On Not Writing

I have been in a writing slump for months. When I say slump, what I actually mean is that I simply have not been writing. Call it writer's block, post hand in malaise, whatever - but the truth is that for many writers this kind of writing desert fills us with fear and panic. 

Mine started after I had sent the almost final version of my MS to my publisher - it was fine to begin with - well, not fine but expected. Then in May I fell over and banged the back of my head. I was not knocked out, I didn't break anything (I've had a head scan). But what it has done is left me with a thing called post concussion syndrome - something I knew nothing about before but is, apparently, quite common. There are some physical effects - scalp pain, headaches etc, but by far the worst thing (for me) has been the way that it has effected my critical and creative thinking. I was literally unable to put together new courses or write book reviews. I could critique single poems, but I couldn't hold a whole pamphlet or collection in my head. 

Of course this has had a knock-on effect on my earning ability as I had been planning to write and then run a new email course in September or October and I wasn't able to do that - and as most freelancers can tell you - losing that momentum in the freelance world can cost you customers long term. When I put out feelers on my social media accounts recently about potentially running a new email course, I had not a single enquiry. I can only assume that the lack of activity has affected the algorithms so that my posts are less seen, or that my prolonged absence has meant my potential clients have moved on and found other tutors to fill the hole.

Anyway, this post is not really about that. Luckily my symptoms are (very slowly) improving and during the Christmas break (after a couple of weeks of getting back to morning pages) I have even written one or two (fairly awful) poems. My biggest worry now is that perhaps everything I write post head-injury might be trite rubbish, but I have to trust that slowly and with regular practice that the skills will come back. One of the things I had been looking forward to was The January Writing Hours with Kim Moore and Clare Shaw. What is brilliant is that they operate a pay what you can system for people (like me) who are down on their luck. For anyone unfamiliar with the format - they run a one hour writing workshop each morning in January where they share poems and offer prompts. It's become very popular, with almost 300 participants this year. Today was day five and while not all the prompts have inspired me, some of them really have. And most importantly I am writing, I am moving the pen across the page, and I am finding things to write about.

So what is it I am trying to say here - probably not to despair if you hit a writing slump or setback - even if it goes on for months. Perhaps cut yourself a little slack to begin with - sometimes we just need a break - especially when life is super stressful or busy, or like me something medical gets in the way. Keep reading though, even if it's just the odd poem. I did keep reading when I was able and I am sure this has helped. Eventually a poem might speak to you or inspire you and send you back to the page. And maybe a workshop (Verve Poetry Festival runs a great and affordable online workshop series) or something like the January Writing Hours will help. (I can also offer single lessons which contain links to poems to read and prompts on a variety of different subjects - contact me through my website https://juliawebb.org/ or on social media for details).

If you like what I do please consider buying me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/hqdiufpgsz

The Post Hand-in Slump

The last couple of months have been quietish for me. One reason being I tripped over in August and have been suffering effects of concussion ever since, but secondly because I am in that kind of weird limbo space that comes after you finish writing a poetry collection. It's a similar feeling to what happens on courses when one finishes a project - at art school we used to call it the post-hand in slump. 

And slump is exactly what it feels like. It's a kind of no man's land for a writer. The big final push has been made and the  project has been finished. Most of the edits are done. It's a waiting game then, and there are months (years sometimes) before the book becomes real. And usually at this point there is no real writing to be done - in fact, if I hadn't been here before, I might think I might never write again! I've just looked it up and Google tells me it's post-project depression - and adds that it might be necessary for replenishing our batteries before we plunge ourselves into another project. It makes sense I guess. 

It does feel like a kind of limbo though - that space between finishing a book and it coming out - with some publisher's that gap can be years. I guess I am lucky that my wait is not quite that long! There has been some movement today though - the first endorsement (for the cover) came through, and it was more than I could have hoped for. Also this week artist and designer Natty Peterkin sent some potential cover images over to my publisher and my editor liked the same one I did. These are the little things that help it feel real - that there might really be a book at some point. 

The value of writing workshops and courses

I have heard a lot of criticism levelled at writing workshops and courses and I would like to set out my case in their defence - and not because I run workshops, but because as a writer I find them invaluable.

I have spent the last couple of years (well longer really) working on a collection loosely themed around grief and loss. I was lucky enough to get an Arts Council DYCP grant last year which enabled me to take valuable time away from earning a living to write, to travel to Wiltshire to revisit where my mum is buried and I was also able to participate in two different Arvon at Home weeks.

Sometimes my students and mentees are surprised when I tell them that I feel it is important that I still attend workshops and writing weeks. I think they imagine that by book four you will magically have the formula for a good collection at your fingertips. Not so. The truth is that despite doing research - reading around my subject area (loss/grief themed poetry, fiction and non fiction) and attending a course about grief - I was still left with myself and my own style of writing, my own preoccupations. Although I had written some poems I was happy with I had come to a point where anything new I was writing felt a bit samey. and there were also one or two events that I wanted to write about but hadn't managed too. One of these was my mum's funeral and the other was the trip I had made to where she was buried - when there my friend and I had immediately seen an enormous hare followed by deer - this had felt like some kind of sign, but for the life of me I couldn't write about it. What I needed was for someone to rattle my cage, to jolt me out of my comfortable writing rut.

The bones of the title sequence 'Grey Time', came out a zoom prose poem workshop with Carrie Etter. I started writing it in the workshop and just couldn't stop writing for about an hour afterwards. Sometimes an exercise, a poem, or something someone says can just unlock something in your head. 

What those two Arvon weeks did was to give me me new ways to approach my subject matter - new ways into writing. In the first of the weeks Rebecca Goss introduced us to a recent form called the centena - a poem of exactly 100 words (excluding the title) opening and ending with the same three words. This tiny form proved to be exactly the kind of container I need to talk about my mum's funeral. It might sound counterintuitive but sometimes a tight writing constraint can actually be freeing. I surprised myself!

The second of the two courses was with Tara Bergin and Yomi Sode and was looking at ways of using research in poetry. This course yielded a massive harvest for me in terms of moving my book forward. Tara's writing exercises are very complicated, but precise, and this somehow opened up mind to possibilities and ways of writing. I was able to bring to the table things that I might never have considered using - map references, references to art works etc. I did a lot of research and reading that week - none of it specifically about grief, but all connected to things I was trying to write about. I wrote a lot that week - all of it surprising, and several of the poems have become the backbone of the collection. One of the components of an Arvon course is that you get a tutorial with each of the tutors and this was really fruitful for me too. Yomi offered me some excellent editing advice on the poem that now opens the collection and Tara made a suggestion that changed how I thought about the collection entirely. I had a sequence of prose poems that ran over two or three pages - just a couple of line breaks between each one. Tara suggested that they each needed to be on a page of their own. This blew my mind - I knew immediately that she was right, but it meant that the sequence would run over nine or ten pages rather than two. This meant I would need to take  more poems out. I was reluctant to do this at first, but realised as I was editing that I needed to take out everything that felt that didn't feel like it fitted with my main themes - loss/grief/, violence, motherhood and neurodivergence. This sounds like a wide remit but actually the themes really feed into one another - the main thrust of the collection being different types of loss. I took out a lot of poems but the result is a collection that feels much more coherent. 

I want to say here that workshops and courses aren't always entirely pleasurable. Sometimes they push you into uncomfortable territory. Sometimes exercises seem pointless or you feel resistance to them (the ones I resist most usually yield the best results), sometime they make my head hurt - but in a good way - because I am learning and being pushed out of my comfort zone. As a writer I feel I need this otherwise I would just write the same book over and over again. Yes, my preoccupations may be the same but challenging myself gives me new ways to come at them, new insights, new ways of working. Hopefully the results are worth it.

Writerly Preoccupations

When I was batting around ideas for a workshop one of the exercises I came up with was getting the participants to look at what preoccupies them as a writer - what interests them and inspires them, what themes they keep coming back to. As always I did the exercise myself to see what happened and it turned out to be a really useful and productive thing to do. 

You might want to try it - think about what interests you as a writer or artist? What are your preoccupations? What subjects or themes interest you? What things do you find yourself coming back to? Don't just limit yourself to things you have written about - I am interested in many different things that directly, but sometimes indirectly into my work. I found I learnt things about myself by doing this exercise.

Here are mine:

Human relationships place; the intersection between the human world, the natural world and the mystical realm; how events changes us - especially loss and grief; family dynamics; how place affects us and/or shapes us; psychology and counselling; music and lyrics; the past and how we repeat behaviour patterns; cruelty and violence (and the reasons for it); myth and fairytale; parallel universes; a Utopian future; the disintegration of a caring democratic society; repetition and internal rhyme; other worlds; art house film; stories where the ending is ambiguous or left open; other species; where wildness encroaches on order; edges and borders; otherness; the the physical body (and how it ages); being a parent - and how that changes over time; loss and grief; the stories and lies we tell ourselves (and others); memory; collective memory; the way memory changes over time; trauma and how its passed down through families.

girl was born - an exploration of a poem

I was recently asked to write some background to one of my poems and explain why I used a particular form for it. It is interesting going back to a poem and trying to remember the intention behind it. I couldn't remember when I wrote the poem - except I knew it was before I moved house in 2021. The intentions were clearer to me and the reasons I laid it out as prose poem with slashes. I will share the poem and what I wrote. The poem is from my book The Telling.

girl was born

girl was in the world / her mother was a horse / and her father was a pony / or was it the other way round / girl never knew when a day would turn sour / the world was a farmyard full of plastic animals / the houses were wooden / tiny painted rectangles for windows / nothing to look out from / girl looked out of her rectangular eyes with longing / girl reached for quiet / she reached for making sense / the words danced themselves up and down on the page / until finally she understood them / girl was born too late / or too early / she became a sister / then she became a sister again / she ran up the slippery stairs two at time / she jumped down them / girl was a ratty tennis ball / somewhere along the way she lost her bounce / girl was born a second time / girl was born of the woods / her father was a pine tree / her mother was a bramble / the house was full of midges / there was no way of returning to where she had come from / she picked up a twig shaped like a gun and aimed it

I wrote this as a stream of consciousness piece. I was thinking about how it felt like I had two different lives as a child. The first life from birth to three years old where we lived in a bedsit in my mum's friend's house in London (Ealing) - the friend had three kids, a dog and was a dress maker, the house was always busy. And then the second life when we moved to Thetford, a small town in Norfolk. There we had a two bedroom council house and I was the only child until my sister was born two years later. In Thetford the house was quiet. During the day it was just me and my mum. We lived opposite a pine wood - that wood was a big part of my childhood and often creeps into my poems, as does the pine forest that Thetford was surrounded by. I was a bright (some might say precocious) child (I was also neuro-divergent but we didn't know that then). I refused to go to nursery and also insisted on learning to read when I was 3 or 4. I learned using the Dr Seuss books. I was also a tomboy - preferring cars and guns to dolls. 

The poem is about a girl trying to make sense of the world around her. The objects (such as toys) become anchors or signs to steer by. Sometimes the separation between the girl and the object becomes blurred. I have always imagined people as different types of animal and object and vice versa. It helps me to make sense of things and is probably heavily influenced by the types of book I read as a child - fairytales, Tolkien and Enid Blyton - books where animals and trees talk and the most surprising and surreal things can happen. 

The order of the poem is not logical, it is not a linear chronologically ordered narrative. Memories are generally not linear - one memory can spark another and another. I knew it would probably be a prose poem as I was writing it. I like the density of a prose poem and the way it can keep that stream of consciousness feel. When it came to editing it, using conventional punctuation like full stops and commas felt wrong. Commas and full stops made each thought (each segment) feel too final, too separate somehow, but I still felt like I needed to break up the text with more than just a simple space. The use of the space in place of punctuation feels (to me) like it slows down the speed at which one reads the text. I like the use of slashes in poems - it feels like each slash is a momentary pause in thought - but exactly that - momentary, the eye moves on fairly quickly as the text feels more cohesive than if it had gaps and line breaks. It also means that you can break the syntax of the poem in unexpected places (a little like enjambement I suppose). I like this and when I read the poem out loud, I do read it with these tiny breaks. It might sound a little jarring at first, but I like this - it feels right for the voice of the poem.  Natalie Diaz says of her slashed poems "I hope they make the readers’ eyes uncomfortable, that they physically and musically express the disjointed, jagged experience explored in the poem."

You can buy my book The Telling from Nine Arches Press - https://www.ninearchespress.com/publications/poetry-collections/the-telling

Books Read in 2021

 

• 1) The Actual - Inua Ellams (poetry)
• 2) The Air Year - Caroline Bird (poetry, re read)
• 3) Antiemetic for Homesickness - Romalyn Ante (poetry, re read)
• 4) How to Wash a Heart - Bhanu Kapil (poetry, Re read)
• 5) The Coming-Down Time - Robert Selby (poetry)
• 6) Love and Other Thought Experiments - Sophie Ward (fiction)
• 7) Little Fires Everywhere - Celeste Ng (fiction)
• 8) Floating, Brilliant, Gone - Franny Choi (poetry)
• 9) The Book of Jobs: Poems - Kathryn Maris (poetry)
• 10) I Want! I Want! - Vicki Feaver (poetry)
• 11) My Year of Rest and Relaxation - Ottessa Moshfegh (fiction)
• 12) How to Change Your Life in 7 Steps - John Bird (non fiction)
• 13) A Song For Dark Times - Ian Rankin (fiction)
• 14) Pepper Seed - Malika Booker (poetry)
• 15) Widowish - Melissa Gould (non fiction)
• 16) Pocket Bowie Wisdom (non fiction)
• 17) Lifted - Bill Manhire (poetry)
• 18) Another Planet - Tracey Thorn (non fiction)
• 19) Self Portrait in Green - Marie NDiaye (non fiction/fiction)
• 20) Juul Kraijer - Ina Fuchs (non Fiction, art)
• 21) The Night Watchman - Louise Erdrich (fiction)
• 22) The School on Heart's Content Road - Carolyn Chute (fiction)
• 23) Lumen - Tiffany Atkinson (poetry)
• 24) Lifted - Bill Manhire (poetry, re read)
• 25) The Windows of Graceland - Martina Evans (poetry)
• 26) Cut the Black Rabbit - Benjamin Cusden (poetry)
• 27) We Swim to the Shark - Georgie Codd (non fiction)
• 28) Eat or We Both Starve - Victoria Kennefick (poetry)
• 29) Beautiful Nowhere - Louisa Campbell (poetry)
• 30) When I Think of My Body as a Horse - Wendy Pratt (poetry)
• 31) Back When We Were Grownups - Anne Tyler (fiction)
• 32) The Atlas of Lost Beliefs - Ranjit Hoskote (poetry)
• 33) Inmates - Sean Borodale (poetry)
• 34) Wasted Rainbow - Caleb Parkin (poetry)
• 35) The Impossible Dead - Ian Rankin (fiction)
• 36) The Secrets of Us - Lucinda Berry (fiction)
• 37) These Queer Merboys - Serge Neptune (poetry)
• 38) The Attitudes - Katie Griffiths (poetry)
• 39) Pandemonium - Andrew McMillan (poetry)
• 40) The Neighbourhood - Hannah Lowe (poetry)
• 41) Say Cucumber - Lucia Dove (poetry)
• 42) Negative Space - Lilly Dancyger (non fiction)
• 43) Yield - Claire Dyer (poetry)
• 44) The Chronology of Water - Lidia Yuknavitch (non fiction)
• 45) Beautiful Nowhere - Louisa Campbell (poetry, re read)
• 46) Her Lost Language - Jenny Mitchell (poetry)
• 47) A Bright Ray of Darkness - Ethan Hawke (fiction)
• 48) Wishful Drinking - Carrie Fisher (non fiction)
• 49) Poor - Caleb Femi (poetry)
• 50) Boy in Various Poses - Lewis Buxton (poetry)
• 51) My Mother Was an Upright Piano - Tania Hershman (fiction)
• 52) Museum of Ice Cream - Jenna Clake (poetry)
• 53) Honorifics - Cynthia Miller (poetry)
• 54) How to Carry a Fire - Christina Thatcher (poetry)
• 55) A - Sophie Robinson (poetry)
• 56) The Wolf Road - Richard Lambert (YA fiction)
• 57) Comic Timing - Holly Pester (poetry)
• 58) The Burgess Boys - Elizabeth Strout (fiction)
• 59) There's a Hole in My Bucket - Royd Tolkien (non fiction)
• 60) Tennis Lessons - Susannah Dickey (fiction)
• 61) Ponti - Sharlene Teo (fiction)
• 62) Play Lists - Jessica Mookherjee (poetry)
• 63) Max Porter - The Death of Francis Bacon
• 64) Fathom - Rebecca Gethin (poetry)
• 65) Hydra - Molly Ellen Pearson (poetry)
• 66) Štupartská’s Daughter - Elizabeth Jane Timms (poetry)
• 67) The Beauty of Living Twice - Sharon Stone (non fiction)
• 68) Soft Science - Franny Choi (poetry)
• 69) NR30 - Doug Jones (poetry)
• 70) Knowing This Has Changed My Ending - Alex MacDonald (poetry)
• 71) Where I'd Watch Plastic Trees Not Grow - Hannah Hodgson (poetry)
• 72) One Hundred Lockdown Sonnets - Jacqueline Saphra (poetry)
• 73) Terminarchy - Angela France (poetry0
• 74) Volcano - Elosham Vog (poetry)
• 75) Rotten days in Late Summer - Ralf Webb (poetry)
• 76) A God at the Door - Tishani Doshi (poetry)
• 77) Materials for Building a City - Elliot C. Mason (poetry)
• 78) Anchorage - Lorraine Marriner (poetry)
• 79) Gaps - Jenny Danes (poetry)
• 80) Spacecraft - John McCullough (poetry)
• 81) Meanwhile, Trees - Mark Waldron (poetry)
• 82) On Narrowness - Claire Crowther (poetry)
• 83) The Frost Fairs - John McCullough (poetry)
• 84) Ephybos - Kostya Tsloakis (poetry)
• 85) Lung Iron - Daniel Fraser (poetry)
• 86) and they are covered in gold light - Amy Acre (poetry)
• 87) C+nto and Othered Poems - Joelle Taylor (poetry)
• 88) Songs My Enemy Taught Me - Joelle Taylor (poetry)
• 89) Ripe - Isabelle Baafi (poetry)
• 90) Feverfew - Anna Saunders (poetry)
• 91) Fleet - Jane Burn (poetry)
• 92) The Story of No - Emma Hammond (poetry)
• 93) A Gathering of Matter/A Matter of Gathering - Dawn Lundy Martin (poetry)
• 94) The Family Upstairs - Lisa Jewell (fiction)
• 95) My Tin Watermelon - Peter Daniels (poetry)
• 96) physis - Nicolas Pesques (poetry)
• 97) A Year in the New Life - Jack Underwood (poetry)
• 98) The Book of Orgasms - Nin Andrews (poetry)
• 99) Olive Again - Elizabeth Strout (poetry)
• 100) Distance Writing - Margaret Seymour (poetry)
• 101) I Think I Might be Autistic - Cynthia Kim (non fiction)
• 102) All the Names Given - Raymond Antrobus (poetry)
• 103) Strangers - Rebecca Tamas (non fiction)
• 104) The Continued Clsure of the Blue Door - Vik Shirley (poetry)
• 105) Glass - Emily Cooper (poetry)
• 106) The Oscillations - Kate Fox (poetry)
• 107) Single Window - Daniel Sluman (poetry)
• 108) The Gold Rush - Craig Martin Getz (poetry)
• 109) Wow - Bill Manhire (poetry)
• 110) Cosmonaut - A.E. De Vaul (poetry)
• 111) The Sun is Open - Gail McConnell (poetry)
• 112) All the Men I Never Married - Kim Moore (poetry)
• 113) The Kids - Hannah Lowe (poetry)
• 114) Atlantis - Mark Doty (poetry)
• 115) How to Think Like David Bowie - Jonathan Tindale (non fiction)
• 116) Hera Lindsay Bird - Hera Lindsay Bird (poetry)

How I didn’t become a short story writer

First I was a novel writer (aged five).
Then I was a poet.

Then I was a short story writer.

Then I was a poet again.

Then I was a short story writer.

Now I am a poet.

I think I was probably a bad short story writer. 

The first time I was a short story writer I wrote in an experimental style. At that time U.K. publishers did not publish many books of short stories, and certainly not ones by unknown writers. They were definitely not interested in publishing experimental short stories by a young unknown writer who hadn't even been to university. At that time I read a lot of American short story collections which were a huge influence on my work - Jayne Ann Philips, Ellen Gilchrist, Raymond Carver, Tobias Wolff., Louise Erdrich. I think now that what I wrote back then sits somewhere between flash fiction and prose poetry. It rarely had a narrative arc. It was often just sniffing around the edges of something.

I was a kid from a council estate who left school at sixteen and went to live in a hippy commune. But as a kid I virtually lived in the local library, and while I lived in the commune I continued hitchhiking into town to use the library. 

You could say the library saved me. 

You could say the library made me. 

I wasn't educated back then. I didn't know about literary journals. I didn't know much at all really. I loved to read and I loved to write. I wrote in those small reporter's notebooks with the metal spiral at the top and I typed my work up on an electronic typewriter. When I look at those old short stories now, I think that maybe I was ahead of my time. They might have been ahead of their time but they're still not very good. But there's something about them that stops me throwing them out. Repeated words and phrases, poetic rhythms, the kind of surrealism that still appeals to me in writing.

When I have tried to write short stories in recent years they have felt stilted and unimaginative in comparison to those early works. I have become a slave to plot but somehow the plots are never good ones. Either the stories are boring and unoriginal or they don't make sense. It seems I have given over my original thinking to the poet in me and I don't know how to become a short story writer again.

Books that shaped me as a writer

 

It would be nigh on impossible or would take weeks and a lot of deep thinking and memory trawling to list all the books that have shaped me or had a direct or indirect influence on my writing. I have, however, been reflecting recently on books I read as a child and a young adult and I will try and cover at least some of them here. 

Let’s get this straight. I come from a working-class family. We lived in a two-up-two down council house on an estate in a rural Norfolk town which was known for being a ‘London Overspill’ town. We were London overspill. Neither of my parents had degrees. My mum left secondary modern at 15 with no qualifications. My dad fared a little better and went to technical college where he trained as an engineering draftsman. My parents were young when they had me – 21 and 20 respectively. One thing my parents did have though was a love for books and music. My mum was a member of various book clubs and throughout my early childhood we had a fortnightly family pilgrimage to the local library – a tradition I kept up through my teens and well into adulthood. I firmly believe that libraries are essential, a necessity. Without the library I would have been lost. I read everything I could get my hands on – well except romance, I was never a fan of Mills and Boon. 

Let’s start at the beginning. The first books I remember were Doctor Seuss and the other books in the American ‘I can read it myself’ series. I have no idea where those books came from – perhaps my mum got them from a book club. I learnt to read with them before I went to school and I can see now that the surrealness and sense of loneliness and unfairness of some of the characters in the stories experience has certainly pervaded my own writing, and, perhaps, my view of the world. The Cat in the Hat books are the obvious ones but the books I remember most were: One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish; Green Eggs and Ham; Are You My Mother?; The King, the Mice and the Cheese; and The Diggingest Dog. I will never forget the thing in a giant bottle in the park in the dark or the little bird standing on top of a giant digger asking ‘Are you my mother?’. I am sure learning to read with these books instilled a love of reading that I would have never have got from Peter and Jane. 

There may have been other books from this time but if so, I have no memory of them. The next book I really remember with any clarity is The Enchanted Wood by Enid Blyton. I was a massive Blyton fan as a child often asking for her books for Christmas and birthday presents and also buying them in the second-hand bookshop on our rare visits to the nearest city. My love affair with her began with The Enchanted Wood. I must have been five or six and it is the first time I can remember a book making me want to write something myself. That book was a revelation to me as a child. I loved all the fantasy elements but also that it was rooted in the kind of everyday world I could relate to. I lived in a poor family. We had moved from the city and lived opposite a wood. I longed to find my own Faraway Tree and escape from my mundane existence to other exciting lands – I think it was my first sense that you could use imagination and reading/writing as an escape route from the everyday dysfunction of your family. Other Blyton books I loved were The Naughtiest Girl in the School series – what child from a noisy argumentative family doesn’t fantasise about escape to a boarding school; the Adventure series (Castle of Adventure, Sea of Adventure etc) – I wanted to be Barney, the boy who had no family and hitchhiked around the country with his pet monkey; and the Famous Five books. I did read the Secret Seven series but found them a bit tame and too Just Williamish. 

Fantasy and fairytale played a big part in my childhood reading habits. My mum had an old battered copy of Perrault’s Fairy Tales (illustrated by Edmond Du Lac) that I was obsessed with. I used to nag my mum to read me ‘Bluebeard’ over and over, thrilling at the point when it is unclear whether the brothers will be in time to save poor nosey Fatima. I used to regularly get massive books of fairy tales from the library – The Red Fairy Book, The Yellow Fairy Book, The Green Fairy book and so on. My mum read to me a lot – my sister and brother weren’t really interested. She read me The Hobbit, which I loved and she read me The Lord of the Rings – twice. It was enthralling and terrifying. She also read me some more adult books – The Thirty-Nine Steps, Jamaica Inn, the Boney books by Arthur Upfield, Day of the Triffids, Oliver Twist. I kept this tradition with my own son – though I have to confess I only read him Lord of the Rings once! 

We had the odd teacher at school who read to us too. One year I had a particularly literary teacher who read us Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The Borrowers, as well as some books that TV series had been based on - Heartsease by Peter Dickinson (The Changes) and The Diddikoi by Rumer Godden (Kizzy). Some of my relatives bought me books as presents too – James and the Giant Peach, Edward Lear’s The Quangle Wangle Quee, Irish Fairytales and - quite randomly a book about Muhammad and one about Alfred the Great. My sister had a ton of Ladybird books too. The school also had a book club and occasionally I was allowed to buy a book from there – the most memorable of these was Stig of the Dump. 

As a teen I was still reading avidly. I read most of the adult books in the house – John Wyndham, Dennis Wheatley, H.G. Wells, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I had also graduated to the adult library and was thrilled by the likes of Sax Rohmer and the Doctor Syn books by Russell Thorndike. The high school library was a little tamer in comparison but I borrowed religiously none the less – though the only book I remember borrowing from there is a book called Pennington’s Seventeenth Summer – about a troubled teen. I also bought books from the secondhand book stall on the market – typically I wanted to read books my parents wouldn’t approve of and I read most of a (terrible but thrilling) series of novels about Hell’s Angels published by New English Library. They published a series about skinheads too but I was anti-racist and left wing even as a teen so I avoided them. 

By my teen’s I had developed a love affair with poetry and was writing some terrible poetry in the back of my English book. I had three poetry collections as a child (and still have all of them): Hilda Boswell’s Treasury of Poetry, The Oxford Book of Children’s Verse and my favourite Louis Untermeyer’s Golden Treasury of Poetry, which I read over and over – my favourite poem being the haunting ‘Highwayman’ by Alfred Noyes. My mum also had The Oxford Book of Poetry which I dipped into regularly – my preference being for the narrative poems of Tennyson like ‘The Lady of Shallot’. She also had a book of Bob Dylan’s song lyrics and drawings and a collection of John Betjeman’s poems. School did me no favours where poetry was concerned – the only poems I remember studying were John Masefield’s ‘Cargoes’ and a poem about ducks that I was made to learn as a punishment. 

I left home at sixteen and went to live in a commune but I continued my love affair with the library, finally graduating onto modern short stories and American novels – Jane Anne Phillips, Louise Erdrich and Ellen Gilchrist were great favourites in my early 20s and it was at this time that I started seriously writing short stories. At the commune there was a massive library with a really eclectic collection of books. I read about Manson’s family, The Grateful Dead, and Drop City – a commune in America in the sixties. I also read Dickens, Hardy, Lawrence, Laurie Lee, Carlos Casteneda, Joan Collins, Colleen McCullough, William Burroughs, Angie Bowie, Angela Carter and Richard Brautigan. 

I am not sure that there is a point to this other than it being a loose collection of my reading up until my early twenties – and I am already aware that there are things I missed out. Peter Puffer’s Fun Book for instance (do look it up – it was definitely illustrated by someone who has done drugs) or a book that I took out repeatedly from the library as a child that I can’t remember the name of – about two children who find a disused station. I was also obsessed with Roald Dahl’s The Magic Finger – where a hunting family wake up to find they have duck wings and the ducks have arms and start shooting them. A novel called Princess Anne that I bought at the guide jumble sale and from which I learned what lumbago was. I also bought a copy of Gulliver’s Travels at the same jumble sale and I did try and read it umpteen times as a child and a teen but never got very far. 

I suppose my conclusion is that I was drawn to books where there was another world waiting beyond this one or where things were not as they seemed. Magical realism I suppose. I was also drawn to bleak stories and gritty realism. My favourite Hardy novels is Tess which has to be one of the most depressing novels ever written – and yet there is something utterly compelling about it. Perhaps that Hardy wrote non judgementally about the real lives of the working classes and his descriptions of a British countryside we will never see again are sublime. I think that all these passions and preoccupations are reflected in my own writing. I love the surreal. People transformed into animals or inanimate objects, metaphors, fairytale-ish scenarios, the lure and threat of the woods.

Poetry Competitions - some hints and tips

As a freelancer and believer in the written word I have many hats - some I wear for money and some I wear for the simple love of the hat. Two of these hats involve poetry competitions - one I sift for (for money), the other I print all the poems for and send them to the judge (for love). I have been donning these hats for several years and am frustrated by how many people shoot themselves in the foot when entering poetry competitions. 

I thought it might be helpful to list some dos and don'ts. I am not an expert. Like you I enter many competitions and don't get anywhere. I have won a couple of competitions and both times I thought the poems unlikely to win. This list is by no means exhaustive.

1) Difficult and emotive content

It is painful reading poetry competition entries - not because the entries are bad (although inevitably some are) but because people are baring their souls and telling you their deepest (and darkest) secrets. There are many poems that move me with their content but will never make the shortlist because they are not doing enough as a poem, or are too oblique, or are simply prose broken into lines to look like a poem. This is sad for a reader - some of those poems have important things to say. Some feel like a cathartic exercise for the writer but are not offering much to reader. A poem about trauma (or loss) needs to offer something to the reader too. A poem is not a misery memoir - though it can touch on the same subjects. I actually find poems more powerful if they are less explicit in their content (I like this in films too) - something alluded to but not explicitly spelt out - a good example of this is the poem 'The Bicycle' by Katrina Naomi from her book What the Crocodile Taught Me. 

Another way into difficult subject matter is to use metaphor.

2) Size isn't everything

Short poems are good, they can be very powerful - but it's unlikely that a haiku will win a major poetry competition - they just don't stand a chance against those poems that have more space to make their point. Save them for short poem competitions - Magma has a short poem category in its annual competition. Of course, there is every chance that I may be proved wrong one day.

Similarly there are poems that feel way too long. Some of these go off at odd tangents (this may work in a prose poem but works less well in a conventional one). Some say the same thing over and over in a variety of ways. Some poems feel like they need the ending and beginnings lopped off - the introduction and the explanation. A good poem feels tight and not baggy. Frisk your poems thoroughly for superfluous weight - you should be doing this anyway, but it's even more important for a competition poem.

tip: One technique I use is to take longer poem and make it shorter to fit the competition guidelines. Sometimes it can't be done, but often it can - and usually the poem is better for it.

3) Write like you live in the twenty-first century

It's as simple as that. I see many poems that read as if they were penned in the 1800's - loaded with words like 'hast', 'thou' and 'whence'. The only time this is acceptable is if you are writing a pastiche - but it's dubious even then. If you are writing like that because all the poetry you read looks like that, then you need to start reading modern poetry. If you don't know where to start get in contact with me and I will send you a reading list. 

tip: Don't expect to love all modern poetry - you need to find the poets that speak to you. You wouldn't expect to go into a library and like the first novel you pick up. Poetry is the same.

Syntax is important too. Beginning poets often think that poetry is some kind of special code and this leads to poems that sometimes don't make grammatical sense - sentences without clauses, sentences that are broken up in odd ways. A poem should be written the way we speak. Try reading your poem out loud and you will soon hear if the sentence structures are odd or unnatural.

4) Rhyming

Rhyming is fine - personally I like a bit of rhyme - but it has to be good. If you are rhyming because you think all poetry has to rhyme then please go back and read number three above. Good rhyme can be amazing - it doesn't whack you round the head shouting I am a rhyming poem - in fact sometimes you might not even notice the rhyme at first. Other times the rhymes want themselves to be noticed. Similar effects can be had from half rhymes, slant rhymes and repetition. A word should never feel like it's in the poem simply for the rhyme scheme - better to ditch the rhyme scheme or put the poem away for a while and hope the right word comes to you.

5) Angst and anger

In the course of sifting/printing and teaching I see many poems that express deep felt sorrow,  grief, angst or anger. While these poems may be cathartic to write - they offer little to the reader. If a poem's message is 'I am angry - really angry' - the reader is left with the question, why? If you need to write an angry poem tell us why you are angry or at least hint at it. 

If you are despairing and feel like the world hates you - please give us some clues as to why you feel like that (and see a counsellor). These kind of poems are frustrating to me as I feel the raw emotion of them but they also leave me a little cold - they don't let me into the world of the poem/writer. I think that's the difference between therapeutic writing and poetry for general consumption - my morning pages are not for anyone else's eyes. I can moan and rage in them and I don't have to explain myself. If I want to put those emotions into a poem I have to offer the reader a way into them too - they have to care about the narrator or feel like there is some kind of universal truth that they can relate to, an 'oh yes that bothers me in that way too'. 

Grief poems can be really difficult too. Sometimes we need a bit of distance from the loss. Sometimes we need a lot of distance. It has been more than ten years since my brother died and I still find it hard to write about. Some of the most successful poems relating to loss of a loved one are about the small things rather than directly about the loss itself. Penelope Shuttle's 'Peter's Shoes' is a great example of this. We all understand what that 'year' means - yet she hasn't felt the need to spell it out. The use of 'you' and 'your' in the poem is clever to - it addresses the dead person but allows the reader to bring their own meaning to the poem (their own lost or dead) in a way that using the specific name throughout wouldn't.

6) Subject matter

Pretty much anything goes in terms of subject matter these days but there are some things to be wary of (and, yes, I have definitely seen all of these):

a middle class white person writing of the black experience 

poems about murdering young women that read like a script for CSI

explicit sex for the sake of it

racist/homophobic/sexist poems

ekphrastic poems that describe the art work/painting that they are based on, but don't do much more than that

poems based on historic events that just describe the event and don't offer us anything new (be careful with this type of poem of overloading it with facts from all your research too)

anecdotes about something that happened and simply that - sometimes these are just prose chopped up to look like a poem

7) Form

Anything goes in term of form really - although as I said earlier a Haiku is unlikely to win a major competition. Poems in strict form can and do win as do poems in free verse. The trick is to do it well and for the form to fit the subject matter. Also check whether your poem is actually a poem and not just a piece of prose chopped up - could it be a prose poem, a bit of life writing or a short story?

8) The Title

You would be amazed looking through a mailbag for a competition or a journal at how many poems have the same title. I must have read a hundred poems in the last year called 'Lockdown' for instance. One line titles like'Lockdown', 'Snow' or 'Rain' are best avoided. I would also avoid titles that are a pun - especially if it's a serious poem. You also don't want a title that gives away the whole poem or a title that is a line of the poem (this takes the power away from the line in the poem). Titles are notoriously difficult. If you are having problems ask your workshopping group or a writer friend. Sometimes when I have been really stuck a friend or a tutor has immediately suggested a title that brings the poem alive.

9) The ending

I talked earlier about poems that feel like they should end sooner. Beware of over-blown or summing-up endings. Trust your reader - you really shouldn't need to spell it all out for us. I have noticed that some great poems go a bit weird towards the end - sometimes a really good poem will suddenly go all poetic, start using archaic words, or hit us round the head with a bit of moral guidance. Similarly some writers feel the end to end on a pun, a joke, or a punchline. Trust the poem to do the work. Endings are hard but there is shortcut to the perfect ending. Workshop your poem if you are having trouble, pay for a critique, or put the poem away for a while so you can come back to it with fresh eyes.

Putting Together a Poetry Collection

 Well, it's done I finally pressed send on my third collection and now, hopefully, it is in the hands/in tray of my editor. I just hope she likes it. 

One of the hardest things about putting together a poetry collection is whittling it down to a manageable size. I got mine down from well over a hundred pages to just under ninety - but I know it will have to get even smaller. 

The process goes something like this:

Print out all poems and decide which are strong enough to go in the collection. 

Look at what themes are emerging and group poems according to theme.

Decide if you want sections and what order they will be in (this can change later).

Order poems within their sections and think about how sections link together - is it a logical progression, does the end poem of one section link to the first poem of the next one.

Section order may be somewhat led my your strongest poems - you want your strongest poems first and last. Also think about how you want the reader to feel when they finish the collection. I always like to put a positive poem last.

Take anything out that feels like filler or poems that are doing a similar thing to each other - you are bound to have some of these - writers often explore the same ideas over and over. I don't necessarily mean poems on the same theme but poems that have a similar feel or message - pick the strongest. 

If you can get someone to read it and give you their impressions. If you can afford a mentor I would highly recommend it. People we workshop with regularly tend to be less critical because they already know our work - I like to (if I can) get someone to read it who hasn't read/workshopped the poems as I have been writing them. Having an outside reader can be vital. They can pick up if the order doesn't make sense or isn't working. With my first two collections I had funding for a mentor and she helped me make some really tough editorial decisions - changing order, taking out poems (and writing more to replace them) and crucially putting a strong sequence first - I had been a little scared of doing that for some reason. With the collection I just sent off, a friend read through it and flagged up a problem with the order of the final section which we were then able to fix.

Don't be afraid to take stuff out and write more. 

Don't feel that everything that has been published has to go in. Similarly not all your best poems have to go in. A collection is not your greatest hits - it should work coherently. I have a sequence of poems that is really strong but it just hasn't fitted with my last book or this one.

Books read in 2020

139) Broken Greek - Pete Paphides (non fiction)

138) The Discomfort of Evening - Marieke Lucas Rijneveld

137) How to Wash a Heart - Bhanu Kapil (poetry)

136) Postcolonial Love Poem - Natalie Diaz (poetry)

135) Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life (non fiction)

134) Princess Anne - Katharine L. Oldmeadow (fiction, re read)

133) The Driver's Seat - Muriel Spark (fiction)

132) Perrault's Fairy Tales - Charles Perrault (fiction, short stories, re read)

131) Barn 8 - Deb Olin Unferth (fiction)

130) My Darling from the Lions - Rachel Long (poetry)

129) Day Four - Sarah Lotz (fiction)

128) The Shooting Gallery - Carrie Etter (poetry)

127) Lost at the Fair - W. Perring (fiction, picture book, re read)

126) Mock orange - Anne Osbourn (poetry)

125) The Bears' Picnic - Stan and Jan Berenstain (fiction, picture book, re read)

124) Bunnikin's Picnic Party - A.J Macgregor (fiction, picture book, re read)

123) My Name is Why - Lemn Sissay (non fiction)

122) Wild Persistence - Katrina Naomi (poetry)

121) Intimates - Helen Farrish (poetry)

120) Because a Woman's Heart is Like a Needle at the Bottom of the Ocean - Sugar Magnolia Wilson (poetry)

119) Shine, Darling - Ella Frears (poetry)

118) Witches, Warriors, Workers - eds Fran Lock and Jane Burn (poetry)

117) The Carrying - Ada Limon (poetry)

116) In the Lateness of the World - Carolyn Forché (poetry)

115) Instructions for My Imposter - Kathleen McGookey (poetry)

114) Solar Cruise - Claire Crowther (poetry)

113) When the Trees Fall - Jane Clarke (poetry)

112) Vixen - Rosie Garland (fiction)

111) Scion - Sue Rose (poetry)

110) Lament - Briony Bax (poetry)

109) Murder in the Dark - Margaret Atwood (fiction, short stories)

108) One Evening in October I Rowed Out on the Lake - Tua Forsstrom (poetry)

107) Be With - Forrest Gander (poetry)

106) Love And/Or the Storm - Jonny Wiles (poetry)

105) Dressing for the Afterlife - Maria Taylor (poetry)

104) The Faithful Look Away - Melissa Lee-Houghton (fiction)

103) The Enchanted Wood - Enid Blyton (fiction, re read)

102) Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me - Kate Clanchy (non fiction)

101) More Than You Were - Christina Thatcher (poetry)

100) The Shaking City - Cath Drake (poetry)

99) Bombs On Aunt Dainty - Judith Kerr (non fiction)

98) I Hate and I Love - Catullus (poetry)

97) Between the Stops - Sandi Toksvig (non fiction)

96) The Rose Metal Field Guide to Prose Poetry (poetry)

95) Feck Perfuction - James Victore (non fiction)

94) Love Minus Love - Wayne Holloway-Smith (poetry)

93) Tiger Girl - Pascale Petit (poetry)

92) Just Ask the Universe - Michael Samuels (non fiction)

91) I love the Bones of You - Christopher Eccleston (non fiction)

90) My Thoughts Exactly - Lily Allen (non fiction)

89) Rendang - Will Harris (poetry)

88) After Fame - Sam Riviere (poetry)

87) Interior With Sudden Joy - Brenda Shaughnessy (poetry)

86) Night Wanderers - C.J. Flood (fiction)

85) Where Were You Robert? - Hans Magnus Enzensberger (fiction)

84) The River's Song - Jacqueline Bishop (fiction)

83) Amy and Isabelle - Elizabeth Strout (fiction)

82) Cloudstreet - Tim Winton (fiction)

81) Antisemetic for Homesickness - Romalyn Ante (poetry)

80) Primers Volume Five (poetry)

79) A Better Me - Gary Barlow (non fiction)

78) A Fold in the River - Philip Gross (poetry)

77) Little Kings - Peter Kahn (poetry)

76) The Nerve of It - Lynn Emanuel (poetry)

75) Monica's Overcoat of Flesh - Geraldine Clarkson (poetry)

74) Magnolia, 木蘭 - Nina Mingya Powles (poetry)

73) Face It - Debbie Harry (non fiction)

72) Unlocked - Sue Butler (poetry)

71) The Remedies - Katharine Towers (poetry)

70) The Artist's Daughter - Kimiko Hahn (poetry)

69) Flood - Clare Shaw (poetry)

68) Remember, Body - C.P. Cavafy (poetry)

67) The Little Book of Passage - Franca Mancinelli (poetry)

66) A Portable Paradise - Roger Robinson (poetry)

65) The Air Year - Caroline Bird (poetry, re read)

64) Call and Response - Rachel Spence (poetry)

63) On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous - Ocean Vuong (fiction)

62) I'm OK, I'm Pig - Kim Hyesoon (poetry, re read)

61) Lasagne - Wayne Holloway-Smith (poetry)

60) Memories of the Future - Siri Hustvedt (fiction)

59) Luxe - Amy Key (poetry, re read)

58) Why? And Other Questions - Robin Houghton (poetry)

57) Litany of a cardiologist - Denise Bundred (poetry)

56) Apple, Fallen - Olga Dermott-Bond (poetry)

55) About Leaving - Ian Glass

54) Tenter - Susie Campbell (poetry)

53) Body, Remember - Wes Lee (poetry)

52) Fruitcake - Selima Hill (poetry)

51) Shine, Darling - Ella Frears (poetry)

50) Sanatorium - Abi Plamer (poetry)

49) The Games - Harry Josephine Giles (poetry)

48) Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods - Tishani Doshi (poetry)

47) Plainwater - Anne Carson (essay/poetry)

46) Station Eleven - Emily St John Mandel (fiction)

45) Letters Home - Jennifer Wong (poetry)

44) Bones on Ice - Kathy Reichs (fiction)

43) Homie - Danez Smith (poetry)

42) Boys in Trees - Carly Simon (non fiction)

41) I'm Stupid, But I'm Not That Stupid - Selima Hill (poetry)

40) Green Migraine - Michael Dickman (poetry, re read)

39) Deluge - Charlotte Ansell (poetry)

38) Footnotes to Water - Zöe Skoulding (poetry)

37) This Is How We Lost Each Other - Karese Burrows (poetry)

36) Split - Juana Adcock (poetry)

35) Don't Try This at Home - Angela Readman (short stories)

34) Much Left Unsaid - Finola Scott (poetry)

33) Milk Tooth - Martha Sprackland (poetry)

32) and what if we were all allowed to disappear - Tania Hershman (poetry)

31) When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities - Chen Chen (poetry)

30) Hinge - Alycia Pirmohamed (poetry)

29) Haverscroft - S. A. Harris (fiction)

28) A Fortunate Man: The Story of a Country Doctor - John Berger (non fiction)

27) Beautiful Place - Amanthi Harris (fiction)

26) My Shrink is Pregnant - Katie Griffiths (poetry)

25) Anything is Possible - Elizabeth Strout (fiction)

24) Hash - Torgny Lindgren (fiction)

23) My Name is Lucy Barton - Elizabeth Strout (short stories)

22) Silent Years - Alasdair Paterson (poetry)

21) The Tenant of Wildfell Hall - Anne Brontë (fiction)

20) Coming Through Slaughter - Michael Ondaatje (poetry/fiction)

19) Horse-man - Em Strang (poetry)

18) Basic Nest Architecture - Polly Atkin (poetry)

17) Apple Water - Raine Geoghegan (poetry)

16) In Nearby Bushes - Kei Miller (poetry)

15) Finished Creatures (issue 2) - edited by Jan heritage (poetry)

14) If All the World and Love Were Young - Stephen Sexton (poetry)

13) That Lonsesome Valley - Melissa Lee houghton (fiction)

12) Truth Street - David Cain (poetry)

11) Wings made from the muscle of a river - Neil Richards (poetry)

10) Significant Other - Isabel Galleymore (poetry)

9) Isn't Forever - Amy Key (poetry)

8) Cuckoo - Nichola Deane (poetry)

7) The Aesthetics of Breath - Charles G Lauder Jr (poetry)

6) Interference Effects - Claire Dyer (poetry)

5) Nine Inches - Tom Perrotta (short stories)

4) Smoothie - Claudia Toutoungi (poetry)

3) Devoured - Anna Mackmin (fiction)

2) Tigress - Jessica Mookherjee (poetry)

1) sad boy/detective - Sam Sax (poetry)

First Draft of New Collection

I am working on my third collection, or what I should say is that I am struggling with my third collection. I have cut the poems down by two thirds. I have put them in an order that I like and makes some kind of sense to me but I still have way to many. At the moment I have 117 A4 pages which is way to many.

I thought it might be helpful to go back and look at what Threat looked like at this stage in the process. The second draft of Threat looks nothing like the finished article. The order is different and I counted thirty-six poems that didn't make the final cut - THIRTY-SIX! This is reassuring but also a bit daunting. There are some big decisions to be made. With my last book I was lucky enough to have funding for some mentoring but I don't have that luxury this time. I need to really interrogate each poem to make sure it is earning its keep, to check that I don't have several poems that are doing or saying the same thing. It is exciting. It is scary. It is exciting and scary!

Books read in 2019

159) Everything I Never Told You - Celeste Ng (fiction)
158) Sorrowtoothpaste Mirrorcream by Kim Hyesoon (poetry)
157) Body Thesaurus by Jennifer Militello (poetry)
156) The Emma Press Anthology of Contemporary Gothic Verse (poetry)
155) City of Departures by Helen Tookey (poetry)
154) The Black Place by Tamar Yoseloff (poetry)
153) This Tilting Earth by Jane Lovell (poetry)
152) Rock, Paper, Scissors by Richard Osmond (poetry)
151) A Map Towards Fluency by Lisa Kelly (poetry)150) Changing Room by Anna Woodford (poetry)
149) Baby by Patricia Debney (poetry)
148) Slattern by Kate Clanchy (poetry)
147) Shadow Dogs by Natalie Whittaker (poetry)
146) Naming Bones by Joanna Ingham (poetry)
145) Kismet by Jennifer Lee Tsai (poetry)
144) Dad, Remember You Are Dead by Jacqueline Saphra (poetry)
143) Coal Black Mornings by Brett Anderson (non fiction)
142) More Shadow Than Bird by Nuar Alsadir (poetry)
41) Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout (fiction)
140) Spider Bones by Kathy Reichs (fiction)
139) Wedding Beasts by Jay G Ying (poetry)
138) Man's House Catches Fire by Tom Sastry (poetry)
137) Box Rooms by Laurie Bolger (poetry)
136) Firing Pins by Jo Young (poetry)
135) #AFTERHOURS by Inua Ellams (poetry)
134) After The Formalities by Anthony Anaxagorou (poetry)
133) Bowie: Loving The Alien by Christopher Sandford (non fiction)
132) The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson (non fiction)
131) Surge by Jay Bernard (poetry)
130) fothermather by Gail McConnell (poetry)
129) Sodium 136 by Carole Bromley (poetry)
128) The Fantastic Book of Everybody's Secrets by Sophie Hannah (short stories)
127) Bridport Prize Anthology 2019 - Winning Poems, Short Stories and Flash Fiction (anthology)
126) Girl Falling by P B Hughes (poetry)
125) Eye Level: Poems by Jenny Xie (poetry)
124) The Tradition by Ben Jericho (poetry)
123) A Warm and Snouting Thing by Ramona Herdman (poetry)
122) Push: My Father, Polio and Me by Sarah Passingham (non fiction)
121) Diary of a Miu Miu Salesgirl by Jennifer Wong (poetry) Jennifer Wong
120) String and Circumstance by Melissa Fu (short stories)
119) Falling Outside Eden by Melissa Fu (poetry)
118) Urban Drift by Natalie Burdett (poetry)
117) All This is Implied by Will Harris (poetry)
116) Stitch by Samuel Tongue (poetry)
115) The Protection of Ghosts by Natalie Linh Bolderston (poetry)
114) THE DANCING BOY by Michelle Diaz (poetry)
113) Time Lived, Without Its Flow by Denise Riley (non fiction)
112) Dear Big Gods by Mona Arshi (poetry)
111) The Latest Winter by Maggie Nelson (poetry)
110) Playing House by Katherine Stansfield (poetry)
109) Search Party by Richard Meier (poetry)
108) Dancing on the Doorstep by Tom Corbett (poetry)
107) Overwintering by Pippa Little (poetry)
106) Zebra by Ian Humphreys (poetry)
105) Time is in Fields by Jean Atkin (poetry)
104) Fen by Daisy Johnson (short stories)
103) Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott (non fiction)
102) Quicksand Beach by Kate Bingham (poetry)
101) The Turning by Tim Winton (short stories)
100) Notes from the Fog: Stories by Ben Marcus (short stories)
99) Lepus by Barry Wilson (poetry)
98) To Sweeten Bitter - Raymond Antrobus -(poetry, re read)
97) Things Only Borderlines Know by Olivia Tuck (poetry)
96) Support, Support by Helen Charman (poetry)
95) In Praise of Truth: The Personal Account of Theodore Marklund, Picture-Framer by Torgny Lindgren (fiction)
94) The Book of Jobs: Poems by Kathryn Maris (poetry)
93) American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin by Terrance Hayes (poetry)
92) Basic Nest Architecture by Polly Atkin (poetry)
91) Something Bright, Then Holes by Maggie Nelson (poetry)
90) England: Poems from a School by Kate Clanchy (poetry)
89) Dear, by Alice Willetts (poetry)
87) Safety Behaviour by Emma Jeremy (poetry)
86) Live Canon 2018 Anthology (poetry)
85) The Unquiet by L. Kiew (poetry)
84) Reckless Paper Birds by John McCullough (poetry)
83) Erato by Deryn Rees-Jones (poetry)
82) The Woman on the Other Side by Stephanie Conn (poetry)
81) Flèche by Mary Jean Chan (poetry)
80) Noctuary by Niall Campbell (poetry)
79) The Million-petalled Flower of Being Here by Vidyan Ravinthiran (poetry)
78) Whistle by Martin Figura (poetry, re read)
77) An Unremarkable Body by Elisa Odato (poetry)
76) The Forward Book of Poetry 2019 by Various Poets (poetry)
75) Island By Stephanie Conn (poetry)
74) The Somnambulist Cookbook by Andrew McDonnell (poetry)
73) Hand & Skull by Zoë Brigley (poetry)
72) The Poetry Home Repair Manual: Practical Advice for Beginning Poets by Ted Kooser (non fiction)
71) My Dark Horses by Jodie Hollander (poetry)
70) In a House of Lies (Inspector Rebus #22) by Ian Rankin (fiction)
69) Lumière by Sue Burge (poetry)
68) I'm OK, I'm Pig! by Kim Hyesoon, Don Mee Choi (Translator) (poetry)
67) The Anatomical Venus by Helen Ivory (poetry)
66) Kingdomland by Rachael Allen (poetry)
65) The Babies by Sabrina Orah Mark (poetry)
64) The Not-Dead and The Saved and Other Stories by Kate Clanchy (short stories)
63) Maps of the Abandoned City by Helen Ivory (poetry)
62) At Hajj by Amaan Hyder (poetry)
61) Your Relationship to Motion Has Changed by Amish Trivedi (poetry)
60) Some Pink Star by Sophie Essex (poetry)
59) An Unremarkable Body by Elisa Lodato (fiction)
58) Near Future by Suzannah Evans (poetry)
57) Madness by Sam Sax (poetry)
56) Girl by Rebecca Goss (poetry)
55) Collected Stories by W. Somerset Maugham, Nicholas Shakespeare (Introduction) (short stories)
54) Threat by Julia Webb (poetry)
53) by Lewis Buxton, Amelia Loulli, Victoria Richards, Jane Commane (editor), Kim Moore (editor) (poetry)
52) Hare Soup by Dorothy Molloy (poetry)
51) Hand & Skull by Zoë Brigley (poetry)
50) Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky (poetry)
49) Darling, It's Me by Alison Winch (poetry)
48) Rabbit by Sophie Robinson (poetry, re read)
47) In Search of Equilibrium by Theresa Lola (poetry)
46) Shiner by Maggie Nelson (poetry)
45) The Emigrants by W.G. Sebald (non fiction)
44) Your Fault by Andrew Cowan (fiction)
43) Lantern by Sean Hewitt (poetry)
42) Bitter Berries by Marina Tsvetaeva, Moniza Alvi (Translator), Veronika Krasnova (Translator) (poetry)
41) Moon Milk by Rachel Bower (poetry)
40) Spells: 21st Century Occult Poetry by Rebecca Tamás (ed.) (poetry)
39) Lanny by Max Porter (poetry/fiction)
38) Bluets by Maggie Nelson (poetry)
37) Discipline by Jane Yeh (poetry)
36) Goest by Cole Swensen (poetry)
35) Luxe by Amy Key (poetry)
34) How to Grow Matches by S.A. Leavesley (poetry)
33) At or Below Sea Level by Elisabeth Sennitt Clough (poetry)
32) Witch by Rebecca Tamás (poetry)
31) 50 American Plays by Michael Dickman (poetry)
30) Green Migraine - Michael Dickman (poetry)
29) The Triumph of Cancer by Chris McCabe (poetry)
28) The Healing Next Time by Roy McFarlane (poetry)
27) Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich (fiction)
26) The Rules Do Not Apply by Ariel Levy (non fiction)
25) The Built Moment by Lavinia Greenlaw (poetry)
24) Vertigo & Ghost by Fiona Benson (poetry)
23) How to Talk to Anyone: 92 Little Tricks for Big Success in Relationships (non fiction)
22) The End of the West by Michael Dickman (poetry)
21) Isn't Forever by Amy Key (poetry)
20) Girl Golem by Rachael Clyne (poetry)
19) £5 for this love by Stephen Daniels (poetry)
18) The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos by Anne Carson (poetry)
17) The Escapologist by Jinny Fisher (poetry)
16) A Hostile Environment: A Poetry Conversation by Nigel Kent, Sarah Thomson (poetry)
15) Rosary of Ghosts - Grant Tabard (poetry)
14) OK, Mr Field - Katherine Kilalea (fiction)
13) The Red Parts - Maggie Nelson (non fiction)
12) The Perseverance - Raymond Antrobus (poetry)
11) Moving Into The Space Cleared By Our Mothers - Mary Dorcey (poetry)
10) In the Days of Rain: A Daughter, a Father, a Cult - Rebecca Stott (non fiction)
9) New Poetries vii - Michael Schmidt (ed.) (poetry)
8) The House with Only an Attic and a Basement - Kathryn Maris (poetry)
7) The Happy Bus - Louisa Campbell (poetry)
6) My Converted Father - Sarah Law (poetry)
5) The Art of Description - Mark Doty (non fiction)
4) Three Poems - Hannah Sullivan (poetry)
3) Faber New Poets: 10 - Will Burns (poetry)
2) My Name is Leon - Kit de Waal (fiction)
1) The Water Cure - Sophie Mackintosh (fiction)

The Post Book Slump

I hesitated about naming this post The Post Book Slump, but after talking to other authors I think it is something that needs to be acknowledged and talked about. What I am talking about is that time after your book has been out for a little while - in my case six months - when the excitement has died down but you still haven't got your writing mojo back.

I have very much been in this space for the past few months. At first I put it down to that fact that I had been travelling a fair bit for readings - but actually when I am 'on it' with writing, travelling is usually a fruitful time for me creatively. I have written before about how much I love writing on trains, but at the moment even trains aren't getting me writing. It is a bit like the post hand-in slump I used to get as a student, and very much like the cavernous feeling of loss I felt both at the end of my degree and the MA. I came across this blog post today https://chroniclevitae.com/news/1046-surviving-the-post-dissertation-slump which is about post PhD slump - but a lot of it feels pretty relevant to the way it can feel once a book is published - especially the feelings of 'so what' and Imposter Syndrome.

I had mistakenly thought that this would get easier with more publications, but for some reason I have found it harder with the publication of my second book than I did with the first. I have also found doing readings harder - partly because the subject matter feels more exposing and more gritty - there is always a niggly worry at the back of my mind as to how new audiences will react, which I didn't really have with the first collection. There is also a pressure (or it feels like there is) to write something radically different to what than what I have written before - but as a wise poet once said to me: 'you can only write what you can write.'

At the moment I am on a writing retreat. I had hoped that getting away and having time to read and write would give me the kick in the pants I feel I need. Of course things are never as simple as you imagine. I have been here a week now and the writing is slow - though I have done a little. Instead I have been focusing on reading poetry books, typing up and editing, and I have also used the time to make some submissions - something I have been very slack about of late. I am planning to use some of my Arts Council DYCP grant to pay for some mentoring and time management sessions. Life is busy when I am at home and it can be very easy to get so sucked down the rabbit hole of work that there is little time for anything else.

The main thing is that I have decided not to be too hard on myself and to try not to be too impatient. If you are in the post book/hand in slump I urge you to do the same.

Writer's Block

I have been thinking quite a lot about my writing practice over the past few days. I went to see Nick Cave in Nottingham last week - he is doing a Q & A tour - basically the audience asks him questions and he answers them, and in between he plays songs and piano. It was a very powerful performance and he was on stage for a whole three hours. I found the question and answer part of the show really interesting - he said a lot of things about song writing that really resonated with me about the way I approach poetry writing. He talked a lot about the commitment to just turning up at the page - which made me think that maybe I need to have a more defined writing practice when I am at home. I tend to be much more prolific when I am away - probably because I don't have all the distractions of home and at home I don't have a designated writing space - I mostly seem to write sitting on the sofa.

Cave also said that he doesn't believe in writers block - either you are writing or not writing. This is something I totally agree with and have had debates about with friends and students. My observations of writer's block are that they mostly stem from either - being too busy, being emotionally pre-occupied (grief, new love, new baby etc) or from being a self-editor. By self-editor what I mean is when a writer is so hung up on finding the right idea or topic, or by writing something perfect, that they don't write anything at all. One of my students definitely falls into the latter category. I think that this is a case where something like morning pages can help - even if you are simply writing over and over 'I have nothing to write about'. I believe that if you keep doing this something will come eventually - I sometimes write lists of things to do, goals, wish lists, moans, anything really to get the pen moving. Getting all that stuff out of one's head and onto the page makes extra room for creative thinking. I find national poetry writing month helpful in this way too. The goal of the month is to write a poem a day. I usually find it difficult for the first six or seven days - if I can keep going that long then something usually changes or shifts and after that I find that some days I am writing two or three poems. This is what Cave meant about turning up at the page - a self editor often has a (mistaken) belief that every poem they write should be perfect. Why would you put that pressure on yourself? Artists wouldn't dream of starting a big commission without doing some preliminary sketches. In fact if you are not practicing your art (what ever it may be) regularly you get rusty. You need to keep producing to get the good stuff. In national poetry writing month I may write forty or more poems but I am happy if I have two or three that I consider worth pursuing - any more than that is a bonus. My advice if you have writer's block is 'just keep turning up at the page.'

Threat - New collection published May 30th

"Forensically detailed and disturbing, the dark and sometimes brutal undertow of small town lives seeps to the surface of these unsettling and visceral poems."
If I had to sum what Threat is about in one short sentence, it would probably be - that which makes us human.
Threat has been a long time in the making. Some of the poems were written before my last collection was published. Some of them are much newer. When I started putting the collection together it was tentatively titled Hometown. As it turned out that title had already been taken by the marvellous Carrie Etter - but as the collection evolved it seemed that it was growing beyond its town boundaries and that a different title would be more apt. Threat was the title of a poem in the collection - the poem itself was edited out but the title remained - it just seemed to perfectly fit the themes and concerns of the book. As a collection I am both proud  and a little terrified of it. It feels incredibly exposing - the poems feel personal - and some of them are - though others are not - or rather bits of them are - there is an overlap, always, between lived experience and fantasy - or rather my lived experience and the experiences of other people. Like Sharon Olds I feel I can't claim all the experiences as completely or directly mine.

"Poems like mine - I don't call them confessional, with that tone of admitting to wrong- doing. My poems have done more accusing than admitting. I call work like mine 'apparently personal'. Or in my case apparently very personal." (Sharon Olds, The Guardian, 26th July 2008).

There is some sense of working out or through some difficult stuff  - but equally the narrator is trying to put into words or make some sense of experiences and feelings that might ring true for other people - experience such as human fallibility, loss, familial dysfunction (which we all experience to some degree or another), what it feels like to live in the human body, what it feels like to be an adolescent girl in a small town, ageing etc. I hope the reader is surprised by where the collection takes them - just as I was surprised at where the writing of it took me. It certainly visits some dark places but ultimately swims back up towards the light. There is a playfulness in this collection too - that I feel Bird Sisters perhaps lacked.



The cover art for the book was done by artist and graphic designer Natty Peterkin. I knew I wanted to use an image of Thetford forest as part of the art work but other than that I had to let go of control and let Natty run with it. Natty read the book several times and decided that he wanted to make some kind of painted semi abstract shadow creature part of the image. What he came up with is perfect - is it a man? Is it a beast? Is it a teddy bear? We just don't know.

Threat comes out with Nine Arches Press on May 30th and is available for pre-order now.

Julia will be launching the collection at Cafe Writers in Norwich on June 10th with Helen Ivory and at The Poetry Cafe in Covent Garden on July 19th with Jessica Mookherjee.