About Me
I'm Penny, Pentakles, Penmeister, P-dawg, Pence, Triple F- 'your ferret featured friend' or more recently...Penzance.
I trawled my ass through medical school in order to be a psychiatrist with a view to being a writer alongside practising psychiatry.
After a long stint of working in the student equivalent of the Samaritans it it good to be able to finally help in more ways than just listening.
The plan was to write one novel, get it out of my system and get back to training as a psychotherapist, maybe using a bit of poetry therapy along the way.
However...
I made the mistake after my house officer years of taking a 'gap yaahhr' without the gap part. I was working in A+E most days in a small district general hospital in Elgin. I moved there on a bit of a whim after meeting a hilarious English teacher through a friend who happened to have a spare room. I'd also recently met a 37 year old man who worked in the shortbread factory down the road and had bought a big black motorbike- gosh writing it down is making it sound more and more like a mid-life crisis. So I moved in with Maz Duncan – also a closet poet and maker of THE best gin and tonic. She equipped me with a fountain pen, ink cartridges and Stephen Fry's 'The Ode Less Travelled'. In return I helped her get through piles of her marking whilst sitting in my scrubs after work swigging a can of red rooster for creative inspiration and wrestled her into dragging her poems out into the light of day.
It turned out to be a year in which all of the creative energy I'd suppressed throughout Medical school finally got a look in. I no longer had to drag myself past the poetry section of the library on the way to take out books on pharmacology and cell physiology with a look of mournful longing. I spent the first month of this year at the SUISS creative writing summer school in Edinburgh, being a creative writing student under the tutelage of inspirational award-winning redheaded slam poet Claire Askew who introduced us to the world of poetry with a bang.
In the Winter of that year I also went on an Arvon course, much to Maz's poorly-hidden envy, and spent a week in the snowy Yorkshire dales writing my heart out in an attic room in in the home of Ted Hughes' just a walk away from the cobbled village where Sylvia Plath is buried.
What really got me writing was the online Poetry skills course I did with York University where my ability to be gobby and opinionated online but not in real life (in a tactful and productive way obvs) developed into critiquing and feedback on other people's poems in a context where I could finally get a word in edgeways whilst getting some great inspiration for some of my own.
That year came to an end after I went to Falmouth in Cornwall for an Introduction to Therapeutic Writing run by the lovely poetry therapist Victoria Field and health journalist Anne Taylor and felt the heavy grey cloud of Aberdeen calling me for psychiatry training.
Aberdeen...
I've still yet to work out what it was exactly that caused my soul to start bleeding dry the minute I moved there, as I absolutely loved living with one of my bffs The Scab. I loved my job and had some cracking patients. But on that first morning I arrived for our introduction to psychiatry training, I woke up to find my motorbike had been stolen from outside my new flat and the year just got worse from there on in. The introductory 'welcome' to the deanery consisted of the usual bollocking from HR asking why we hadn't sent back the forms it turned out they'd never actually sent us. I sat staring out the window at the dismal grey sky, watching a zombified patient trudge past the window, his arm-swing stolen by antipsychotics and I've never had such a strong feeling of being in the wrong place doing the wrong thing for me at that time.
But I survived the first year, and it confirmed that psychiatry is definitely what I want to do. It's a shame really as writing is a hobby, much like skiing or surfing and the look I got when I asked if I could combine part time psychiatry training with a creative writing masters was as though I had asked if I could have half the year off to do a ski season in the Pyrennees. Since the year I spent in Elgin, not being able to write has felt physically painful, like it's something I can't not do and so my life began to feel very out of balance last year when it became dominated by long days and a miserable journey home to Mastrick on my pushbike, go on Google image it!! (I know we lived in the posh part scabs :) )
I was very fond of my colleagues and my patients and I think psychiatrists sometimes get a bad rep but I think there are lots of ways they can and do help as well as by prescribing medication . There is also still a long way to go in the de-stigmatisation of mental illness and that's something I feel quite passionately about and it’s one of the themes I hammer on about in this novel I’m writing.
In the end I decided that life is too short not to do what you love. If I hadn't tasted the freedom and power that come with living with integrity I wouldn't feel the pull of knowing how good it feels to live a life where what really excites you gets top priority.
I recently cracked my novel out of its dusty coffin after a year of accidentally emitting angsty poetry each time I sat down to write it. This is despite it being planned out quite precisely from each character arc to each plot twist and dramatic scene using fun little flashcards I got free with Writer's Forum Magazine. (My favourite game growing up was the educational spelling game on my Vtech computer...I was that cool..)
The Grand Plan
The master plan is to get this novel out of my system and onto a word document, to get my pamphlet of medical poems out into the world whilst continuing my psychiatry training with the plan of specialising dually in CAMHS and Psychotherapy.
I hope to do lots more therapeutic writing workshops and have some in the pipelines with a group of young people I have worked with at CAMHS (Children and adolescent mental health)
I'm otherwise a bit of a bed-bound creature at times. I like a good night out dancing in the top floor of Yes-pionage with The Scab, wild swimming, random camper van trips. I also love reading, writing, reading about writing, going to workshops about writing, drinking Red Rooster or 35p equivalent budget energy drinks and running or more often, reading about running in fitness magazines, but not doing a whole lot of actual running or writing. But that’s all about to change!
I trawled my ass through medical school in order to be a psychiatrist with a view to being a writer alongside practising psychiatry.
After a long stint of working in the student equivalent of the Samaritans it it good to be able to finally help in more ways than just listening.
The plan was to write one novel, get it out of my system and get back to training as a psychotherapist, maybe using a bit of poetry therapy along the way.
However...
I made the mistake after my house officer years of taking a 'gap yaahhr' without the gap part. I was working in A+E most days in a small district general hospital in Elgin. I moved there on a bit of a whim after meeting a hilarious English teacher through a friend who happened to have a spare room. I'd also recently met a 37 year old man who worked in the shortbread factory down the road and had bought a big black motorbike- gosh writing it down is making it sound more and more like a mid-life crisis. So I moved in with Maz Duncan – also a closet poet and maker of THE best gin and tonic. She equipped me with a fountain pen, ink cartridges and Stephen Fry's 'The Ode Less Travelled'. In return I helped her get through piles of her marking whilst sitting in my scrubs after work swigging a can of red rooster for creative inspiration and wrestled her into dragging her poems out into the light of day.
It turned out to be a year in which all of the creative energy I'd suppressed throughout Medical school finally got a look in. I no longer had to drag myself past the poetry section of the library on the way to take out books on pharmacology and cell physiology with a look of mournful longing. I spent the first month of this year at the SUISS creative writing summer school in Edinburgh, being a creative writing student under the tutelage of inspirational award-winning redheaded slam poet Claire Askew who introduced us to the world of poetry with a bang.
In the Winter of that year I also went on an Arvon course, much to Maz's poorly-hidden envy, and spent a week in the snowy Yorkshire dales writing my heart out in an attic room in in the home of Ted Hughes' just a walk away from the cobbled village where Sylvia Plath is buried.
What really got me writing was the online Poetry skills course I did with York University where my ability to be gobby and opinionated online but not in real life (in a tactful and productive way obvs) developed into critiquing and feedback on other people's poems in a context where I could finally get a word in edgeways whilst getting some great inspiration for some of my own.
That year came to an end after I went to Falmouth in Cornwall for an Introduction to Therapeutic Writing run by the lovely poetry therapist Victoria Field and health journalist Anne Taylor and felt the heavy grey cloud of Aberdeen calling me for psychiatry training.
Aberdeen...
I've still yet to work out what it was exactly that caused my soul to start bleeding dry the minute I moved there, as I absolutely loved living with one of my bffs The Scab. I loved my job and had some cracking patients. But on that first morning I arrived for our introduction to psychiatry training, I woke up to find my motorbike had been stolen from outside my new flat and the year just got worse from there on in. The introductory 'welcome' to the deanery consisted of the usual bollocking from HR asking why we hadn't sent back the forms it turned out they'd never actually sent us. I sat staring out the window at the dismal grey sky, watching a zombified patient trudge past the window, his arm-swing stolen by antipsychotics and I've never had such a strong feeling of being in the wrong place doing the wrong thing for me at that time.
But I survived the first year, and it confirmed that psychiatry is definitely what I want to do. It's a shame really as writing is a hobby, much like skiing or surfing and the look I got when I asked if I could combine part time psychiatry training with a creative writing masters was as though I had asked if I could have half the year off to do a ski season in the Pyrennees. Since the year I spent in Elgin, not being able to write has felt physically painful, like it's something I can't not do and so my life began to feel very out of balance last year when it became dominated by long days and a miserable journey home to Mastrick on my pushbike, go on Google image it!! (I know we lived in the posh part scabs :) )
I was very fond of my colleagues and my patients and I think psychiatrists sometimes get a bad rep but I think there are lots of ways they can and do help as well as by prescribing medication . There is also still a long way to go in the de-stigmatisation of mental illness and that's something I feel quite passionately about and it’s one of the themes I hammer on about in this novel I’m writing.
In the end I decided that life is too short not to do what you love. If I hadn't tasted the freedom and power that come with living with integrity I wouldn't feel the pull of knowing how good it feels to live a life where what really excites you gets top priority.
I recently cracked my novel out of its dusty coffin after a year of accidentally emitting angsty poetry each time I sat down to write it. This is despite it being planned out quite precisely from each character arc to each plot twist and dramatic scene using fun little flashcards I got free with Writer's Forum Magazine. (My favourite game growing up was the educational spelling game on my Vtech computer...I was that cool..)
The Grand Plan
The master plan is to get this novel out of my system and onto a word document, to get my pamphlet of medical poems out into the world whilst continuing my psychiatry training with the plan of specialising dually in CAMHS and Psychotherapy.
I hope to do lots more therapeutic writing workshops and have some in the pipelines with a group of young people I have worked with at CAMHS (Children and adolescent mental health)
I'm otherwise a bit of a bed-bound creature at times. I like a good night out dancing in the top floor of Yes-pionage with The Scab, wild swimming, random camper van trips. I also love reading, writing, reading about writing, going to workshops about writing, drinking Red Rooster or 35p equivalent budget energy drinks and running or more often, reading about running in fitness magazines, but not doing a whole lot of actual running or writing. But that’s all about to change!