Character Study

Emma Gannon: Passage Reading — Creative Compass

Character Study

Show Notes

In this passage episode from our guest, Emma reads from her latest book Creative Compass — a story about watching a Bill Cunningham documentary in her early 20s and the creative philosophy it unlocked.

Bill Cunningham, the beloved New York Times street photographer, lived in a rent-controlled room at Carnegie Hall, slept surrounded by filing cabinets, and ripped up a large cheque rather than compromise his freedom. The passage that follows is Emma's meditation on what that means for a creative life: keep your overheads low, consume less, create more.

Freya and Emma then discuss the passage and where it sits in their own creative lives.

WATCH the full episode HERE

Buy Emma Gannon’s Creative Compass, A Year of Nothing and more. And remember you can now pre-order Freya’s novel: A Real Piece of Work.

👤 Follow @emmagannonuk on socials and Substack 💛 Follow @freybromley on Instagram for updates and to ask your questions 📚 Join Freya’s newsletter at freyabromley.substack.com for behind the scenes thoughts 🎙️And hit subscribe wherever you get your podcasts Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

More from Character Study

Aug 6, 2026

Novelist Jem Calder reads from I Want You to Be Happy in this passage episode of Character Study, a scene about a hundred pages in, as his two characters go on early dates and feel each other out across a pub table by the river.

Aug 4, 2026

Novelist Jem Calder joins Freya to talk about I Want You to Be Happy, his debut novel about two people trying to fall in love while everything around them is engineered to distract them. Jem’s writing career started with Sally Rooney emailing him about the first story he’d ever finished and now his debut is on the tote bag of every literary it girl this summer. He tells Freya why he’d rather write a novel than a memoir (he’s a self-described cagey person who doesn’t like giving too much of himself away) and why he thinks of fiction as a gift, something a reader can reach for in their worst moments. They chat about how quickly a good line about phones curdles into cliché, why he keeps thousands of words of notes he’ll almost never use and why writing within the constraints of a genre is a form of respect for the writers who came before. A funny, honest conversation between two writers about connection, cringe and what fiction is for.

Jul 27, 2026

Poet Will Harris reads Speakee Stonehenge, an exclusive sneak peek into the collection of poems he is currently working on, Speakee.

Jul 23, 2026

Poet Will Harris joins Freya to talk about writing a whole collection around a brother he never had. Will, who won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, tells Freya where that idea came from: a hunch that people with siblings remember their childhoods better. They chat about why the most exciting phase of a writer's life is the one before you’ve published anything, how the copious notes he kept travelling across America by bus ended up weighing his writing down as much as helping it and why poets are always arguing that the ‘I’ on the page isn’t them. They also get into the novel about feeding the ducks he abandoned, the white jumper he dreamt about that became an elegy for his grandmother and why a poem doesn’t need to be solved.

Jul 20, 2026

Screenwriter, artist and Murky Book Prize-winning novelist Sufiyaan Salam reads the opening chapters of Wimmy Road Boyz: three young men in a BMW, cruising towards Manchester's Curry Mile at the start of a night that none of them yet know might be their last together.

See all episodes →