Between Us: A new Substack by Pat Barker and Anna Barker
Mother and daughter writer duo Pat Barker (The Regeneration Trilogy, The Silence of the Girls) and Anna Barker (Book of Crow) have started a new Substack to share reflections on craft, creativity, story and everyday life. Keep reading for a taste of what’s to come!
Between Us grows out of conversations we’ve been having for years, usually in one of our kitchens, sometimes in the pub, and often without any sense that they were leading anywhere public. They were simply how we talked: about writing, about what shaped us, about why certain sentences worked and others didn’t, about what we were circling but not yet able to say.
We are both writers, working in different forms but asking many of the same questions. Pat Barker, novelist (the Regeneration trilogy, The Silence of the Girls trilogy), has long been concerned with war, trauma, class, and the interior lives of people shaped by history. Anna Barker (also writing as Anna Ralph) is a writer across fiction, poetry, and literary nonfiction, interested in inheritance, silence, and how voice is formed through lived experience. Between us, we’ve spent decades thinking about writing, complaining about writing, reading each other’s work and, occasionally, actually doing it.
Our conversations are honest, sometimes uncomfortable, and deeply invested in questions of voice and truth. We are the person for each other who can say this isn’t working yet and who can also recognise when something fragile is beginning to take shape. We laugh a lot; writing needs that! Talking this way has long been part of how we make sense of what we’re doing.
Lately, we’ve found ourselves having more of these conversations. About craft, yes, but also about what comes before craft: early life, class, absence, fear, reading, work, and the long process of paying attention. More than once, we’ve wondered whether there might be some value in letting others listen in.
This isn’t advice, and it isn’t a how-to. Craft appears here, but indirectly as something that emerges from lived experience. Sometimes we’ll talk about novels, sometimes about reading, sometimes about the past. We’re interested in how voices are made, how stories are withheld or distorted, and how writers learn, slowly, to speak in their own voice.
If you find something useful here, we’re glad. If it gives you company while you’re thinking through your own work, even better. That’s all this is. A door left open.