Skeleton Architecture

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,

First Kiss is available now! You can buy it from me - just click the button below to buy your copy, which I'm happy to sign.    Want it signed? Alternatively, you can buy it in the Maytree Press shop , along with other books like the award winning The Collective Nouns for Birds by Amanda Huggins. Here's what people have been saying about it so far: "terribly beautiful, and also terribly intriguing..." - Dave  "Your book is fantastic, love all of them, well done" - Wendy If you missed the live launch on Instagram you can still find it on IGTV here . 

With First Kiss coming out this Friday - 22nd May 2020, and now available to pre-order (you'll find the order button in the sidebar from the homepage). I was hoping to do all sorts of events, and plan to, once we can do that kind of thing again, but for now I'm going to be doing a live launch on Insta at 5.30pm on Friday 22nd. You'll find my Instagram account  here , and here's the deets.

My first poetry collection comes out on 22nd May 2020, and is now available to pre-order. I was hoping to do all sorts of events, and plan to, once we can do that kind of thing again, but for now I'm going to be doing a live launch on Insta at 5.30pm on Friday 22nd. You'll find me here . It's a coming of age chapbook, beautifully put together by Maytree Press, with gorgeous cover art from Annie Ovenden. Here's what my publisher had to say: First Kiss is a remarkable debut collection from Yorkshire born writer Cara L McKee,  And here's a little taster: I thought that my first kiss was required for the rich boy tearing petals from gardenias in October, throwing them from the old bridge into the Wharfe, wailing that the blooms would get more kisses from the water than he would get from me. If you would like to get a copy, I can send you a signed one - just let me know in the note to seller.   You'll find the button to buy a copy in the side bar on

On Tuesday 10th March, just before everything got a bit mad on the meeting up front, at the very lovely Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA) in inclement Glasgow, the Scottish Writers' Centre launched its beautiful chapbook - Island & Sea - the first in a series of five. I'm really happy to have had my poems chosen to be serialised throughout the series, and was delighted to have the chance to take part in the launch, and to get to hear the other work in the gorgeous wee chapbook, and the stories behind it. Also I'd never before had the experience of a signing table, and that was gloriously friendly I can't find the details of how to buy your own copy, because the Scottish Writers' Centre are working on their website just now, but perhaps you could email them here.  It's a truly lovely little book, put together by Figment Books under the meticulous eye of the very lovely Laura Fyfe. I was hard pressed to choose a wee snippet to quote, but I couldn't

So this is happening!!!!! Due out in May, from Maytree Press, my first poetry collection! Maytree Press have written a lovely piece about it, so go check that out. Maytree Press post here .

I am currently reading Adventures in Form: A Compendium of Poetic Forms , Rules & Constraints, edited by Tom Chivers, and published by Penned in the Margins in 2012. It's such a good book, particularly because it shows you how people have done surprising, interesting, challenging things with their poetry, which I find both useful and inspiring. Buy Adventures in Form here . I love to use a form as a way to get my poems into shape, and I love the way other poets use form, I'm particularly excited about the way Terrance Hayes used the sonnet form in his book American Sonnets for my Past and Future Assassin, which I may have raved on about previously on this blog. Google it, it's widely available and there are lots of the poems online. One poem that particularly caught my attention in Adventures in Form was You Wave Me by Chrissy Williams (the start of it - titles only - is in the image). It's in the Found Materials section and uses song titles to form a mixtap

I seem to have been talking about rejection in one way or another a bit lately, so I thought I'd share a post with you. Personally I am of the opinion that you've got to give people the chance to say no, getting rejected is part of the process of getting published, and if you're not trying to get it published, that can sometimes be because you're afraid of rejection. That's OK, rejection sucks, but I was inspired by Kim Liao who, in this 2016 article  described her successful friend's technique, of aiming for one hundred rejections a year. As Liao points out, this isn't a new idea. In his excellent book, On Writing , Stephen King talks about collecting his rejection slips on a nail. Liao herself decoupaged a desk with her rejection slips, to encourage herself to move on, to revisit, revise, to find better fits for her work. I've got to be honest, sometimes you get rejected because your work sucks. Even very famous writers sometimes create work that s

Lately I have been listening and re-listening to Joe Dunthorne's After I have written my important poem'  on the A Poem a Week podcast. You'll find the episode here . In the poem Joe discusses ideas for poems that he'll write after  he's written his important poem, which I find wildly, and joyfully optimistic (he is also really confident about capturing his reader's interest, which I also find fabulous). This poem is from Joe's pamphlet, published by Faber and Faber, O Positive, which I highly recommend. I'd lend you my copy, but I've lent it to someone. Anyway, Joe has got me thinking about important poems, and what makes them important. My first thoughts about what's officially important is the stuff we teach our children - mainly old (preferably dead) white guy's poems. Having spent January and some of February supporting my nine year old daughter in memorising a poem by Robert Burns (she got through to the Cronies, and got a certific