Hello. My name is Jackie Taylor.

I’m a writer of short fiction, poetry, creative non-fiction and hybrid things.

I’ve lived in South East Cornwall for almost 30 years. I was born in London and worked as a Chartered Management Accountant in the UK and overseas, although that seems like a strange and very different life! I started to write in my early thirties after moving to California with my husband, Peter. I didn’t have a work visa and started taking writing classes. Then I went to a talk by San Francisco writer Ann Lamott who had just published Bird by Bird, her famous book on writing. Up until that point, I really thought that writers were Gods. But she talked about ‘shitty first drafts’ and perfectionism as the ‘voice of the oppressor’. Lightbulb moment. I’ve been writing shitty first drafts ever since, and some have made it to slightly better 2nd/3rd/4th/nth drafts, and some have made it from nth draft to publication. Now writing is what I do.

My work has been published widely in anthologies, literary journals and magazines including Mslexia, and placed in many competitions. In 2019, I won a funded place at the Iceland Writers Retreat in Reykjavik. My collection of linked short stories, Strange Waters, was published by Arachne Press in 2021, with one of the pieces receiving a Pushcart nomination.

After a gap year that lasted 40 years, I was awarded an MLitt in Creative Writing with Distinction from the University of Glasgow in 2023. My work has appeared most recently (Summer 2024) in Inkfish Magazine and Women Speak Volumes (ed. Sharmilla Beezmohun), and is forthcoming in SPELT magazine.

Projects in progress: Bearing, an experimental hybrid prose/poetry collection on love and ageing; botánica a future-world eco-fiction long-form prose-poem (probably!); and Pimp My Viz, examining edgelands, seeing, and being seen.