Gayle Burgoyne

I write novels, short stories, flash fiction and creative nonfiction inspired by nature, art, science, history, adventure, rebellion and, increasingly, the weird and wonderful ways of the human mind. One of the things I love about reading other writers’ work is that it’s an opportunity to observe another mind in motion. I used to worry a lot about what my own writing reveals about me, but I’ve been changed so much by the process that my insides are now merged with the ‘outside’ and there isn’t any way to disentangle me from not-me. 

Of the creative process, Jung said, ‘It is not Goethe who creates Faust, but Faust that creates Goethe.’ It’s a funny thing to be resculpted by the novel you believe you’re in charge of, and probably there’s something deeper in Jung’s choice of Faust as his example. I didn’t know any of this when I began teaching myself to write in 2006. I really just had an urge to make and I thought fiction was just about representing the world in some way. Realism has its uses, but I don’t confine myself to whatever we suppose literary realism to be. In the last couple of years, I’ve also found myself unexpectedly departing from scientific realism, or at least the ‘naive' kind that would rather not consider how scientific inquiry, being a highly specialised form of human thinking, is necessarily mediated by human minds. 

I also run creative writing workshops, and occasionally teach and coach, specialising in de-mystifying the creative process (while retaining plenty of depth, subtlety and possibility) and imparting a sense of the whole. I studied English Literature and Philosophy at The University of Leeds, then later 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.

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, triathlon, origami and other crafts. I now climb, and practice ashtanga yoga, another method of observing the mind in motion. With my nervous system seemingly retuned by the yoga, I wonder what we might be missing in the West by having no tradition of an engaged practical philosophy that’s designed to meet the challenges of day-to-day living.

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, assisted by the global precariousness which so exactly matched my inner reality as mediated by the writing process that I spent six months dizzy with elation that I wasn’t mad, or at least no madder than the rest of the world. Then in 2024, I found myself in the transformative place of the novel’s ending, the writing of which preceded my personal development by four years.