Poetry in print

A poem of mine, centred around a historical massacre in York, appears in The North (issue 56), a journal I subscribe to and which is highly regarded in the poetry world. It will be my first poetry print publication. Look for Seeing Bluebells beneath Clifford's Tower, York. (You can see the first few lines of this on my April 25th post)

Writing prose has also continued.  I await with bated breath the result of a submission to Mothers Milk Books, an independent UK press who have already published two great short story collections entitled The Forgotten and the Fantastical.  Quite used to rejections - and see them as a mark of my continuing to write, and write more - I have high hopes of this one, the first time I have tried a modern fairy tale!

Harvesting this summer has not taken up much of my time, the summer being so on and off - the weather that is. Runner beans, gooseberries and young raspberry plants have yielded little.  Only the previously mentioned blackcurrants were undaunted by the late frost. At least this year I've had the pleasure of seeing the ornamentals flourish, giving more colour. Cut flowers are the plan for next season.

Arrivals and Departures - out now!

Uprooted from home, a small boy finds himself on a poignant rail journey in Departing, my story, with twenty-seven others, in a month's worth of fiction, memoir and poetry that can be enjoyed during a 20-30 minute public transport commute.
Don't miss this second issue of commuterlit selections: buy it here
Only £9.13  £7.76

 The Manor House, Ilkley

I don’t know.  This was a starter phrase, a warm-up, for one of Michele Roberts' writing exercises in the workshop I managed to get into, last week at the Ilkley Literature Festival.  Michele describes her style of workshop teaching as ‘bullying’!  But I wasn’t complaining – we all wrote, and wrote, and wrote.  And she left us with plenty of further work to continue at home. That's what I call a really satisfying workshop.

Antony Dunn, the poet in residence for the festival, introduced our over-50s group to some ways of incorporating a life event into poetry.  The workshop was definitely fun as well as productive.  Now the younger end, the 11 or 12-year olds, are working on our events to write their poems, whilst we will get their material to write our poems.  It’s intriguing.

If you didn’t go to the see Carol Ann Duffy perform, along with John Sampson, you missed such a treat.  Carol Ann is a sharp, witty, entertaining poet with a strong feminist element whilst John is an amazingly talented player of all sorts of modern and very old whistle type instruments.  This was the first time I’d seen someone play two whistle instruments at the same time, and not even playing the same notes …

They performed alternately, and then John played Danny Boy with Carol Ann reading a poem to match the haunting melody.  Perfect.  For an hour and a quarter I was thoroughly absorbed and the large audience in the Kings Hall all seemed equally so.  Apart from the three people on my row who left before the beginning of the performance – quick to judge or what?  They can’t have been at the ‘wrong’ show as they would have had to show their tickets to get in …

Irish Rural Wedding Breakdown

IRISH RURAL WEDDING BREAKDOWN

Stopped by the telegraph,

shocked at hanging about,

hoists the silver-blue skirt.

White shirt mooches about.

Black suits you. Gardai’s never here

when you need them. I always smoke Carroll’s.

By God.

Vegetable love meanwhile wrenches a sigh

at the edge

of the road.

Are you sure then Declan,

- no petrol?

This is a draft of the poem I have sent off to Ian Parks for his comments. And I am very aware that it needs something else doing with it .... not sure what yet.

Meanwhile I sent off a story to the Calderdale libraries competition so I will have to wait and see whether that gets anywhere. After a great deal of re-thinking and re-drafting over a period of weeks I ended up being pretty pleased with it - at last I am able to get into the swing of writing. Poetry seems to be making more of a mark on my writing - I've just sent off an equally short one to the MsLexia Women's Poetry competition, inspired by notices seen on a train journey, though the collected words and phrases were put to a different purpose. In any case it's a fun thing to do: collect words and phrases from any specific activity, it could be an occupational jargon for instance, and use them for poetry.

My next deadline is the Grey Hen Press poetry competition - for women over 60. And, yes, I do fit the category!

Last, but most important at the moment, I'm waiting to hear if the Lancaster University online writing course will be running - it starts in a few days and I'm really looking forward to getting my teeth into regular writing, and critiquing.