Just to say…

I’m still here, beavering away with pen and notebooks, typing up multiple drafts of assembled words which might pass as ‘stories’ (or, more accurately, beginnings of stories) and printing them out to re-write and edit, collecting many reams of paper in the meantime. In 2020, my aim was to write fiction again, rather than poetry, and I signed up for a weekly writing fiction class at Bristol University (Department of Continuing Education) as a means of taking my project seriously. When I first started writing, in 1992 while a mature student studying for various degrees, I was writing (and sending out for consideration) short fiction and plays, and in the ensuing years I had some successes before my started-late writing ‘career’ was waylaid by marriage, children, a house move, a need to earn an income – life, in other words. My writing plans were put on hold until around 2008, when I began reading and writing poetry, for the first time, with intent. To date, I’ve had three pamphlets and one full collection published – I wrote a bit about my started late, stop-start writing journey here.

But back to 2020. A return to fiction was my plan and I took my new notebook on the train to Bristol about three times before life, again, thwarted my ambitions, this time in the form of a global pandemic. Poetry, somehow, continued to squeeze itself in to my upended life – I couldn’t find enough space for longer form writing – and I’m grateful to Live Canon for publishing a pamphlet of my poems last year and to Maria Isakova Bennet for publishing a mini pamphlet of my work in the Coast to Coast to Coast competition.

So, this is where I am, third paragraph down, letting you know that I’m slowly, laboriously, filling some of my notebooks with longer form writing. However, some notebooks are still dedicated to poems, since I cheated on prose and scripts with poetry a long time ago and I’m not quite ready to leave that relationship. Perhaps I can find a way to have an open friendship with more than one form of writing. That’s certainly what I’m striving for.

I hope all is well with you, whatever you’re writing (or not writing).