Skip to main content

Yorkshire Day & Maytree Press

Happy Yorkshire Day! 

It's a weird kind of Yorkshire day with lockdown closing down my home town of Ilkley where we were supposed to be this weekend. I had hoped for afternoon tea at the White House on the moor, instead I'll be visiting the new market in my new home town in Scotland.

This time last year I was on holiday in Scarborough (pictured) with my family, and my poem, My First Kiss, had just come out on the rather marvellous The Poetry Village website. You can see that here.


For a while I'd been trying to get a publisher interested in a small collection of my poems, with no luck. When I saw that Maytree Press, the independent publisher associated with The Poetry Village, were looking for small collections I decided I'd send them something, but instead of sending them poems from the collection I'd brought together myself, I sent them poems that were connected with Yorkshire. 

To be honest, I didn't expect much to happen. I'd been rejected many times, and what I hoped to get out of this submission was the skill to vary what I sent out according to the publisher I sent it to. So, when they got back to me offering me a place in their publishing schedule I was so surprised that I nearly said no!

I'm delighted I didn't. My book, First Kiss, is a gorgeous wee collection (buy it here), which I really enjoyed bringing together with my editor, David Coldwell. It's full of poems I love, and it is gorgeous. It was David's idea to use Annie Ovenden's Ophelia for the cover, and I was blown away with it. It's such a beautiful picture, and absolutely perfect for the collection, it even looks like it could have been painted in the park in Ilkley. 

Obviously, bringing it out in lockdown has not been the experience I was expecting, but that just means it's going to take a bit longer before I can do the physical events I'm still looking forward to.

If you've got 20-25 poems ready to go into a collection, Maytree Press has just opened for submissions again. Find our more here

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Interview with Gutter

It was lovely to be invited to do an interview with the marvellous Gutter magazine in the light of my poem, Bending to Nightbreak , being published (in fabulous company) in issue 27. Here's a couple of pics they shared on Instagram from it - a picture of me, and a quote. You can find the whole interview, and one with Simon Wade too, here . 

A wee update

  Hello! Thought I'd give you a wee update on how things are going in my world! Little Gods came out with Roswell Press at the end of September 2023 and I was really busy for the first bit of October, reading poems from the new book at various local events. I'm really grateful for all the books people bought, but there's still copies available, either online via Amazon  for Kindle or in paperback, or you can get in touch with me at caralmckee (at) gmail (dot) com to get a signed copy of Little Gods and/or First Kiss sent to you in the post! After my reading frenzy at the beginning of October I took a little break for a birthday celebration frenzy (it's still going on, there's a lot to celebrate). I've been meaning to read a couple of poems online too, but I'm having a flare of trigeminal neuralgia which is triggered by talking, so that will come when it comes. I'm hoping to read at the Scottish Writer's Centre launch of their new Mountain & Glen

Chapbook number two is coming!

  Great news today as I'm working on a new chapbook coming soon with Roswell Publishing. This is all I'm going to show you right now - my beautiful notebook, picked up at the Bronte Parsonage Museum in Haworth, on my last ever day out with my Mum. This notebook is full of mostly glued in, revised, scribbled on and annotated poems, some of which are going in to the new wee collection with Roswell. Why did I want to work with Roswell Publishing for this collection? I was following Rae on Instagram because I'd seen her pop up in some other writerly stuff I was interested in, and she seemed to be working with a load of writers I am currently obsessed with - like Claire Askew, Kate Garrett, and Alice Tarbuck for example, so when I saw she was calling for submissions, I went for it. She's been such a joy to work with so far, and I look forward to being able to tell you more about my second chapbook! Find out more about Roswell Publishing on their website , or head over to the