unfinishing

Emily Anderson

unfinishing celebrates projects that are incomplete, abandoned, works in progress, or not public. Guests on unfinishing rediscover and find the value in secret and incomplete schemes. Presented by Emily Anderson. Website: unfinishing.co.uk Instagram: @unfinishingpod Email: emily@unfinishing.co.uk Twitter: @TrueBagglerag

  1. 11 HR AGO

    with Fuschia Sirois. Procrastination and what to do about it.

    unfinishing is the podcast about projects that are incomplete, abandoned, works-in-progress or not public. It’s presented by Emily Anderson and the artwork is by Graham Oakes. If you have an incomplete or private project you’d like to talk about, please contact us via our website: https://unfinishing.co.uk/. My guest in this episode is Fuschia Sirois, a Professor in Social and Health Psychology at Durham University, and a former Canada Research Chair in Health and Well-being.  For over twenty years, Professor Sirois has researched the causes and consequences of procrastination, so she’s the perfect person to speak to about things not getting finished. We talk about what procrastination is, why we do it, and how we can help ourselves to overcome it. Fuschia gives some brilliant insights into why procrastination is bad for your health, and how it's linked to our emotions. Fuschia’s advice on what to do when you find yourself procrastinating are at the end of the episode, but she's also developed a tool to help stop procrastination. It's called TEMPO and you can find out more via the link below. Links of interest Fuschia’s website: https://fuschiasirois.com/2024/11/12/do-you-or-someone-you-know-struggle-with-procrastination/ Sign up for the TEMPO tool: https://durhamuniversity.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_eJzXFb6SBwNPI46  If you liked this episode you can: 1. Give it a rating or a review: On Apple: tap on the podcast thumbnail (the logo), and scroll down to below the episodes until you find the ratings and reviews section. On Spotify: click on the three dots below the podcast art and title (next to settings), and select ‘Rate show’. 2. Check out the website and sign up to the unfinishing newsletter: https://unfinishing.co.uk/contact This is the best way to stay up to date! 3. Tag us in your social media posts: Instagram: @unfinishingpod Bluesky: @unfinishing.bsky.social Twitter: @TrueBagglerag

    47 min

  2. 18/09/2025

    with Micah Clasper-Torch. Sugar coats and punch needles.

    Micah is an artist, designer, and teacher who’s an expert in punch needle rug hooking - a type of textile craft that can be used not only to create rugs and cushions, but also fashion and art. Micah’s unfinished projects include a stalled attempt to create a piece of punch needle art every day for a hundred days, and several ideas for punch needle fashion that she’s never quite got round to starting.  We talk about the struggles that have stopped her progressing that work, as well as the complexities of trying to navigate the worlds of art, fashion, craft, and business all at the same time. If that weren’t enough, Micah has also just released her first book, Punch Needle Fashion, which explains how to make different pieces of wearable art. About Micah Micah Clasper-Torch is a Los Angeles-based artist, designer, and educator helping to lead the modern revival of punch needle rug hooking. With a background in fashion design from The Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City and the Politecnico di Milano in Italy, Micah blends fine art, heritage craft, and wearable design to create one-of-a-kind textile pieces that range from coats and accessories to wall hangings and soft sculpture. In 2019 Micah launched Punch Needle World, an online community, shop and educational platform dedicated to uplifting the craft and its history, and making high quality supplies and training accessible around the world. Her debut book, Punch Needle Fashion, came out in June 2025 from Quadrille –– it brings punch needle into the world of contemporary fashion through 15 original projects and a beautifully photographed exploration of the medium. Links of interest Punch Needle Fashion - https://www.amazon.com/Punch-Needle-Fashion-Accessories-Wearables/dp/1837832218 Micah’s website - www.micahclasper-torch.com Micah’s blog, including information on how to get started in punch needle art - Blog – Punch Needle World Micah’s Instagram - @claspertorch & @punchneedle.world

    38 min

  3. 15/07/2025

    with Tommy Mackay. An encyclopaedic mish-mash reflecting the absurdity of modern times.

    unfinishing is the podcast about projects that are incomplete, abandoned, works-in-progress or not public. It’s presented by Emily Anderson and the artwork is by Graham Oakes. If you have an incomplete or private project you’d like to talk about, please contact us via our website: https://unfinishing.co.uk/. My guest in this episode is Tommy Mackay. Tommy is a musician, a comedian, a punk, a satirist, a mature student, a reader of James Joyce, and a writer. He’s the creator of The Daily Reckless, a long-running website known as ‘the paper that’s sick of the news’ – which is jam packed with comic songs. Tommy’s unfinished project is a book called 'The Reckless History Of The 21st Century.' It’s part a history, part memoir, part experimental account of the Daily Reckless.... and of the 21st century. He describes it as ‘an encyclopaedic mish mash reflecting the absurdity of modern times’. Tommy used to play in punk bands in the 70s and 80s, but then resurrected his career to become a popular entertainer on the Scottish comedy circuit. As The Sensational Alex Salmond Gastric Band he has played in comedy clubs across the UK. He was once a regular on SW1 radio in London, as well as appearing in several Edinburgh Fringe shows, including Tartan Special, Best of Scottish Comedian Of The Year and Mark Watson’s ‘The Hotel’. He has also contributed regularly to the Caledonian Mercury and the BBC Comedy Unit’s Rough Cuts. Collaborations include his work with Armando Iannucci, Adam & Joe and journalist Robert McNeil, whose reviews of Scottish MSPs Tommy shaped into a collection of songs about our political leaders (mishaps.htm). He was also half of the short-lived phenomenon that was Whyte & Mackay and the public art agitpoppers The Tam Tam Club. Links of interest Rabelais: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Francois-Rabelais Armando Iannucci: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0406334/ Stuart Lee: STEWART LEE vs THE MAN-WULF : Stewart Lee - 41st Best Standup Ever! Hugh MacDiarmid: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/hugh-macdiarmid P.L. Travers: https://www.britannica.com/biography/P-L-Travers Wake podcast: WAKE: Cold Reading Finnegans Wake | Podcast on Spotify If you liked this episode you can: 1. Give it a rating or a review: On Apple: tap on the podcast thumbnail (the logo), and scroll down to below the episodes until you find the ratings and reviews section. On Spotify: click on the three dots below the podcast art and title (next to settings), and select ‘Rate show’. 2. Check out the website and sign up to the unfinishing newsletter: https://unfinishing.co.uk/contact 3. Text it to a friend with this link: with Tommy Mackay. Satire, experiment, and Noel Gallagher. — unfinishing 4. Tag us in your social media posts: Instagram: @unfinishingpod Bluesky: unfinishing (@unfinishing.bsky.social) — Bluesky Twitter: @TrueBagglerag

    41 min

  4. 22/04/2025

    with Teresa Stenson. 90s teenage diaries (ft. Take That).

    unfinishing is the podcast about projects that are incomplete,abandoned, works-in-progress or not public. It’s presented by Emily Anderson. You can find more episodes and get in touch with us here: https://unfinishing.co.uk/. My guest in this episode is Teresa Stenson, a writer and zine-maker based in York. She’s the creator of My 90s Teenage Diaries, an online project in which she revisits her old diaries and shares extracts alongside present-day thoughts and reflections. She’s also a published short story writer, with work placed in several literary prizes and anthologies, including the Guardian’s Summer Reads contest. My 90s Teenage diaries is a work-in-progress, and in this interview with Teresa we talk about the emotional and practical challenges of keeping it going. Teresa also shares two diary extracts during our interview. One is a letter that her teenage-self wrote to her future husband, and the second is a list of flirting tips. Towards the end of this episode, Teresa tells me about her day job as a freelance ghost writer and editor, helping her clients all over the world to tell their own stories. We also talk about the comedy persona Teresa created sometime in the mid noughties – an alter ego called Bella De La Rocher – who by coincidence has published an unfinished novel. Teresa continues, sporadically, to share Bella’s creative works and her inner world online, though sometimes that's just photos of potatoes.   Links of interest More unfinishing episodes: https://unfinishing.co.uk/. My 90s Teenage Diaries: https://teenagediaries.substack.com/ Teresa’s zines are here: https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/TeresaWrites?ref=profile_header Teresa’s Insta: @Teresa.Stenson Most of a Novel by Bella De La Rocher: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Most-Novel-Bella-Rocher-ebook/dp/B07XLP7RB6?ref_=ast_author_dp Bella’s insta: @BellaDeLaRocher   If you liked this episode you can: 1.    Give it a rating or a review: On Apple: tap on the podcast thumbnail(the logo), and scroll down to below the episodes until you find the ratings and reviews section. On Spotify: click on the three dots below the podcast art and title (next to settings), and select ‘Rate show’. 2.    Check out the website and sign up to the unfinishing newsletter: https://unfinishing.co.uk/contact 3.    Share it with a friend! 4.    Tag us in your social media posts! Instagram: @unfinishingpod Bluesky: @unfinishing.bsky.social Twitter: @TrueBagglerag

    42 min

  5. 05/02/2025

    with Michael Shallcross. Inscribing Pandemonium.

    unfinishing is the podcast about projects that are incomplete, abandoned, works-in-progress or not public. It’s presented by Emily Anderson and the artwork is by Graham Oakes. If you have an incomplete or private project you’d like to talk about, please contact us via our website: https://unfinishing.co.uk/.  My guest in this episode is Dr Michael Shallcross, who is a writer based in York, UK. Michael's unfinished project is called Inscribing Pandemonium. Inscribing Pandemonium is about why authors introduce devils or devil-like characters into their writing, and what happens when they do. Michael focusses on writers who try to use the devil to help convey a particular angle on social and political change - only to find that the devil isn’t always that easy to control. Originally, Inscribing Pandemonium was going to be a traditional academic book, but it became clear that a book just wasn’t going to contain the subject. Instead, Michael left the book unfinished, and he’s now exploring a far more expansive, accessible, and entertaining online format for his work. Michael has a PhD in English Studies from Durham University, and his first book, Rethinking G.K. Chesterton and Literary Modernism: Parody, Performance, and Popular Culture, was published by Routledge in 2017. Michael can be contacted via ⁠⁠⁠Bluesky⁠⁠⁠. If you liked this episode you can: 1. Give it a rating or a review:  On Apple: tap on the podcast thumbnail (the logo), and scroll down to below the episodes until you find the ratings and reviews section. On Spotify: click on the three dots below the podcast art and title (next to settings), and select ‘Rate show’. 2. Check out the website and sign up to the unfinishing newsletter: https://unfinishing.co.uk/contact  3. Text it to a friend with this link: https://unfinishing.co.uk/episodes 4. Tag us in your social media posts!  Instagram: @unfinishingpod Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/unfinishing.bsky.social Twitter: @TrueBagglerag Links of interest About Inscribing Pandemonium: ⁠https://inscribingpandemonium.wordpress.com/the-point/⁠   G.K. Chesterton: https://www.chesterton.org/who-is-this-guy/ Butler Act: ⁠⁠⁠https://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/transformingsociety/livinglearning/school/overview/educationact1944/⁠⁠⁠  Kingsley Amis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingsley_Amis Lucky Jim: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucky_Jim Evelyn Waugh: https://evelynwaughsociety.org/about-evelyn-waugh/ J.G. Ballard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._G._Ballard

    33 min

  6. 30/12/2024

    with Kenton Rogers. Treeconomics and the treescapes of the future.

    unfinishing is the podcast about projects that are incomplete, abandoned, or not public. It’s presented by Emily Anderson and the artwork is by Graham Oakes. If you have an incomplete or private project you’d like to talk about, please contact us via our website: https://unfinishing.co.uk/. This episode features Kenton Rogers, the director and co founder of Treeconomics. Treeconomics is an organisation that uses the best available scientific techniques to understand and improve how trees enrich our urban and rural spaces. Kenton talks about some of the projects that the team at Treeconomics has completed, and explains why working with trees is always an ongoing, unfinishing endeavour. Kenton is a Chartered Urban Forester and Environmentalist. He’s worked on a range of commercial, urban and community forestry projects in the UK, Europe and North Africa. Kenton was a Trustee of the International Tree Foundation and is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. He has written for the UK National Ecosystem Assessment and the Springer Handbook of Urban Forests, and co-authored the Haynes Workshop Manual for Trees. ‘Thank the Lord (for Sidmouth  Arboretum)’ was recorded by Kelvin Dent and Tess Bisson, musical director of Sid Vale Folk Choir. Links of interest Treeconomics website and resources: https://treeconomics.co.uk/resources/other-resources/  Birmingham Tree People: https://birminghamtreepeople.org.uk/ Sidmouth Arboretum: https://sidmoutharboretum.org.uk/

    31 min

  7. 17/09/2024

    with Sophia Siddique Harvey. Shirkers, vulnerability, and staying for the credits.

    Sophia Siddique is a film scholar whose area of focus is contemporary Southeast Asian cinemas, film phenomenology, and genre (horror and science-fiction). She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Film at Vassar College. Siddique lives with a lovable feline rascal, Magnus, who is her creative muse! Sophia’s unfinished project is a film called Shirkers, which she created in the early 1990s alongside Sandi Tan and Jasmine Ng. She met Sandi and Jasmine while studying film at Substation, Singapore’s first independent contemporary arts centre. Shirkers is an incomplete film because after shooting was finished the director, Georges Cardona, took the recordings and refused anyone else access to them. The theft meant that Shirkers could never be fully produced and released as a complete feature film. Georges was involved in Shirkers because he taught the film course on which Sophia, Sandi, and Jasmine were enrolled. The footage of Shirkers – but crucially not the sound recordings – was eventually recovered decades later. The recovery took place when, after Georges’ death, his ex-wife found and entrusted the film reels back to Sandi, Jasmine, and Sophia. Sandi Tan tells that story in her excellent 2018 documentary, which is also called Shirkers and is available on Netflix. It contains lots of footage from the original film (which Sophia calls Shirkers 1.0), and features Sophia talking about her experiences of creating it. As Sophia explains in our interview, taking part in the Shirkers documentary (which she refers to as Shirkers 2.0) has allowed her to access whole new ways of thinking about incomplete things, to use exciting experimental forms in her academic work, and to enjoy different, delightful approaches to living creatively. Sophia tells me about the variety of emotions and youthful confidence involved in making Shirkers 1.0; about the vulnerability she experienced when watching Shirkers 2.0; about how her experiences with Georges prepared her for working with difficult people later in her career; about the impact of the Shirkers film on how scholars can think about films that are incomplete or no longer exist; and about the importance of staying for the credits when you go to the cinema. Links of interest: Sophia: https://www.vassar.edu/faculty/soharvey Shirkers: https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/80241061 Incomplete: The Feminist Possibilities of the Unfinished BBC Film, edited by Alix Beeston and Stefan Solomon: https://www.ucpress.edu/books/incomplete/paper Giselle Buchanan: http://www.gisellebuchanan.com/about-1  Allyson Nadia Field, Uplift Cinema: The Emergence of African American Film and the Possibility of Black Modernity: https://www.dukeupress.edu/uplift-cinema unfinishing is the podcast about projects that are incomplete, abandoned, works in progress, or not public. It’s presented by Emily Anderson and the ⁠artwork is by Graham Oakes⁠. If you have an incomplete or private project you’d like to talk about, please email unfinishing.pod@gmail.com, ⁠contact Em on Instagram @unfinishingpod⁠, or on ⁠Twitter @TrueBagglerag⁠.

    45 min

  8. 23/07/2024

    with Robert Hampson. Publishing an unfinished poem (twice).

    unfinishing is the podcast about projects that are incomplete, abandoned, or not public. It’s presented by Emily Anderson and the artwork is by Graham Oakes. If you have an incomplete or private project you’d like to talk about, please email unfinishing.pod@gmail.com, contact Em on Instagram @unfinishingpod, or on Twitter @TrueBagglerag. My guest in this episode is Robert Hampson, Professor Emeritus in English Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London, where he began teaching in 1973. Robert has dedicated a very large chunk of his career to studying Joseph Conrad, the author who’s probably best known for his novel Heart of Darkness (1899). Robert tells me about two of his unfinished work on Conrad. One is a possible further critical monograph on Conrad, and the other is a recent Ukrainian edition of Conrad’s works for which Robert wrote the introduction. Two volumes of this edition were published before the Russian invasion, with the war then interrupting the project. We then go on to talk about Robert’s poetry. Robert began writing a volume in the 1970s called seaport, which was published in unfinished form in 1995. Robert returned to seaport during lockdown and has now written a (very long) version of the section that was originally missing. We talk about – among other things – the challenges of picking up an unfinished work decades after it was begun. Finally, we discuss another lockdown poetry project of Robert’s that is unfinished, called covodes. This series was – again – interrupted by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Robert is also kind enough to give a reading of one of the works in this series. About Robert Robert has been engaged in research on Joseph Conrad since 1971. He has published four critical monographs on Conrad  – Joseph Conrad: Betrayal and Identity (1992), Cross-Cultural Encounters in Conrad’s Malay Fiction (2000), Conrad’s Secrets (2012) and Joseph Conrad Cosmopolitanism and Transnationalism (2023) – as well as a critical biography, Joseph Conrad (2020). He has co-edited a number of volumes of essays on Conrad: Conrad and Theory (1998), Conrad and Language (2016), The European Reception of Joseph Conrad (2022) and Conrad’s Cultural Legacy (2024). He is also the current editor of The Conradian. Robert has edited three Conrad texts for Penguin – Lord Jim (1986), Victory (1989) and Heart of Darkness (1995), and two Conrad texts for Wordsworth – Nostromo (2000) and the Lingard Trilogy (2016). He has been on the Editorial Board of the Cambridge Edition of Conrad’s Works since the 1980s. In addition, he has published numerous essays, articles and chapters in books on Conrad. Robert has published some 15 pamphlets of poetry since 1975 as well as five books of poetry: Assembled Fugitives: Selected Poems, 1973-1998 (2001); seaport (1995, 2008); an explanation of colours (2010); reworked disasters (2012); and covodes 1-19 (2021). The volume reworked disasters was long-listed for the Forward Prize, and selections form the covodes have been translated into Italian and published in Italy. Links of interest Robert Hampson: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Gavin_Hampson William Roscoe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Roscoe William Rothenstein: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Rothenstein Charles Olsen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Olson

    48 min
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unfinishing celebrates projects that are incomplete, abandoned, works in progress, or not public. Guests on unfinishing rediscover and find the value in secret and incomplete schemes. Presented by Emily Anderson. Website: unfinishing.co.uk Instagram: @unfinishingpod Email: emily@unfinishing.co.uk Twitter: @TrueBagglerag

Information

  • Creator
    Emily Anderson
  • Years Active
    2020 - 2026
  • Episodes
    46
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Emily Anderson
  • Show Website
    unfinishing