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.

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