Skeleton Architecture

The above quote comes from a writing exercise provided by the Glasgow Women's Library at their most recent, online, Open the Door event. The exercises were inspired by the work of Muriel Spark who was born 100 years ago, so I'm guessing it is a quote from one of her works.  This is from the first exercise. You have to use one of the quotes provided to start a story, and just keep going until you're done.  You can have a go too, you'll find   the exercises here. This is mine (with links to The Literary Gift Company and Etsy stores to buy the things in my imagined shop). Let me know if you do one of the exercises too, I'd love to see it.

A lot of people tell me that they don't like poetry, and to be honest, I get it. I was at a thing at the weekend where a bunch of people were sitting around sharing poems and lots of those poems were by dead white men and although I could say they might have had literary merit they were for the most part old and stale and boring (sorry, dead white men). The thing is that there is a massive explosion of poetry going on right now, that isn't stale, that isn't particularly male (although you wouldn't know that looking at some publications ahem), and that isn't always pale. At the thing I was at at the weekend only two people (both of us women) read poems by women and I was pretty fed up about the whole thing. I didn't want to just stamp my feet and tell the men to read more women, more living poets, just something new! That's only going to prove to them that women aren't particularly reasonable, so I figured I would do something positive instead. T...

Hi all Just to let you know that the May edition of Peeking Cat magazine is now available (with one of my tankas in it). It's not yet on their website ( here ), although you will find details there for submissions to their 2018 anthology (poetry, flash fiction, and artwork/photography). You've got ages to put a submission together as the window closes on 31st August. You can buy a hard copy of May's Peeking Cat magazine for just £2.99 from here , OR you can download it for free from here . It's got a gorgeous wee cat on the cover too.

Yay! Sun! I always have the notion when the sun appears that perhaps it's time to put the gloves and hats away, but Scotland has had me in training and so they are all still out... They'll go away for a bit come June. May Sun in Scotland Then came the sun and, desperate for light we threw our bodies in its path, heedless of the wind; relentless giver of goosebumps on our bare flesh. We went outside and talked with our neighbours, swapping the pent up stories for what seemed to be the first time in months. Stories come out in the sun. All that was held in through the long dreary months: of grey, khaki, and brown; of the world rubbed out by gathering cloud; of the tears that fall in rain. But the wind still chilled and killed the new blooms and it would not fucking stop. And then this: It did. We had sun and warmth and bare skin and barbecues for at least two days. Three perhaps, if you  count the day the rain came back. But it did come back...