Hi, I’m Jennifer and this is my blog.
For work I mostly do writing, music and organising things. I’m self-employed, and open to offers of paid work if you’re creating something that’s up my street.
Once upon a time I did a maths & computing degree, and I am still quite techie by average standards. Yes I am a geek basically :-)
I write songs, and sometimes make other kinds of music. Single Bass is “songs + voice + solo electric bass guitar”. I toured quite a bit in my youth and made a CD album. You can hear a song via the playback thing further down this page.
I’m interested in creative processes (and process-geekery generally), especially what gets people stuck & unstuck. I wrote a zine about creativity which gives a pretty good idea of how I think about that stuff.
One of my best skills is the kind of nonfiction writing which analyses a situation and explains it.
Nottingham, England, is my home base. The main networks I’m part of here are (a) queer/bi communities and (b) non-school education, sometimes known as “home ed”. Since covid started, I’ve got quite into running online events as well.
I have a classical music background, originally violin. I’ve written a handful of pieces for orchestra, and spent a while running one for adult learners. I’m brewing a covid-careful, beginner-friendly string orchestra for Nottingham.
As a facilitator for group discussions and learning environments, I like to ensure that everyone’s included and no-one’s stressfully “put on the spot”. Besides music teaching (inc songwriting & stagecraft), I’ve done “bisexuality awareness” sessions, created the format for “Fitting and misfitting in the bi community”, and hosted a variety of different discussions and informal meetups.
I’m currently learning how to do Systemic Modelling, a specific way to support people to learn about themselves & each other.
I make beautiful little one-inch button badges, known as the “identity badges“, and you can see a picture of them further down this page. So far, I’ve sold about 4,000 of them, some at events and some by mail-order. I started them partly because back in the 1990s there was hardly any merch for bi people, but then they expanded into some other areas too.
I’ve lived in England all my life except for 3 years in the Netherlands as a kid, where I went to the Montessori School in Leiden and learnt to speak Dutch.
In terms of class background, I feel I had “the luck of the draw”: both sides of my family of origin went “skilled working class” → education → well-paid indoor jobs”. So that meant woodwork tools at home, a love of learning, and enough money for music lessons.
I started this blog in 2007. Despite the long life of the blog, there’s not that many posts here, what with being busy and the time it takes me to think things through to my satisfaction. The web site as a whole pre-dates the blog; I first set that up in 1997, and some of the earliest stuff is available from the original main home page.
A list of blog “categories” is available towards the bottom of any article page. WordPress allows you to follow a RSS feed of any individual category page – possibly useful if you’re only interested in a subset of what I write about.
On the Fediverse, I’m at @UnchartedWorlds@scicomm.xyz, SingleBass@musicians.today, @BookTrail@sunny.garden for tiny book reviews, @IdentityBadges@sunny.garden for the badges and @NBFSOrchestra@musicians.today for the orchestra. If you don’t want a Fediverse account but would like to follow any of these, another option is to use a feed reader: all Mastodon feeds can be read as RSS.
I’m not much on Twitter any more, but the earlier book reviews are at @BookTrail, my main account is at @UnchartedWorlds, and there’s also @SingleBass.
For simplicity, I’m okay with “she/her” pronouns, although in my own mind I might be more of a genderqueer “they”. On the whole, gender is weird :-)
You can email me if you like (old page, still mostly true).