Lily Dunn

The Arts Council backs our recovery project

We heard this past week that the Arts Council has awarded us a grant for not only the artistic costs of publishing our recovery anthology, A Wild and Precious Life, but also for A Wild and Precious Mentoring Programme (WPMP), which will enable four of our writers to develop their careers. This is such good…

A Wild and Precious Evening

Last Monday Zoe and I hosted our first event for A Wild and Precious Life, our ACE-funded anthology of recovery stories, which sprung from our teaching creative writing to a group of people recovering from drug and alcohol addiction at Hackney Recovery Service (affiliated with St Mungo’s). The event took place at http://www.housmans.com/, a radical…

New Year’s Eve

This is a small piece of creative nonfiction I wrote about taking drugs and going to World Dance in the 1990s. It’s part of a bigger piece that looks at addiction in all its forms and its legacy. You can read it here: https://therealstory.org/2018/07/27/new-years-eve-by-lily-dunn/ The Real Story is a small Arts Council online journal, celebrating creative…

Our recovery project is live!

Yesterday was a very exciting day. We launched our recovery anthology with the award-winning publisher, Unbound, and within the first day we reached 6% of our funding. A Wild and Precious Life: Addiction, physical and mental illness and its aftermath – is a collection of stories and poetry from writers in recovery. It’s a very special book, the…

Writing for survival

Slowly but surely my hybrid memoir is taking form, becoming something larger than its separate parts, dreamed up late at night, and then made real in a messy scrawl in a heavy hardback book, before elevating themselves to type here at my computer. This is how it has grown. I’ve been through the most unimaginable…