Skeleton Architecture

I was recently lucky enough to provide a poetry inspired writing workshop for a young writer's group at one of our local libraries. Some brilliant work came out of it, so I thought I'd share the workshop with you, to spread the joy of a bit of inspiration. I was thinking about time. FYI Salomé (which is currently on hiatus due to illness) is hoping to have a theme of 'time' for its Spring issue. Check out this link to their submissions page to see when they're back up and running. I was also thinking about our communications with ourselves at different times of our lives, the 'if I'd known then what I know now' moments. In poems, these can take the form of advice to our perhaps younger selves, statements of intent about how we will behave in the future, or observations of people at a particular stage of life to share some kind of truth about it. I shared a few poems with the young writers group to give examples, making sure we had time to chat abo...

My apologies, it's been a while since I've put together a selection of the tankas from guests to the Tanka Project, and you can no doubt tell from some of the subject matter in these three, fabulous tankas. First up is Brianne Bowman, with a Halloween inspired tanka which I adore because of the image she conveys of a book as a magical place of refuge, it reminds me of Julia Donaldson's 'I Opened a Book' ("I opened a book and in I strode./Now nobody can find me./..."), but with a gorgeous fairytale twist. I am currently reading Sarah J Maas' A Court of Mist and Fury, and would love to step into the book and discover the artist's quarter in the city of Velaris. Feyre and Rhysand can do the flying around, those dresses are never going to suit me. I've been working in a library for a week and my list of things to read is even more endless than it was before so this Halloween inspired tanka from Brianne really spoke to me! Thanks for sha...

There's something so special about gifting something hand-crafted to someone. It's created with (lots of) time, love, and consideration, and is something that they can always keep which will remind them of you. When the nights are long, the wind is wild, and the weather's awful, I'm a big fan of crocheting, and in the last year I've made a couple of blankets. You can read about the first one here  (an Attic 24 Ripple ), and the second one (pictured above), here  (that's an Attic 24 Cosy Blanket ). The first lives on the sofa, and is shared by everbody, but the second was made specifically for my boy. It was that one that I was thinking of when I wrote this sonnet for this week's Prompt ( in between ). The love between Between each stitch resides a point in time: the programme watched, the laughter shared, the love, the cat's keen eye on dwindling ball of twine: swift catching claw is greeted with a shove. Between each shift in colour ...

Things change fast in the blogosphere. The blogs that are available, and the ones that catch my fancy come and go, so I thought it was about time I updated this post from last year, to tell you about five of my favourite blogs taken from my Bloglovin ' feed now. What are your favourites?  First up (just because it came up first in my Bloglovin' feed) is the Authonomy Blog from Harper Collins. I love The Quotidian pieces which offer quotes from writers, mainly on writing. They're inspirational, and just long enough to set the mind racing, without having to do someting about it straight away.  This quote from Neil Gaiman was there just the other day: "All writers have this vague hope that the elves will come in the night and finish any stories." - Neil Gaiman Talking of Neil Gaiman, I am obsessed with him at the moment. I am delighted that he and Amanda Palmer are expecting a baby, and wonder what it must feel like to be such an incredible 'it' c...