Month: May 2026

How do we write joy?

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It’s not often reviews come in poetry form. Yesterday Anthony Toner and I did a little event together, a ‘lazy Sunday afternoon’ in Chapters coffee and book shop in Sturry (near Canterbury), combining Anthony’s beautiful, laid back songs and my poetry. This morning the event organiser Maurice Kinkead has sent me a marvellous review written by a poet in the audience. Andy Robert’s review in poetry is below, straight off the WhatsApp. Very many thanks, Andy!

A Chapters’ One

How do I write joy?*

May I relay my

May Bank Holiday matinee marvel?

Under dappled sunlight spotlights,

Booked in and brilliant,

We are introduced to

The Emerald Isle

entertainment Rosie and Anthony,

Bard meets balladeer

In rhythmic rhapsody,

Refreshing our souls

Through music and poetry

Marinaded in memories.

Cedar and mahogany

Stretch in the heat

And Toner tunes

Because he cares,

Then feeds us finger pickings

wrapped in riddle and rhyme,

A smorgasbord of

Chords and clef hangers

As time past sweeps into time present;

We are both rapt and

unwrapped.

Then Rosie rises to the cause;

She’s arrived in the right place

Via all the wrong roads

To share her life’s work

Of putting the right words

in the right order,

Urging us to ‘be bolder for

tomorrow we’re older.’

Her words weave their spell

As they percolate deep

Into our sunny day

subconscious.

We pause for digestion…

Beer, wine, coffee, teas, pees anyone?

Then, hungry for more,

Once more we turn to the

finely tuned Toner

As he wonders whether we are

Too far east for Louise,

While the breeze

Wafts his melodic rhetoric

Further east.

Rosie desserts us with

sumptuous 17-syllable truffles;

Words melt delicately in our minds;

(By now we are full as Babette’s feasters.)

Then,

Suddenly:

Feck me! It’s finished!

But, like Belfast’s shipyard’s finest,

We were alright when we left there,

Sated and eager for new chapters

To be written (and crooned)

In Chapters

Soonest please.

Wonderful! If you’d like to find out more about Maurice’s events in Chapters Coffee and Books, you can follow Chapters Unplugged on Facebook or ask at Chapters.

*You’ve probably guessed that Andy (poet-reviewer) has knitted phrases and thoughts from our event through the poem. For example, his first line cleverly comes from this of mine from Safe Ground (Mica Press) published just over a year ago. I read it in answer to Anthony’s song The Road to Fivemiletown…

In the Cool of This Hottest Day
Another day closes its
sunset eye.
At least it watched me writing.


How do I write joy? Peg
phrases
on pages, spun laundry in the sun.


Tonight, I will wear party black,
celebrate
the death of past ordeals.


Turn over any heart. Count
nicks, scars.
Admire the flinty shine. The weight.


We hew more truth with our pieces than
wreckers
ever wreak in breaking.


Blackbird threads notes through this frayed
evening’s quilt,
stitches the day together.


In the cool of the close of this
hottest day,
I sense my life begin

Anthony and me outside The Old Curiosity Shop in Broadstairs where we did a similar event last Saturday evening. My thanks to Anthony, Maurice, both wonderful audiences and the staff and owners of the Old Curiosity Shop and Chapters who made it all such fun.

Writing prompts for May 2026: something for our taste buds

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Everyone was a little tense … but that’s as far as it went until the quail were served. It wasn’t enough he’d made his wife jealous earlier, for when Pedro tasted his first mouthful, he couldn’t help closing his eyes in voluptuous delight and exclaiming, ‘It’s a dish for the gods!’

(Laura Esquivel, Like Water for Chocolate, 1989)

The smell of blue grapes is sweet…

The intoxicating view tantalizes.

Your voice is hollow and cheerless,

But I’m not feeling sorry for anyone, not anyone.

(Anna Akhmatova, 1889-1966)

Herodotus, the Greek writer of the fifth century B.C. known as the ‘father of history’, explained that gathering cassia, a form of cinnamon, involved donning a full-body suit made from the hides of oxen, covering everything but the eyes.

(Tom Standage, An Edible History of Humanity by Atlantic Books, 2009)

Wine was created for the solace of man, as a slight compensation, we are told, for the creation of woman, who was merely created to keep him on the move and busy generally.

(The Savoy Cocktail Book, Constable & Co., London 1930)

Pudding (like parking and steak) is now a French word. Indeed, it entered the language in the seventeenth century, and almost every bakery in Paris sells its version of what was originally a simple English bread pudding.

(re Pudding Diplomate in Le Cordon Blue At Home, Hearts Books, New York, 1991)

I love bread pudding… Happy writing!

My research is taking over, help!

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A word for you #fiction writers about research. One trouble can be that the more you learn, the less confident you feel about getting enough of it right. Well, forget about that – you can keep researching throughout your work on the book and ask experts to check your drafts when the time is right.

Another is that you can find yourself so thrilled by looking into another era that you forget about the novel or story it’s all for. You forget to write your book.

My work in progress is a novel (again, at last, after so many years, I can’t tell you how excited I am). It’s set in the 1920s and I’m having a marvellous time dabbling, paddling, then heaving myself into deep water for a truly exhilarating swim in those waters. So much of what went on then matches us now, and so much is different. You probably know how it feels when I say that the material keeps multiplying, like weeds on the verge of getting out of control.

So yesterday I sorted it out, made lists for the future, gathered in new files.

The biggest pile is from my evenings and afternoons of quiet writing: scribbles in long hand in lovely cafes. That took me by surprise. Those two-hours patches of leaving the research miles away and allowing characters to stride up to me and talk, to tell me about the crucial times of their lives, confide about their best and worst, those have been most useful of all. My characters deepen by the day, become tougher, kinder and (to me anyway) more loveable.

My point is this: research can often take over, yes. Regular sessions of ‘quiet writing’, preferably with friends, rather than alone at home, can open that portal and allow your characters to bring you their strongest stories in their voices. The balance is wonderful, between your novel’s world and allowing the characters to circle and land.

Long live those marvellous coffee shops, especially those close to where I live in Kent, UK: Chapters Coffee and Books in Sturry, near Canterbury and The Old Curiosity Shop in Broadstairs

Happy writing!

Rosie Johnston is a human author – no AI