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I first met Professor Henrietta Bowden-Jones OBE at the Nightingale Psychiatric Hospital, where I came to see her as a patient. 

As you will hear in this conversation, I had previously seen her website, https://henriettabowdenjones.com/media/, and I had listened to her on Private Passions, BBC Radio 3.

I'm not aware of any other podcast in which somebody interviews his own psychiatrist - mind you, I haven't actually looked very hard. The main point to make is: I think this is a very interesting conversation, and I hope you find it engaging / useful / interesting. If you do, feel free to share it. Thank you.

You can follow Professor Bowden-Jones on Twitter. 

In this mini-series, I talk about how much I have gained by showing my work in progress.

Part 2 of 5. You should listen to part 1 first, if you haven't already.

In this episode, James Mayhew talks about the process of finding his own style as a young man - initially, by copying others. If you're a regular listener, you'll know this is a regular theme: there's a real liberation in setting constraints for your artistic practice. 

In this particular case, the practice is visual art, but what James describes is relevant to any other kind of creative work, including writing.

I first came across James's art as a parent, reading picture books before bedtime. We loved the Katie books. The first of these was published in 1989, soon after James left art school. Here's what you need to know: in the Katie books, James takes his main character into the world of other artists - literally stepping into their famous paintings to meet the people pictured there. 

As it happens, I have recently been doing a very slightly similar thing, and posting my drawings on Instagram (here). I've learned a lot from copying the great masters, and after I had done a few I thought of James, drawing the Katie books, and just knew I had to ask him about it. I'm so pleased he said yes.

Also in this episode, we talk about how (for a decade before the pandemic) James did live drawing sessions, collaborating with orchestras to convey the world of particular pieces of music. And we hear how he adapted that work, with a pair of musicians, to work online. 

James Mayhew's website: https://www.jamesmayhew.co.uk/

Plus: James explains how he uses Patreon to enable the people who like his work to do something concrete to support it.(https://www.patreon.com/ABrushWithMusic)

Why would a writer put themselves into the background? Wendy Jones has written many kinds of books - fiction, and for children - but in this episode we focus on how and why she likes to tell people's stories in their own words. She did this in her biography of Grayson Perry, and in The Sex Lives Of English Women.  In this conversation, we talk about what drew her to use this technique, and how she actually goes about it - the hard work, like the figure of the writer, can sometimes seem invisible. We also talk about Studs Terkel, the American radio broadcaster and pioneer of oral history, who inspired Wendy. 

You can buy Wendy's books on Amazon, and follow Wendy on Twitter.