BACKGROUND

Writing for me began in earnest a long way back, when the editor of a tiny newspaper in a remote, but extraordinarily beautiful region of Australia, asked me to contribute a weekly column. The task didn't pay anything and it often kept me awake late into the night, on the day before the due date ... but I loved it!

There was a lull of a decade or so before I grew into the area of Global Education and began to devise, write and edit, newsletters for general consumption and magazines for schools. This was in the days of the literal form of copy-paste and I recall one time when a posse of kids got high on art glue, while putting together the artwork for a national schools magazine.

Soon after the glue-sniffing incident (by strange coincidence) I began to write poems. The sniffing stopped, but the verses keep coming, until today. I liken poetry to a fine-art version of prose: so much inspiration and emotion compacted into just a few lines. 

Work led me to Asia, back to Europe and then to Africa; joining the dots, as it were, as I tried to add my tiny little bit to an understanding of different perspectives, within and between these regions. This related to social and environmental issues, and in the last decade or so, to the climate crisis.

Covid-19, for all its negatives, has given me one important positive: time alone to pull together the writing already there, whilst adding more and editing the composite whole. My main regret is that I did not make the time to do it sooner.

I hope that you as the reader can enjoy the experience with me.

And if you do feel the urge, please do respond with comments and questions.

Duncan Gregory

So, what’s this WHITTLING our NICHE all about?

Well, let’s just say that it applies to me, to you, to everyone, throughout our lives, from those early cries in the cradle, to our last stuttering steps. That’s why I highlight the term, the concept if you will, because it’s so important to each and every one of us joint inhabitants of planet Earth.

Where does our niche comes from? What is it affected by? And how do we choose to carve and develop it? These are the most personal questions for us all to deal with. And of course, how we do this in a communal sense, alongside others, will have lasting significance for ourselves, our own and other species … and the planet.

Whittling our Niche alludes to the fact that through our lives we choose from a tiny number of people and places. We mostly associate and assimilate within a small circle. At birth, our brand-new world is a clean slate on which we can draw the life we wish to lead, and people we prefer to meet. Though not really; even at that point of entry to the world, we are the child of a mother and father, who inhabit a specific culture. Already we’re confined and codified; occupying our birthright space. Interplays with people and places in our vicinity form the basis of relationships and activities for life. If we had been born into an alternative existence, or chosen another route, then the result would have been quite different.

This website came to life in 2019, just before the dawn of the coronavirus. It seems a world away now, from those days of face masks, rigorous hand-washing, and temperature checks. Back then, I simply wanted a place to store my files safely, without having to depend on The Cloud, or my memory stick.

That early site grew to accommodate about 250 articles, some quite short and designed as columns for a local (Kenyan) newspaper, others a bit meatier aiming at international news sheets, and even more that were much longer, uninhibited by editorial demands and deadlines.

But the site itself was hardly visible, with few connections to anyone, or anything, other than its author. Nevertheless, it surprised me when I saw hits from different parts of the world; Russia for example, when I wrote a piece that included the headline with the words Ukraine and Putin in it. It made me wonder just who was out there watching?

Then much more recently came my first book: WHITTLING our NICHE, From the Tree of Life. The initial text was drawn from many of the articles on the website, then refined, edited and extended to make up the 270-page book, which I am now reservedly proud of, and which I hope to add to in the near future.

Up-coming publications planned for 2026, will be a book of thirteen short stories titled HEAVEN’S ABOVE! plus POETRY IN MOTION, a compendium of poems written over the past 40 years. Both in some ways are connected and related to the first book.

After that, my plan is to attempt a novel. To date, I have baulked at this task, but now, with more experience coming from penning the short stories (some of which are pure fiction) I am gaining confidence to attempt the longer version.

Duncan Gregory May, 2026