Welcome

Writing, motherhood and third collections

Once upon a time, I wrote a blog every Sunday. I used to publish a poem by a poet I admired, and talk about why I liked it, interspersed with news from my week as a writer. After quite a few years, and one of my friends pointing out I could have written a novel with the amount of words I churned out, the blog eventually fizzled out.

My fascination with process, and how writing about what I’m thinking, teaching, reading and doing feeds into my own writing is still there. I’ve been enjoying reading substacks by other poets such as Helen Mort, Katie Hale and Wendy Pratt - so I thought I would have a go.

It also feels like a completely new phase in my life - I’ve just moved house to Hebden Bridge and I love it here. It’s the first place I’ve chosen to live, rather than kind of being blown by the wind. I’m very tentatively exploring ADHD and the possibility of going down the long road of getting a diagnosis (or not) and I’m also in the process of putting together my third collection. My plan is to have a go at documenting what happens, not just for anyone that wants to read this, but also for myself.

The process of putting a book together feels both mysterious and familiar now. There are no rules I’ve learnt from the other two times that I’ve done it, except perhaps the most important one of all - I now measure the energy I put into working on my book in terms of time, rather than in terms of outcome. So I put two hours work into the book, and I don’t worry about what that translates to, as it might only translate to moving one poem from the beginning to the end. It is, I tell myself, about the energy I put in, and if we put energy into the world, we will get it back again.

This time round, I’m also able to recognise the process of despair that I have gone through each time. Being able to say - ah, here is the wave of crashing self doubt is both helpful and unhelpful of course.

I also would like to do a little bit of what my old blog did - so every now and then, I may be discussing someone else’s poem, or collection and talking about why I like it. And of course, there will be things I’m writing about on here that I didn’t expect at all, things I couldn’t have predicted.

Thank you for reading this first post, and see you on the other side!