Helen Russell – Peter Kenny: a writer's notebook

About ‘The Centaur’, an opera written with Helen Russell

Peter Kenny

October 15, 2016

I’ve not talked much about the work I am doing with Helen Russell. We met in December 2014. She contacted me after hearing the CD called Clameur I had done with Matthew Pollard, and she needed a librettist for new a project based on a short story by José Saramago called The Centaur. Here is a link to…

a writer’s life, Music

Helen Russell, Jose Saramago, The Centaur

A one-way ticket to Palookaville and other random observations

Peter Kenny

June 13, 2015

There are all kinds of romantic ideas about how you should behave as an artist. But starving in a garret, which I have done in the past, was not for me. Just recently, pockets full of air after moving house, I had a sequence of six freelance assignments being cancelled one after another – all for legitimate and…

Autobiographical, Music, Real life

AnotherSun, Helen Russell, Opera, poetry, Social Media, worry

A stocktake

Peter Kenny

February 5, 2015

Thanks to hefting a sack of wet sand just before New Year, January was a trapped nerve. Weeks of sleepless and painful nights left me groggy. In one fanboy moment I tweeted (it seemed right) Pascale Petit about her fabulous poem Ortolan about her father eating a songbird. She told me that it was written after a sleepless night in Paris. I…

Music, Poetry, Telltale Press

Clameur, Helen Russell, Ink sweat and tears, Jose Saramago, Robin Houghton, Skelton Yawngrave, Telltale Press