Alison Wells Author

I have been a big fan of neuroscientist Rick Hanson’s practice advice for “changing the brain for the better”, he draws on the spiritual wisdom of Buddhism, the practice of mindful meditation and evidence based neuroscience to suggests many ways that we can ‘take in the good’ and train ourselves to circumvent our innate negativity bias. His recent book Hardwiring Happiness is full of fantastic advice on how to boost our feelings of ‘safety, satisfaction and connection.’ I hope to shortly develop a course on writing and creative resilience that draws on some of these techniques as well as other wisdom in the area of psychology and motivation to help us keep hold of why we strive to create and help us remember and really take in our achievements, large and small to feed us into the future.

So today, I would like to stop for a moment in a relentlessly busy time of highs, lows and constant on-the-go to enjoy the fantastic feeling of having been longlisted in the An Post Writing.ie Short Story of the Year Longlist with a fantastic group of talented Irish writers. Once again, through time constraints and focus on work and study have isolated me a little bit from my writing and so it comes as a big surprise to be included on this fantastic longlist. A moment to truly savour.