Yesterday somebody in a writing group I’m working with gave me flowers for helping them – so heart-warming on a cold January afternoon which was supposed to be so-called Blue Monday because of the post-Christmas dip. That’s media-speak, of course, like Black Friday. January is endless, but we have to resist it, don’t we –…

In this post I introduce some of my collage and related works. I don’t have many of them. I tend to begin using sketchbooks then just stop. I couldn’t begin this post without mention The Humument by Tom Phillipps. In this video, Phillips talks about his lifelong project. He transforms a Victorian novel into the…

I’m interested in poetry and the visual – poems that respond to art and other visual forms, works where words and images share the same space and/or use the space of the page in a vital way. Poet Julie Mellor has been posting interesting examples of redacted poetry where words of a text are blacked…

It’s great when a film and a poem gain another life through a translation project. I have been working with three talented students, two Italian, one English, at Leicester University and their lecturer, Dr Anna Milsom, to translate my poem ‘Chasing the Sun’ into Italian.  The process was fascinating, not least listening to the discussions…

NaPoWriMo I have failed at blogging once a week as I thought I might. It could have been done but, all too often, I freeze and think, well, what’s to say? Yet I enjoy reading regular posts from friends, like Jayne Stanton, who, this week,  shows us a photo of her writing journal. Like Jayne, I…

  This is a photograph of sculptor Sean Hedges-Quinn’s bronze statue of suffragette, Alice Hawkins, which was unveiled in Leicester’s Market Square last Sunday. More than a thousand people turned out on a freezing afternoon for the unveiling to mark the centenary of the 1918 Representation of the People Act. It was a rousing occasion with…

This post features my poem ‘The Talking Cure’, written in 2005. Here is the first version of the poem and comments made during the workshopping of the poem, compared with the final version, published in my prize-winning Smith/Doorstop pamphlet, Show Date and Time.     The poem begins as eight quatrains and ends up as five tercets. It…

The photo below, taken last week on a beach in Fuerterventura, shows the end of one year straying into the beginning of the next. I like this makeshift tree — and I was lucky to get away for a week where there was heat, and blue skies. Back with a bump, though, and reflecting for…

Solstice Rituals The sun is returning even though it might seem that it’s getting dark around 2pm. People of different cultures have long practised various rituals to welcome the sun such as the one practised by the Druids at Stonehenge, a place built within sightline of the solstice sunset. In Iceland, locals celebrate ‘jólablót’, a pagan…

Here we go. I’m leaping in to this post with a big splash! I haven’t blogged for ages and, as I am trying to convert this blog into a web-site to establish myself as a freelance writer/ tutor, I really should resume. My working pattern is about to change. These are months of transition. I…