As the summer season begins to emerge at last, I have been thinking of Evelyn’s plays and of theatre groups which have been preparing for festivals and pre-summer performances. It was always a massive relief when the after-show parties could take place and the nerves and uncertainties experienced over the previous weeks and months immediately evaporated without anyone even noticing!

I am delighted to share with you that I presented a talk at the Paisley Central Library on 27th March 2024. This was a soft-launch to celebrate the reissue of Evelyn’s 2003 publication of the Mill Memories, which is a collection of photographs and interviews of over 40 people who actually worked in the mills.

With great delight we can now announce that thirteen of Evelyn’s books have recently been uploaded to the Kindle Unlimited library.

In June 2023 I was asked to give a talk at Abbey Books in Paisley, as part of a four-day long Book Fest. The topic was, ‘The Resurrection of the Works of Evelyn Hood’, and I realised I had my work cut out for me as I am not an author myself, and giving a presentation in a bookshop to people who are much more literature-savvy than me was outside the realm of anything I had done before.

In the spirit of the Christmas season, ‘Listen with Godfather’ reflects on the pantomime story of Snow White, and is best read with an understanding of the classic radio broadcast, ‘Listen With Mother’; reading it and hearing it with a ‘Scottish accent in New York’ will bring a good sense of fun.

Once again Evelyn gave us her kind permission to post one of her unpublished poems here on her website. We hope you enjoy it as much as we did when we uploaded it.

‘Do you actually think of the characters in your books as real people?’ a reader once asked me. Of course I do. If the people who populate my books aren’t real to me, how can they possibly be real to anyone else? Who wants to read about cardboard characters with no personality at all?

Who would have thought that a complex concept such as reincarnation could be considered alongside such a mundane object as a hat? That is how Evelyn’s monologue, ‘Interview With A Hat’ starts; no straight forward opening statement here, but simply ‘Of course I believe in reincarnation, all hats do…..’

Over the last two years, during various lockdowns, we had a chance to re-organise Evelyn’s files and during that exercise we re-discovered large amounts of unpublished short stories, poems, pantomimes and plays. Evelyn kindly allowed us to publish these early works, mainly written on a typewriter, on her website.

I count myself fortunate to have had a mother who loved telling stories, some from books, others from her own imagination. Because of her, I couldn’t wait to learn to read for myself.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you all.

In this blog I am sharing a significant piece of work from Evelyn documenting the evolving story of Paisley’s further education campus now known as the University of West Scotland.

When I write I lose myself in my writing. I own the whole world. I am flying, I am free and I am in charge.

I have the power within me to travel wherever I want – to be whoever I want.

The year 2022 will be a significant year for the town of Paisley as its museum re-opens following an extensive refurbishment. There will be a wave of excitement as the eyes of the world can look at this latest development for the town. Some years ago there was a similar sense of excitement with the Paisley Thread Mill Museum and an interest in bringing to light the unique experiences of Paisley’s extensive thread mill and weaving industry. Evelyn Hood played a significant role in this renewed interest in the thread mills.

The previous blog shared my memories of writing the first Hood & Hood musical, ‘Pop! Go the Reindeer’. It was not Evelyn’s first musical as she had written ‘High-Rise Halloween’, but it was our first collaboration and it had come together so quickly and easily that it was easy to say ‘yes’ when we were asked to write another