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The more you look at this landscape ... the more you can feel it, looking back at you.

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DEBORAH CURTIS WRITER

Writer, theatre director and author based in East Anglia

As a writer, theatre maker, film-maker and story maker, I take my inspiration from the landscape, people and places of the Fens.
This region inspires a great deal of my work.

Flat, brooding under vast skies, with horizons stretching into infinity, the place has its own unique atmosphere.
This is a harsh and haunted place. Poverty has walked hand-in-hand with the people here since time began.

Perhaps that's why Fen folk clung to the old ways for so long.
Putting their faith in folk magic, home remedies, and of course, the white blooming opium poppy.

Fen folk are still a race apart. Proud, independent, and famously pig-headed!

They don't call them 'Fen Tigers' for nothing. But make a friend of one of them, and you'll have a friend for life.

The lilting, sing-song Fen accent is becoming rarer these days.
A reminder of  the time when this part of England was ruled by the Viking Danes.
And the old dialect words are becoming rarer, too. Diluted by the influence of TV and the ever-widening spread of Estuarine English.
You can still hear traces of it now though, in goo, froze, frit,  bor, and hum.

And the Danes have left their mark in place names such as Toft.

In spite of all the changes to this region I still find the people and places an endless source of inspiration.