Gayle Burgoyne

Everything I write is a piece of myself in relation to the world. Not literal or direct, but oblique…sometimes I actually do close one eye, squint with the other and look at the page sideways, so as not to scare off the ideas before they know I can be trusted. 

Gather, dissolve, sift, blend and merge. Then I encourage the ideas to grow in their own ways in response to my reality at the time of writing. Often I’m conscious of putting ideas way out in front of me, that I couldn’t possibly have written this or that because I don’t yet know these things. Years later I find pieces of my current life explicit in these tales from the past and I wonder how I know what I know when I know that I don’t know it. Perhaps it’s because I’m always swimming in the undercurrents of the collective (un)consciousness and everything I’ve ever thought or seen or done is already woven into the fabric because I’m just one instance of the human blueprint. The written word is one of the many ways in which we transmit wisdom even when we – readers, writers, deep water divers – aren’t aware of our place in the flow. Maybe this is why I have a continuing fascination with time travel and the real yet intangible.

Topside, in the choppiness of the surface waters, I write novels, short stories and essays about nature, history, adventure, art and all kinds of rebellion. I’m always looking for new ways to pull the rug out from under my own feet. The regular ashtanga yoga helps to balance this tendency, and I’m currently enjoying reconnecting with my teenage self through the difficult handstands and backbends that I haven’t done for thirty years.

I also run creative writing workshops, and for a while delivered creative writing coaching, specialising in de-mystifying the creative process and teaching a sense of the whole, until being the ‘expert’ stalled my own experimentation. After a recent and major paradigm shift in my life, I once again know nothing. Every day (and sometimes in the night) I wake up excited to be me. I’ve welcomed back all my lost selves from where they got stuck in my looping timeline and very often we’re to be seen, metaphorically, jumping up and down in a big huddle, so so happy to be together after all this time.

In previous episodes, I worked for ten years as a management consultant in government and health in the UK and Qatar, focusing on strategy, change management, project set up and delivery, and training and coaching. Before that I was an accessories designer-maker-seller at London’s outdoor fashion markets. Further back, and at other times: lots of travelling, gymnastics, dancing, capoeira, climbing, origami and other crafts. At The University of Leeds, I studied English Literature and Philosophy. I taught myself to write from books, and a lot of trial and error. It took a very long time to get over the fear of the greats. I’ve been writing fiction for seventeen years and, more sporadically, doing triathlons for eight years – both are endurance sports which support each other. The endurance experience and, unexpectedly, the consultancy skills, have been invaluable during the recent upending of my life, the cause of which I was surprised to discover in one of my short stories from three years earlier.

I also began learning Russian a few years ago and after six months it began to do interesting things to my English syntax, which I explored in my novel set in 1850s tsarist Odesa, Becoming and Dissolving. I wrote this book a fourteen-month frenzy from 2019 to 2020, aided by the global precariousness which so exactly matched my inner reality I spent six months dizzy with elation that I wasn’t mad, or at least no madder than the rest of the world. Now, in 2024, I find myself in the transformative place of the novel’s ending that preceded my personal development by four years.

You can contact me on gayle@gayleburgoyne.com or complete the enquiry form on the Contact page.