Nicki Hastie

Nicki Hastie is a British lesbian writer living in Nottingham, UK. She has an enduring interest in autobiographical story-telling and the ways in which reading/writing can become routes for exploring/building identity. She writes poems for the page and poetic journeys for the web and enjoys collaborating with other writers in online environments. Creative work can be found at her website, Lesbian Essays and Other Writings.

Nicki's research and published work, to date, has primarily focused on women’s health, coming out stories, lesbian fiction and representations of lesbians in popular culture. She has an MA in English Literature from Leicester University. She worked in information management roles within the voluntary sector for a number of years and is currently doing something similar at a local university.

About Nicki Hastie, by Mary Meriam

A poet like me could write for 30 years and never find a reader like Nicki Hastie. But then suddenly, Nicki appeared, with her educated, kind, eloquent responses. Nicki feeds me quotes, like this one:

We have few gifts of importance to give one another: our love and acceptance, our forgiveness, the stories of our lives. Learning to listen to other people's stories may be one of the few things that can help us survive these intolerant times.
(Alan Helms, Young man from the provinces: a gay life before Stonewall, New York: Avon Books, 1995)

and also the quote from Virginia's letter to Vita that inspired my essay, It's All About You: Imagination and Lesbian Nation, which in turn inspired this blog, Woman-Stirred (which Nicki named). All the way from Nottingham to Middle America, Nicki feeds me intense lesbian literary essays. She feeds me with her astonishing insights into my poems, poetry, the poetic process, and lesbian poetics in particular. Then Nicki gives me the pleasant surprise of writing sonnets, inspired by my sonnet-writing. So here we are, two woman-stirred imaginations at work, nourishing each other, as only literary lesbians can.