In Boots Like These … Kendal Mountain Literature Festival Goes Virtual

Kendal Mountain Festival is a wonderful four day event in November that brings a much needed boost of colour and excitement to the town and has done for four decades. A tented basecamp village springs up overnight in the Brewery Arts Centre, the main arteries of Kirkland, Highgate and Stricklandgate throb with quilt jacketed bodies,…

Coming Home

My poem from the Handstand Press Anthology of Cumbrian Poetry which, along with Incoming, I’ll be reading at the Norman Nicholson Festival at the end of this month in Millom. Coming Home I wonder if, like me, the winter skies at Cunswick, swathed in low cloud, above old scars of crag and frozen garlands of…

Norman Nicholson Festival

The Norman Nicholson Festival is taking place in Millom (of course) over the weekend of June 29th – 30th. The events have been organised by the Norman Nicholson Society. Among other attractions, the key note speaker will be Sean O’Brien; multiple award-winning poet whose laurels include the TS Eliot Prize, Northern Writer of the Year…

Yew

In search of yew in Borrowdale that shared the sun with Judas, I walk a rutted path, aware of twinges, snares, rocks, carrying your paints and easel along with this bowl of words, no longer fit for consumption, mould festering in knots from sour touching fruit within. And if these words were berries, gardeners would…

Kendal Mountain Literature Festival 2018

Happening in two weeks time: poems from This Place I Know (anthology of Cumbrian poetry published by Handstand Press) read by notable poets plus meeee at the Kendal Mountain Literature Festival in the Malt Room at the Brewery Arts Centre (Saturday 17th November 11:30 am).

This Place I Know

Wednesday 17th October, 2018 and at 6:30 pm I’m driving to Grasmere for the latest launch of the Handstand Press anthology of Cumbrian poetry at the Jerwood Centre. Hoping to be able to get a contributor’s copy for myself and Em, I had thought the evening would consist of the editors reading a selection of…

Is that the time already?

Good grief, we’re half-way through September; this soapbox go-cart careers uncontrollably toward the cliff edge of oblivion, while the steering wheel comes off in my hands and I begin to regret that I didn’t incorporate a brake as a design feature. Ah well … At least Kendal Poetry Festival was good. I enjoyed listening to…

Swings and Swirly Things

This has happened before, this poetical déjà vu thing, where one bit of submission news (either good or bad) is almost immediately followed by a further bit of submission news of the opposite hue (either bad or good). About ten minutes after finding out that Strix had passed over a poem, I receive another e-mail telling…