship between biography, autobiography and fiction through myth, fable, fairytale and forms of lyrical and visual memory. Published works include her three-part coming-of-age sequence, Girl with Dove, No Boys Play Here and The Green Lady and a study of the diary as an art form, The Private Life of the Diary. Sally hosts and performs the highly successful podcast A Reading Life, A Writing Life, designed to inspire creative writing, innovative reading, and artistic responses to living.
Author portrait © Alexandra Kelly
