Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

On the slow architecture of trust, and the grace of staying kind.

Robert Ford @robertmford.bsky.social · 3d

Sometimes rebuilding doesn’t look like reconciliation — it looks like kindness, returned and sustained.

What We Build in Silence — on trust, presence, and the quiet grace that follows forgiveness.

www.brittleviews.com/p/what-we-bu...

#writing #trust #forgiveness #relationships #essays

What We Build in Silence

A tin, a chair, and the quiet art of taking up space.

Robert Ford @robertmford.bsky.social · 6d

A Fortnum & Mason’s tin, a new face at the WI, and a silence that says more than it should.

Half-Measures — a Maggie B. story about charm, control, and what’s left unspoken.

www.brittleviews.com/p/half-measu...

#MaggieB #ShortStory #QuietFiction #BritishFiction #WryComedy #LiteraryFiction

Half-Measures

Between Stillness and Fire

Robert Ford @robertmford.bsky.social · 7d

What holds us isn’t always strength—it’s the quiet balance between stillness and fire.
New on Brittle Views: an essay about friendship, family, and the small acts of endurance that keep the light moving forward.

www.brittleviews.com/p/between-st...

#essays #writing #reflection #presence #stillness

Light, memory, and the quiet architectures of defiance (Sep 28 – Oct 11, 2025)

The Architecture of Safety

Robert Ford @robertmford.bsky.social · 8d

Avoidance isn’t distance.
It’s defense — what love looks like when it’s been singed too many times.

My latest essay, The Architecture of Safety, is about learning to live inside our defenses differently.

www.brittleviews.com/p/the-archit...

#Essays #Healing #Vulnerability #Boundaries

What looks like distance is often defense.

When I wrote The Light That Stays, I was thinking about the friendships that hold — the ones that steady us through change and silence.

Robert Ford @robertmford.bsky.social · 9d

Friendship moves through us — in gestures, laughter, and the stillness that asks for nothing.

The Light Between Us is about love as continuation — what we carry forward, and what carries us.

www.brittleviews.com/p/the-light-...

🕯 Read & share if it speaks to you.
#Friendship #Essays #BrittleViews

The Light Between Us

Chapter Twenty-One – Holding On

Robert Ford @robertmford.bsky.social · 10d

A new chapter of Holding On is out.

Emma’s sketchbook becomes a bridge—between grief and grace, silence and story.

It’s about how love endures through the act of making.

shorturl.at/WI3Nz

#HoldingOn #QuietFiction #FamilyStories #LiteraryFiction

Read, reflect, and share if it lingers.

A clipping, a crease, and the kind of record that forgets what matters most.

Robert Ford @robertmford.bsky.social · 12d

Even in Lower Tissington, the records don’t tell the whole story.
Counted, Not Named — a new Maggie B. Casefile about what gets tallied, and what’s left unsaid.

www.brittleviews.com/p/counted-no...

#BrittleViews #MaggieB #QuietFiction #BritishFiction #ShortStory

Counted, Not Named

Chapter Twenty – Holding On

Robert Ford @robertmford.bsky.social · 16d

In this latest chapter, Emma sketches as Ralph recalls. Washing lines, laughter, a red peg swinging in sunlight. A beetle becomes a prince on a quest.

It’s a chapter about how memory is carried forward — in stories retold, in drawings remade, in quiet bonds between generations.

shorturl.at/ZjuMI

A Maggie B. Casefile - Revisite

Robert Ford @robertmford.bsky.social · 20d

She wasn’t always “Maggie B.” Some stories refuse to be numbered, some moments refuse to be forgotten. 🍊
The new Casefile is live: This One Doesn’t Count.
Come for the village oddities. Stay for what lingers.

#MaggieB #ShortStory #LiteraryFiction #EnglishVillageLife

shorturl.at/70oIt

This One Doesn’t Count

Robert Ford @robertmford.bsky.social · 21d

Defiance is lived in bodies: fire on the tongue, breath pulled from smoke, knees refusing the ground. When they come to erase us, let them meet a wall of us, together, unbroken.

www.brittleviews.com/p/unbroken

Unbroken

Not a whisper.

Chapter Nineteen – Holding On

Robert Ford @robertmford.bsky.social · 25d

In this week's Holding On, a long-kept letter is finally opened. Lily’s voice returns—warm, wry, unflinching—her words reverberating.

It’s about legacies spoken aloud: silence, guilt, forgiveness, and the fragile hope of repair.

shorturl.at/2fgHC

#FamilyStories #LiteraryFiction #Caregiving

Robert Ford @robertmford.bsky.social · 27d

It’s Monday. Another Maggie B. Casefile.
Step into Lower Tissington — where a Women’s Institute coach trip to York brings medals, pigeons, and a recognition Maggie nearly allows.

www.brittleviews.com/p/a-respecta...

#MaggieB #Casefiles #Fiction #VillageLife #LiteraryFiction

A Respectable Distance

A Maggie B. Casefile

Defiance, presence, and stories that stay — September 14th - 20th, 2025

Robert Ford @robertmford.bsky.social · 28d

This week:
– Presence as a framework for living aligned.
– Rachel seeing her brother differently in Holding On.
– Bread rolls, grease, and silence in All The Way In.
– Maggie B. leaving just enough unsaid.

What we carry forward isn’t just memory—it’s how presence reshapes us.

shorturl.at/Bsob6

What We Carry Forward

Navigating What Was, What Is, and What’s Next

Robert Ford @robertmford.bsky.social · 29d

Flashback Friday isn’t only about the past. Memory also lives in the present, shaping how we step into what’s next.

In Currents and Crossings, I write about retirement, reinvention, and the streams that give life meaning — with presence as the thread that ties it all together.

shorturl.at/cVJV6

Currents and Crossings

Chapter Eighteen – Holding On

Robert Ford @robertmford.bsky.social · Sep 19

New chapter of Holding On is out.

It’s about memory pressed into a journal, about siblings fumbling toward presence, about how showing up — even imperfectly — can still be enough.

www.brittleviews.com/p/chapter-ei...

#LiteraryFiction #QuietFiction #Grief #Family

We scrubbed in silence, four teenagers bent over pie-shaped halos that refused to blend in.

Robert Ford @robertmford.bsky.social · Sep 18

A short delay on the next Holding On chapter — it’ll be here tomorrow. For today, I’m sharing a piece from my misspent youth: exuberance, recklessness, and bread rolls in flight.

www.brittleviews.com/p/all-the-wa...

#brittleviews #needledrops #misspentyouth

All The Way In

Robert Ford @robertmford.bsky.social · Sep 15

Mavis Holt brought lemon curd, but left with something else—an outline shaped by silence.

The newest Maggie B. Casefile: Just Enough.

Come for the curd. Stay for the withheld stories.

www.brittleviews.com/p/just-enough

#TheMaggieBCasefiles #BrittleViews #SmallStoriesBigEchoes

Just Enough

A Maggie B. Casefile

Mourning in the Age of Outrage — September 7th - 13th, 2025

Robert Ford @robertmford.bsky.social · Sep 14

A week of noise and silence: essays on Charlie Kirk’s murder, the theft of mourning, and a father’s courage. Balanced by Maggie B.’s quiet defiance and Emma’s letter to Grandad in Holding On.

Stories stitched from memory, mischief, and meaning.

shorturl.at/P9YnF

#GriefAndMemory #PersonalEssays

What Survives the Noise

Flashback Fridays are where I look back at something I once wrote and hold it up to the light of now.

Robert Ford @robertmford.bsky.social · Sep 12

31 years ago I wrote: “Words are so empty. Just noise.”
This week proved otherwise. Words are never empty—they’re forged into slogans, sharpened into wounds, choreographed as grief.

Flashback Friday: Who owns grief, and who abuses it?

shorturl.at/2C93c

#Defiance #FlashbackFriday #WeaponizedGrief

Who Owns Grief?

The Weaponization of Grief

Robert Ford @robertmford.bsky.social · Sep 11

Couldn’t agree more. This is exactly the tension I wrote about—how tragedy gets turned into spectacle, and grief into a weapon.

www.brittleviews.com/p/the-weapon...

The Weaponization of Grief

Robert Ford @robertmford.bsky.social · Sep 11

A single gunshot became a narrative war overnight.
I wrote about Charlie Kirk’s assassination—not to justify or condemn him, but to ask what happens to us when grief is sharpened into a blade.

www.brittleviews.com/p/the-weapon...

Read & share if it resonates.
#BrittleViews #Essays #Grief #Politics

Chapter Seventeen – Holding On [Narrated]

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Robert Ford @robertmford.bsky.social · Sep 10

Emma takes the story in her hands.
A blank page. A letter to her grandad. Silence turning into words.

Chapter 17 of Holding On is here.

shorturl.at/OuNX9

Share if you know the weight of memory—and the relief of setting it down.

#QuietFiction #Family #Grief #LiteraryFiction

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Robert Ford @robertmford.bsky.social · Sep 8

It began with a trifle and a dare.
It ended with soup, a fig bar, and silence that carried more than words.

The new Maggie B. casefile, Set for Two, is up. Quiet grief, quiet respect.

www.brittleviews.com/p/set-for-two

#MaggieB #ShortStory #LiteraryFiction #VillageLife

Set for Two

A Maggie B. Casefile

Every Friday, I return to an earlier piece of writing in a series I call Flashback Fridays. Not reprints, but re-entries — the past offers a fragment, and I follow it to see what else it might hold.

Robert Ford @robertmford.bsky.social · Sep 5

Every Friday I re-enter an earlier piece of writing. Not repeats, but reimaginings. This one began with a 2021 poem called No More Talk and became a story of release and resilience.

www.brittleviews.com/p/what-i-cho...

#FlashbackFriday #BrittleViews #ShortStory #Memory

What I Choose to Keep