Marching forward (oh dear...)

It’s been too long since I’ve used such a terrible pun; please forgive me. I just got back from a trip to British Columbia in Canada so my writing head has not yet been reattached, so to speak. Lots of great things coming up, including: Definitions of Distance (my pamphlet), a collaborative performance for the NCLA Festival of Belonging and the launch of the South Shields SeaChange works (including, hopefully, a limited run of the sequence I’ve been working on – ‘The Coast Will Wait Behind You’). I can’t elaborate on any of these things in the mean time, however, so this is essentially going to be another redundant post. What else...oh yeah, had a rejection from The Rialto. I’d sent them a bunch of poems from the pamphlet ages ago and I think the rejection is probably fair; they don’t really have much of a spark about them. Hopefully I can change them for the pamphlet, or else I’ll just have to live and let die, or something. Good news, though, in that 4 different poems from the pamphlet have been accepted by Cadaverine and should be up in a few weeks. The poetry development course I’ve been doing has now finished, leaving me with several new poems and a refreshed outlook on what it is I ought to be writing about and how I might do it in a more urgent way. Thanks to Clare and the other poets on the course for that, I guess – it was great to be back in a critical environment. Speaking of which, I went along to The Writers’ Cafe in Newcastle for the first time this morning. It’s a great place to convene with like-minded people and forces me to get out of bed and actually do some writing, so that can only be a positive thing. There will be more, but it’s sunny now, so I must bask while it lasts.

Negatives

Just a quick one: my flash essay, 'Negatives', has just been published by Friction. Forming a lead-in to the NCLA festival of Belonging, these short essays provide insights into what it means to belong - or not belong - to any community or area. I hope my effort provides an interesting slight on that.