Month: October 2024

Publication date for ‘Safe Ground’: Mica Press

2 Comments

Mica Press has scheduled Safe Ground, my fifth book of poetry, for publication on 25 March, 2025!

On the same day Mica Press and Irena Hill of In-words will launch Safe Ground and Michael Vince’s Legwork at West Greenwich Library in south east London. Mica writers Michael Foley, Nayma Chamchoun and Leslie Bell (Mr Mica himself) will join us to read too. You can find more about them on Mica’s website here. Irena’s poetry events are renowned for their wonderful atmosphere and her home-baked polenta cake and everyone will be welcome.

Safe Ground traces my search for safety from the Causeway Coast and Troubles Belfast to peace and a sense of home near Margate Sands where TS Eliot wrote part of The Waste Land. The shore is a significant healer in the poems and North Sea winds gust through them. I will be enormously proud to be a Mica poet, and hope you can come to celebrate with us and enjoy the depth and scale of Mica’s work. Here I am by the Mourne Wall a long time ago…

Writing prompts for poetry, fiction or short story

Leave a comment

In Margate, my writing group reckoned that our senses are their favourite writing prompts and that visual prompts are particularly wonderful. The spirit of JMW Turner haunts the air and skies around here and the Turner Contemporary Gallery is just around the corner, so we’re not short of visual stimulus. In case you’re looking for images today, here are some photographs – happy writing.

In Cambridge yesterday though, the writers called for written prompts as well. These below are culled from the wonderful poetry anthology, The Rattle Bag edited by Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes:

The tree the tempest with a crash of wood

Throws down in front of us is not to bar

Our passage to our journey’s end for good

But just to ask us who we think we are.

‘On a Tree Fallen Across the Road’, 1921, by Robert Frost

Before the sixth day of the next new year,

Strange wonders in this kingdom shall appear.

From ‘On the Cards and Dice’ by Sir Walter Raleigh, c 1553-1618

My mother said to me not to be talking with you today,

or tomorrow, or on the Sunday;

it was a bad time she took for telling me that;

it was shutting the door after the house was robbed.

Translation from Irish anon by Lady Augusta Gregory, 1852-1932

One of the pumps has been shot away – it is generally thought we are sinking

From ‘Song of Myself’ by Walt Whitman, 1819-1892

It was the evening all afternoon

It was snowing

And it was going to snow.

The blackbird sat

In the cedar limbs.

From ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’ (any one of them could serve as a prompt) by Wallace Stevens, 1879-1955

The Angel that presided o’er my birth

Said, ‘Little creature, form’d of Joy and Mirth,

Go love without the help of any Thing on Earth.’

From ‘The Angel that presided o’er my birth’ by William Blake, 1757-1827

Whatever works for you is your best prompt. Happy writing!

Writing Prompts

1 Comment

Last Sunday at Marine Studios in Margate, my Where to Start Writing group were chatting about what sort of prompts work best. Many writers don’t need prompts of course. Their words churn in the brain like planes stacking above an airport and all they need is a quiet place and time. But sometimes we sit down to write and can’t get going.

If you have the confidence to start just anywhere, you won’t go far wrong. Fill a few pages with free scribbling, and keep writing – eyes down, let anything come – even when you think the words have dried. In time and with luck, your priorities about what you’re writing and then your story will find their way through to you.

Another way is use prompts. What did the Margate writers like best? Visual imagery was high on the list and I’ve added to my page of photo prompts here for you to have fun with. (I used to be able to add new photos to the top of the page but some update or other means we have to scroll down now, I’m afraid.)

Sensual prompts work too. As Marcel Proust knew, our sense of smell is marvellous for leading us by the nose down memory lane. Taste, touch, sounds especially music, they all work too. For me, anything from a kitchen drawer or in the bathroom cupboard can be useful. Hold whatever it is, really feel its textures and smells, its possibilities, its past, take a moment, then start writing…

A single word can be a good jump start sometimes. Specific words – blanket, door, pebble, rings, pages, trumpet – or abstracts like peace, exile, home, need, money, hope.

Character writing is excellent of course and my blogposts about getting deep inside your characters are useful there. A way back into writing a novel after a time of distraction is to choose an emotion (rage, love, grief etc.) and write a monologue for each of your main characters where they talk to you (and you write on your page or screen) how they feel about that emotion and how they are when they are deep in it. That should have them wading back into your imagination, ready for action.

Happy writing, however you do it. Here is a taster of my photo prompts for today:

West Greenwich, London last week – photos

Leave a comment

Our poetry event at West Greenwich Library in south east London last week has left such a lovely glow. Everything was beautifully organised and hosted by Irena Hill of in-words.co.uk – her 59th event in a series of exquisite poetic experiences – and I am deeply grateful to have been asked to read. Huge thanks to everybody who was there. A few photos, starting with Irena and In-Words

Our poets above are Jane McLaughlin, Alex Josephy, Mick Delap and myself (with Irena in the middle)

Below with NJ Hynes and Gillie Robic

Irena’s next event is on NOVEMBER 26th at West Greenwich Library – an evening with poets who write in English while English is not their native language, she says – with Natan Barreto, Isabel Bermudez and Kostya Tsolakis (and more). Please come if you can.

West Greenwich Library in London tonight!

Leave a comment

I have been asked to read tonight, Tuesday October 8th, at West Greenwich Library in London for an In-Words poetry event on the theme: ‘Loving Nature in Troubled Times’. Doors open at 6.45 for a 7pm start.

Due to illness, Jude Rosen and Derrick Porter can’t make it and we all wish them better soon. So Mick Delap and I will be joining Alex Josephy and Jane McLaughlin. In-Words events are always excellent – Irena Hill looks after her audiences so well. I’m hugely honoured and look forward to the evening very much.