This is Reasons to Remain. It’s effectively me, but proofread. It’s where I fill in the forms of my life and draw cartoons in the margins.

My name’s Aran Ward Sell. I’m a writer. I’m a University of Edinburgh PhD researcher, and alumnus (undergraduate and postgraduate). I have been called disgustingly sanguine. I climb trees when available, play the guitar and do occasional performance poetry. I worked for a while at Leith Library, which meant drawing puffins with the under-10s, helping the elderly print off emails, and occasionally stacking books. Then I lived in London, where there are foxes and the trains go under the soil. Now I live in Edinburgh again. It keeps calling me back.

This blog began as a travel journal when I spent a year in Queensland; since then it’s become a repository of fiction and verse, a space for occasional cultural reviews and political opinions, and a hub to tie together strands of Aran which have spiderwebbed across the internet. ‘Reasons to Remain’ was the title of a poem I wrote a long time ago, which I turned into a URL without even pausing to think that everyone would read it as ‘Reason Store Main’. The name of this website has nothing to do with Brexit.

-A.

I am nothing if not accessible. Access me via comments here, or via:

• Email: aranws [little-funny-at-symbol] gmail [full-stop] com
• Twitter: @AranWS
• YouTube: YouTube.com/AranWS
• Instagram: Instagram.com/aran.ws

I will reply with such ebullience that you’ll wish you hadn’t bothered.