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 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.

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.

Books Read in 2019 - a record

• 156) The Cutting Room by Louise Welsh (fiction)
• 155) Bright Dead Things by Ada Limon (poetry)
• 154) The Ward by Louisa Campbell (poetry)
• 153) The White Hotel by D.M. Thomas (fiction)
• 152) Mixed-Race Superman by Will Harris (non fiction)
• 151) Fortune Cookie by Jenna Clarke (poetry)
• 150) Meat Songs by Jack Nicholls, Mark Andrew Webber (Illustrator) (poetry)
• 149) I CAN’T WAIT FOR THE WENDING by Wayne Holloway-Smith (poetry)
• 148) The Weather in Normal by Carrie Etter (poetry)
• 147) Disko Bay by Nancy Campbell (poetry)
• 146) The End of Everything by Megan Abbott (fiction)
• 145) Translating Mountains by Yvonne Reddick (poetry)
• 144) The Distal Point by Fiona Moore (poetry)
• 143) All the Naked Daughters by Anna Kisby (poetry)
• 142) As Slow As Possible by Kit Fan (poetry)
• 141) The Illegal Age by Ellen Hinsey (poetry)
• 140) Solo for Mascha Voice/Tenuous Rooms by Jack Underwood (poetry)
• 139) Jinx by Abigail Parry (poetry)
• 138) The End of the West by Michael Dickman (poetry)
• 137) Holloway by Robert Macfarlane, Stanley Donwood (Illustrations), Dan Richards (non fiction)
• 136) The Shepherd's Hut by Tim Winton (fiction)
• 135) Everyone Knows I Am a Haunting by Shivanee Ramlochan (poetry)
• 134) Imagine Me Gone by Adam Haslett (fiction)
• 133) Nowhere Nearer by Alice Miller (poetry)
• 132) Explosives Licence by Jonathan Totman (poetry)
• 131) Get the Guy by L.A. Rich (non fiction)
• 130) Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative by Austin Kleon (non fiction)
• 129) Drinking: Vintage Minis by John Cheever (fiction, short stories)
• 128) The Fault in Our Stars by John Green (fiction)
• 127) What Are You After? by Josephine Corcoran (poetry)
• 126) MFA in a Box: A Why to Write Book by John Rember (non fiction)
• 125) Demi-Gods by Eliza Robertson (fiction)
• 124) Familiars by Linda Rose Parkes (poetry)
• 123) The Becoming of Lady Flambe by Holly Magill (poetry)
• 122) Dark Places by Gillian Flynn (fiction)
• 121) My Converted Father by Sarah Law (poetry)
• 120) Faber New Poets 12 by Declan Ryan (poetry)
• 119) Death in Midsummer and Other Stories by Yukio Mishima (fiction, short stories)
• 118) Rapture (New Irish Voices #1) by Roisin Kelly (poetry)
• 117) Faber New Poets 15 by Sam Buchan-Watts (poetry)
• 116) playtime by Andrew McMillan (poetry)
• 115) The Republic of Motherhood by Liz Berry (poetry)
• 114) Kiss In The Hotel Joseph Conrad And Other Stories by Howard Norman (fiction, short stories)
• 113) Who Seemed Alive & Altogether Real by Padraig Regan (poetry)
• 112) Human Wishes by Robert Hass (poetry)
• 111) Blackbird, Bye Bye by Moniza Alvi (poetry)
• 110) Depths by Henning Mankell (fiction)
• 109) The Theatre of Confection by pauline suett barbieri (poetry)
• 108) The White Road and Other Stories by Tania Hershman (fiction, short stories)
• 107) A Bag of Hands by Mather Schneider (poetry)
• 106) Noose and Hook by Lynn Emanuel (poetry)
• 105) In Her Shambles by Elizabeth Parker (poetry)
• 104) Black Bicycle by Lesley Quayle (poetry)
• 103) After Eden by Stella Wulf (poetry)
• 102) Good Stock Strange Blood by Dawn Lundy Martin (poetry)
• 101) When My Brother Was an Aztec by Natalie Díaz (poetry)
• 100) Moon Over Melbourne and Other Poems by Yu Ouyang (poetry)
• 99) Dirty Laundry by Deborah Alma (poetry)
• 98) The Bitters by Susie Campbell (poetry)
• 97) he True Keeps Calm Biding Its Story by Rusty Morrison (poetry)
• 96) No Art: Poems by Ben Lerner (poetry)
• 95) A Bargain with the Light by Jacqueline Saphra (poetry)
• 94) A Hurry of English by Mary Jean Chan (poetry)
• 93) stack by James Davies (poetry)
• 92) Suffolk Bang by Adam Warne (poetry)
• 91) Wound by Richard Scott (poetry)
• 90) Soho by Richard Scott (poetry)
• 89) Alarum by Wayne Holloway-Smith (poetry)
• 88) small white monkeys by Sophie Collins (non fiction)
• 87) A Watchful Astronomy by Paul Deaton (poetry)
• 86) A Knowable World by Sarah Wardle (poetry)
• 85) Big Bones by Laura Dockrill (fiction)
• 84) Fox Unkennelled by Myfanwy Fox (poetry)
• 83) Mayakovsky's Revolver by Matthew Dickman (poetry)
• 82) Self-Portrait with the Happiness by David Tait (poetry)
• 81) Dying Notes by Reuben Woolley (poetry)
• 80) Fields Away by Sarah Wardle (poetry)
• 79) The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (poetry)
• 78) The Wound Register by Esther Morgan (poetry)
• 77) Cumshot in D Minor by Melissa Lee-Houghton (poetry)
• 76) Primers Volume 3 edited by Jane Commane (poetry)
• 75) Three Poems by Hannah Sullivan (poetry)
• 74) Fourth Person Singular by Nuar Alsadir (poetry)
• 73) Inside the Wave by Helen Dunmore (poetry)
• 72) Weemoed by Tim Dooley (poetry)
• 71) We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (non fiction)
• 70) A Question of Blood by Ian Rankin (fiction)
• 69) Orpheus in the Park: Poems by Rose Solari (poetry)
• 68) A Communion Of Breath by Derek Harper (poetry)
• 67) Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude by Ross Gay (poetry)
• 66) The Casual Perfect by Lavinia Greenlaw (poetry, re-read)
• 65) The days that Followed Paris by Paul Stephenson (poetry)
• 64) Somewhere Between Rose and Black by Claire Walker (poetry)
• 63) Asylum by Sean Borodale (poetry)
• 62) All My Mad Mothers by Jacqueline Saphra (poetry, re-read)
• 61) House by Myra Connell (poetry, re-read)
• 60) Shrines of Upper Austria by Phoebe Power (poetry)
• 59) I Ate the Cosmos for Breakfast by Melissa Studdard (poetry)
• 58) Calling a Wolf a Wolf by Kaveh Akbar (poetry)
• 57) Seal Wife by Kitty Coles (poetry)
• 56) In These Days of Prohibition by Caroline Bird (poetry)
• 55) So Glad I'm Me by Roddy Lumsden (poetry)
• 54) British Museum by Daljit Nagra (poetry)
• 53) The Forward Book of Poetry 2018 by Various (poetry)
• 52) God Loves You by Kathryn Maris (poetry)
• 51) The Ice Factory by Philip Gross (poetry)
• 50) Enough of Green by Anne Stevenson (poetry)
• 49) Cry Baby by Gareth Writer-Davies (poetry)
• 48) The Devil's Tatoo by Brett Evans (poetry)
• 47) Uninvited Guests by Gill Lambert (poetry)
• 46) The Son by Carrie Etter (poetry)
• 45) Record and Play by Degna Stone (poetry)
• 44) Every Salt Advance by Andrew McMillan (poetry)
• 43) The Moon is a Supporting Player by Andrew McMillan (poetry)
• 42) The Knowledge Weapon by Annette C. Boehm (poetry)
• 41) You've never seen a doomsday like it by Kate Garrett (poetry)
• 40) White is a Color by Rosemarie Waldrop (poetry)
• 39) Don't Call Us Dead by Danez Smith (poetry)
• 38) The Hoopoe at the Execution, Villebois by Tom Kelly (poetry)
• 37) All We Saw by Anne Michaels (poetry)
• 36) ShallCross by C.D. Wright (poetry)
• 35) Who Is Mary Sue? by Sophie Collins (poetry)
• 34) fAt aRouNd tHe MiddLe by Jane Burn (poetry)
• 33) Eidolon by Sandeep Parmar (poetry)
• 32) Glass by Elisabeth Sennitt Clough (poetry)
• 31) How to be a Poet by Jo Bell (non fiction)
• 30) The Pocket Poetry Book of Anger by Sarah Miles (poetry)
• 29) Swims by Elizabeth-Jane Burnett (poetry)
• 28) Natural Phenomena by Meryl Pugh (poetry)
• 27) Then Suddenly-- by Lynn Emanuel (poetry)
• 26) Metropoetica by Ingmāra Balode (poetry)
• 25) Assembly Lines by Jane Commane (poetry)
• 24) A Slither of Air by Alison Lock (poetry)
• 23) Flies by Michael Dickman (poetry)
• 22) There Is an Anger that Moves by Kei Miller (poetry)
• 21) You are mistaken by Sean Wai Keung (poetry)
• 20) Incorrect Merciful Impulses by Camille Rankine (poetry)
• 19) Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions by Valeria Luiselli (non fiction)
• 18) Caldbeck by Jenny Pagdin (poetry)
• 17) Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders (fiction)
• 16) Speaking in Bones by Kathy Reichs (fiction)
• 15) Of Mutability by Jo Shapcott (poetry, re-read)
• 14) Grace by Esther Morgan (poetry, re-read)
• 13) Standing Female Nude by Carol Ann Duffy (poetry, re-read)
• 12) BOOM! by Carolyn Jess-Cooke (poetry)
• 11) Ten: Poets of the New Generation by Karen McCarthy Woolf (poetry)
• 10) little armoured by Rebecca Perry (poetry)
• 9) A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf (non fiction)
• 8) Ticker-Tape by Rishi Dastidar (poetry)
• 7) Bestiary: Poems by Donika Kelly (poetry)
• 6) lemon, egg, bread by Laura Elliott (poetry)
• 5) The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything by Ken Robinson (non fiction)
• 4) Joy by Sasha Dugdale
• 3) Hyem by Robyn Bolam (poetry)
• 2) LaRose by Louise Erdrich (fiction)
• 1) Sphinx by Cat Woodward (poetry)

Running with it - back to writing (again)

After a few weeks of barely writing (post hand in slump!) I have been on a writing binge. Partly fuelled by the workshops and readings I went to at Aldeburgh Poetry Festival and partly fuelled by a shift in my poetry thinking - something too hard to quantify exactly, but nevertheless I know it has happened. It's true I have been reading a lot and that definitely helps, and not just poetry books, but books concerned with writing - I found Mark Doty's "The Art of Description" particularly inspiring and really readable. Through looking closely at some well known (and not so well known) poems Doty focusses in on the essence of what makes good poems good.

Which brings me to this week when I was lucky enough to attend not one but two really inspiring poetry events. the first was Jacob Polley performing his show "Lamanby" at the National Centre for Writing in Norwich. "Lamanby" is a show featuring poems from Polley's award winning collection Jackself with video, sounds and music and atmospheric lighting, the Medieval Dragon Hall was the perfect setting for it. Polley is a superb performer and I am still thinking about the show almost a week later and have started re-reading the book - which, has, in turn, fed into my writing. The second inspiring performance I attended this week was Jill Abram's Stablemates in London featuring Mark Doty, Andrew McMillan and Fiona Benson. I don't very often book up for events in London as it is such a pain to get there, but Mark Doty rarely comes to Britain so it was too good an opportunity to pass up. I was certainly not disappointed - what an evening. Benson read from her forthcoming collection - the poems were mostly concerned with rape - to be honest I found them quite harrowing and was glad that she went first, though I think the book will be really good. Andrew McMillan is always a joy to hear read and did not disappoint. He read from "Playtime". Mark Doty was amazing - he read a bunch of new poems of his laptop. He was erudite and engaging and I went home with my poetry well brimming over and very pleased I had gone.

I started my latest writing binge in Aldeburgh. I began writing almost the minute I got there - it was like I had been given permission to put on my writing head - and I haven't really stopped since. I have begun several things that might become sequences of sorts. One thing came out of an exercise that I set my Friday class. We had been talking about sequences and what kinds  of topics might be good to write sequences about. We had brainstormed a list and I suggested writing about the thing on your list that you were least attracted to writing about. My subject was writing. I never usually write poems about writing - it's just not my thing - so that was the topic I felt I had to choose. I had bought in some books of sequences - one of which was "Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil" by C.D. Wright. The book is an exploration of writing, part essay, part poetry, part memoir. I picked it up and started flicking through it for inspiration and some phrases in pages I had previously bookmarked leaped out at me. This is how my sequence started - it is part comment on writing process, part fictional narrative and is interspersed with quotes by C.D. Wright. I am interested in juxtaposing the different elements against each other - I am not sure if it works but I found it exciting to write and edit. here is a short extract:

"The bishop had stopped paying attention and was dipping his biscuit into his lukewarm tea.

The poems were roaring along the road outside the overlarge window, they had the shapes of busses and lorries, cars even – but I wasn’t fooled.

‘Some of us do not read or write particularly for pleasure or instruction, but to be changed, healed, changed.’ (C.D. Wright)

When I returned from the bathroom the bishop was scrutinizing my notebook.

Your trouble, he said, is the undercurrents, everything beneath your surface is oily dark."

Ye Gods

It is September. I am doing the September write a poem a day challenge. I am doing it because since I went to Rugby to meet with my editor and we licked my collection into a final order I have not been writing much, and I miss it. I need to get back to it.

After the initial excitement of finalising when the book is coming out (May since you ask), and the tweaking of the poems - I went into a kind of limbo. I wasn't too worried, I recognise the pattern. At university we called it the post hand in slump. However much you think it won't happen, it does. I see my son go through it every time he comes back from being on tour with his band, and every time they finish an album. I have seen my friends go through it too once they have sent collections off to their publishers.

The second stage after finalising a collection (and I recognise this from last time too) is the oh my god what have I done phase. The phase where you become convinced that your book will upset and offend everyone on the planet. The phase where you start to doubt yourself and your choices - where it is tempting to fiddle and tweak - and mostly at this stage it is best to sit on your hands and not do that (beyond the odd comma) because the book has been accepted and edited after all. It's also best not to burn the manuscript, blow up the computer, or run screaming into the distance - all of which become hugely tempting at this point in the process. It's funny I had been thinking about this when I was walking into the city today and my friend Rose who is preparing for her first art show posted about it on Facebook. She described it as the urge to throw herself out of a window. Yes I get that - I really do. I am hoping writing a poem a day - even if it's just five minutes of writing (which mostly it is). I am on day 13 and so far I have written one thing I like - onwards and upwards.

Collection Update

Over a month since I last blogged and a lot has happened.

Firstly I went away to a little chalet on the Norfolk coast that has no internet and spent several days finally getting the new collection in an order that I was relatively happy with. There is a kind of magic that happens when I am away from home alone, and that coupled with the fact that I was mid way through NaPoWriMo meant that as well as working on the collection order I also wrote a whole new sequence of poems. The new sequence is very different so it won't go in the collection I am currently working on - it may be a pamphlet in its own right, or it may turn out to be the beginnings of another collection - only time will tell. I am quite excited about it though.

I did finish the ordering and then last week I went to Rugby to meet with Jane at Nine Arches HQ. I have to admit I was more than a little nervous in case she didn't like it. Luckily she did! We spent a very intense and productive day going through the collection poem by poem - the upshot was that the order is now pretty fixed. We took thirteen poems out and I need to find or write something to bring together the final section. I am very happy with it. There is still a bit of work to do - but it doesn't feel insurmountable. We settled on "Threat" as the title - which was the title I have liked all along - but we took the poem of the same title out as it is not strong enough to bear the weight of being the title poem. Publication date has been set as end of January 2019. Very exciting.

collection as an entity in its own right - making sense of chaos

The second day of NaPoWriMo (National Poetry Writing Month) and today marks a long awaited return to thinking about my collection. At the beginning of March I went to see my mentor (Pascale Petit) in Cornwall and I have avoided looking at it since. I had thought it was finished and I had shown it to a friend who also thought it was finished. Pascale, however, didn't agree. She felt that the title was misleading and that I needed to rethink the sections and put a different poem as the opener. She was right of course, it is just uncomfortable to hear and involves a major rethink of order. Since I saw her I have been engaged in a period of busyness, creative procrastination and avoidance, but of course while all that is going on the subconscious mind is worrying away at the problem.

Today I started really thinking about the order in earnest. Pascale was definitely right about the poem she suggested as the opener. I realised that I have  been resistant to putting it first because it feels more scary, as of course it sets the whole tone for the book. Aside from that I am still nowhere near knowing how to reorder the poems. This morning I spent some time looking at some of my favourite collections (All My Mad Mothers, What the Living Do, Falling Awake and Say Something Back) to see how they are ordered. I also re-read Ordering the Storm: How to Put Together a Book of Poems, which is a book I read when I was working on my first collection. One of the things I realised from reading it again is that maybe I have been too obvious in clumping themed poems together - for example family poems, relationship poems, home town poems etc. I may need to be more fluid in my connections and find other ways that the poems speak to one another. Originally the book was divided into five sections, the titles of which were: Honey Don't Blow Up the Kids; Heart is where the Home Is; Tell Me More Lies About Love; Family and Other Distractions; and Evidence of Body. I may keep a couple of these in some form but I am not sure yet.

To help me think about order I started thinking about what the themes are in a less overt way. This is what I have come up with so far:

body as an entity in its own right

body as a house for the soul or spirit

body as commodity (that which we have become)

grief vs guilt

making sense of the past

making sense of emotion

the physical weight of the past

class and the struggle to know where/how/if one fits in

the family as guardian and destroyer

self vs identity

the curse/blessing of femininity (woman and her relationship to the world)

hometown (where do we come from/where do we really belong?)

Of course some of these overlap one another, but I am hoping it will help me think about how the poems hang together. I have also started writing more bits that may help tie it all together. I had also been waiting to see if a sequence I started in Devon was good enough to go into the collection - it's always wise to get a bit of distance between writing something and deciding if it actually has legs. It is too easy to get overexcited about something fresh and think it is the best thing you have written. I think this sequence is good enough though and including it will change the shape of the whole, which is probably a good thing. The hardest thing will be saying goodbye to a few poems that I am fond of and that have already been published. Never easy but it will make for a better MS in the long run.

My plan now is to work some more on order and fitting the new poems in and then make a date to meet up with Jane at Nine Arches Press, who has brilliant editorial eye.

Read about ordering my first collection here