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

Writing prompts for April 2026

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Our writing prompts for last Saturday’s meeting of Churchill Writers featured Papa Hemingway’s first successful novel, ‘The Sun Also Rises’, published by Charles Scribner & Sons in 1926. Hemingway famously stripped his writing to the journalistic bone but the quotations below (chosen at random, by letting the book fall open) show how he didn’t throw out his narrative skills. He was adept at suspense, surprise, economic description and writing slant. Let these take you where they will – happy writing!

At noon of Sunday, the 6th of July, the fiesta exploded. There is no other way to describe it.

When I woke in the morning I went to the window and looked out. It had cleared and there were no clouds on the mountains.

As a matter of fact, supper was a pleasant meal. Brett wore a black, sleeveless evening dress. She looked quite beautiful. Mike acted as though nothing had happened.

Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton. Do not think that I am very much impressed by that as a boxing title, but it meant a lot to Cohn. (The novel’s first line.)

We drove out along the coast road. There was the green of the headlands, the white, red-roofed villas, patches of forest, and the ocean very blue with the tide out and the water curling far out along the beach.

A 1st edition is selling today online for around £500K.

An evening with Rosie and Anthony Toner, Sat 23 May

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On the Bank Holiday weekend, last one in May, 2026 in the UK, musician and blogger Anthony Toner is visiting north Kent on his way home to Northern Ireland after touring as a special guest of Barbara Dickson and Nick Holland. His friend Maurice Kinkead, known for organising music events in Belfast for Van Morrison and now living in Sturry, is bringing Anthony and me together for a unique show combining music and poetry. Anthony’s music ranges from sweet and thoughtful through funny to a high old time and it’ll be great to see how the two of us blend in a celebration of Northern Ireland and of home and happy times, wherever we find them.

Tickets are selling well so do book fast if you’d like to come: Saturday 23 May, from 7 for a 7.30pm start at The Old Curiosity Shop in Harbour Street, Broadstairs – ‘An evening of words and music with Anthony Toner and Rosie Johnston’: event information and ticket details here.

POETRY AND PROSECCO on Sat 13 June

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I’m thrilled to be reading at Sarah Briault’s POETRY AND PROSECCO event coming up on Saturday 13 June. I was booked to read at last month’s P&P but, floored by covid, I had to pull out. I’m so pleased to be reading this time alongside my friends, both excellent poets, Charlotte Ansell and Maggie Harris. Thank you, Sarah, for organising these events so beautifully. More details are here:

On Saturday 13 June, 2026, from 7.30 – 9.30pm, Sarah Briault brings POETRY & PROSECCO to north Kent again for another  ‘fun, bubbly evening’ and I am excited to be a featured poet reading alongside CHARLOTTE ANSELL and MAGGIE HARRIS. We’ll be in the glamorous surroundings of the Oriole Cafe at Kent County Cricket’s Spitfire ground in Canterbury. Your ticket price includes a glass of Prosecco or non-alcoholic drink, and the chance to read your own words in the OPEN MIC. You can find more about the event here, with a photograph of Sarah reading ‘Safe Ground’. Books will be available at a pop-up book stall run by Chapters Coffee & Books of Sturry and tickets are through EVENTBRITE.  

What is ‘quiet writing’ anyway?

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It’s Alice in my Cambridge group we have to thank for my ‘quiet writing’ groups in north Kent. It was her suggestion that my Churchill Writers group meet for a retreat each year, for a whole weekend. No intense workshops and skills training, thank you. The most valuable thing of all, she assured me and the other writers agreed, is to have ring-fenced time away from demands so that writers can do what we love best: just sit and write.

I have transported this to the north Kent coast where I live and now, twice a month, I invite other writers to meet me in a cafe where we can sit in silence and write to our hearts’ content. That’s what a group of us did yesterday afternoon in The Old Curiosity Shop tea shop in Broadstairs, north Kent (with a paddle on Viking Bay afterwards) and it was a magical experience.

There’s no need to have anything prepared. It’s purely about turning up and being with other writers, enjoying that special energy we conjure up whenever we’re together. Heads down and in time, if we just keep writing, catching whatever comes, a portal opens. Writing floods through that can land us in something extraordinary beyond what we thought we knew. Whether we’re blocked or are laden with excellent plans, these sessions can take us by the hand into a different flavour of writing, something expansive and new, and sometimes a style we never knew we had.

Happy writing wherever you are, and let’s treasure our writing buddies everywhere.

The Old Curiosity Shop tea room in Broadstairs, north Kent

Writing prompts from Churchill Writers

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Last Saturday our writing group in Churchill College, Cambridge was together again in person for the first time in months. Through the darkness and chill of winter, we meet by Zoom, which is cheery in its own way. But there is a magic about writers being in a room together that can ignite us, especially when we write together. Below are the prompts we used that day. I hope they work for you too:

Here, in this little bay,

Full of tumultuous life and great repose,

Where, twice a day,

The purposeless, glad ocean comes and goes,

Under high cliffs, and far from the huge town,

I sit me down.

(Magna Est Veritas by Coventry Patmore, 1823–1896)

Always it happens when we are not there —

The tree leaps up alive into the air,

Small open parasols of Chinese green

Wave on each twig.

(Metamorphosis by May Sarton, 1912–1995)

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now

Is hung with bloom along the bough,

And stands about the woodland ride

Wearing white for Eastertide.

(Loveliest of Trees, the Cherry Now by A E Housman, 1859–1936)

Cherry blossoms –

lights

of years past.

(by Basho, 1644–1694)

In time of silver rain

The butterflies

Lift silken wings

To catch a rainbow cry.

(In Time of Silver Rain by Langston Hughes, 1902–1967)

In-words poetry in West Greenwich, London next Tuesday 24th

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This coming Tuesday 24 March, we’re greeting spring with an evening of poetry in West Greenwich library from 7 for 7.30pm GMT, thanks to marvellous Irena Hill of In-Words. I’m enormously honoured to be reading (from Safe Ground, Mica Press, launched there in April last year) alongside NJ Hynes and Susannah Hart, with music by harpist Lucia Foti. We’ll be focussed on home and where we find it, with wine, Irena’s home-made cakes and the best of company.