Skeleton Architecture

All the best to you and yours for the festive season and let's hope 2022 brings an easier year for us all. Having spent the beginning of the covid period writing daily poems, getting involved with endless online events, launching a book in lockdown (get in touch at caralmckee at gmail dot com to get your copy), and with a flurry of poetry publications in journals and the like, I found this year's quietness a surprise.  Family members took ill and died (not covid, but certainly not helped), my children struggled with the endless days of schoolwork and not much else, we all struggled. On the day my daughter's guinea pig died she said "everything is dying and nothing is good." I couldn't argue with her. I also couldn't write. I did try sometimes. I attended some events, I tried to style myself through it, but I felt like everything I wrote was terrible. Instead of enjoying events and poetry podcasts I would think them irrelevant or pointless, or decide that i

 Hello I haven't checked in for a while so thought I'd say hello and let you know what's going on with me. Basically I have a lot going on in my life at the moment, and so I'm not able to do as much writing. However, things are still happening. I try to keep the page which talks about my poetry up to date, so you can always click on that to find out where to find the latest things. Just yesterday I was delighted to have my poem, The Bird  on the Bind Collective website . The Bind Collective is an online platform for creative work examining ecology and the natural world. It's beautifully designed, and well worth an exploration. I particularly enjoyed Judith Klausner's work, (de)composed . I am also delighted to have a poem coming out in issue 96 of Obsessed with Pipework . I have been submitting to them for quite a while, but never found a fit before. One of the editors at OwP is Katerina Neocleous  who, like me, has had a book published with Maytree Press ( you&

 Can we start by getting the 'Don't judge a book by its cover' thing out of the way? Book covers are so important. They tell you what you're getting yourself into - crime, romance, a gritty thriller, you'll be able to tell from the cover. If you spot a book that looks like one by a favourite author, it's because someone wants you to connect it with their writing, and it's probably worth a read. I seem to always have three books on the go at the moment, so let's have a look at what I'm reading right now and what the covers have to say about them: 1. The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers - this is a beautiful looking book, as are all the books in the series. I bought this because I heard an interview with Becky on the Imaginary Worlds Podcast  which was fascinating, but I recognised the book because of the beautiful cover. You can buy it here . I'm really enjoying reading this but I am struggling with my attention span during the c