Skeleton Architecture

 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...

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, ...

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...

I am hardly new to the party in reviewing Fiona Benson's astonishing second collection, Vertigo and Ghost. It came out from Cape Poetry in January 2019, and has already been talked about a lot. Here's a good review from The Guardian back in January.  - (they were selling it at a discounted price then - worth checking). You don't need me to tell you it is an excellent poetry book.  Fiona has already won the Forward Prize for best poetry collection, giving her £10,000, and the book is also shortlisted for the 2019 TS Eliot prize. I only just got round to reading it as I have a bit of a book backlog - it's a hazard of working in a library! I got it on inter-library loan (thanks Newcastle libraries) because like most libraries at the moment, my local library has had funding cuts and now can't get much poetry at all, so it takes a little longer, but if more of us get poetry out of libraries, it becomes more cost effective to buy the books. Have at it! Anyway, Vertig...

I seem to have been super busy lately, and I'm only just getting the feeling I'm catching up on myself, not that I'll ever get the to-do list finished, but lately I've been wondering if we can't just burn the second page of it. Brexit is still happening, we now have a prime minister my daughter calls Bobby Jobby, and women of colour on the BBC are getting grief for calling Donald Trump racist. FFS. I saw this quote from the previous American laureate Tracy K Smith in The Rialto. She finished her term this year and has been replaced by Joy Harjo. If you agree with her that poetry is a necessary remedy to the darkness you're in, here are some open windows to hurl your poetic light through... The Poetry Village  - they're lovely people, whose imprint, Maytree Press, will be publishing my first chapbook next year!!! They publish two poems a week online, plus gorgeous art. Their window is currently always open. Southlight  - based in the South of Sco...

Back in June 2017 I had a  villanelle  (the poem form, not the Killing Eve character) published in The Interpreter's House #65. I loved The Interpreter's House. Back then they published these beautiful little journals with gorgeous graphics, lovely formatting, and great poems, so I was really interested in 2018 when all changed in the House. The people, the website, the logo, even that beautiful format. The Interpreter's House is now edited by Georgi Gill, assisted by  Andrew Wells  and it comes out three times a year as a freely accessible online magazine. You'll find it  here . It is still beautiful, it still boasts gorgeous graphics, lovely formatting, and great poems, and now it's easier to access. As well as editing The Interpreter's House, Georgi Gill is a PhD researcher at the University of Edinburgh, exploring poetry in dialogues about multiple sclerosis. Her chief areas of interest, according to  her website  are "the work of Ciaran Cars...

Toffee by Sarah Crossan is supposed to be a Young Adult book, but don't let the teens keep it to themselves. The story is perhaps best introduced by this widely referenced quote from the book itself: I am not who I say I am, and Marla isn't who she thinks she is. I am a girl trying to forget. She is a woman trying to remember. This story is about a teen who feels she has nowhere to go and an elderly woman so used to being unseen that she barely sees herself anymore, and now she's got dementia to deal with. Sarah Crossan is the Irish Children's Laureate, and she writes young adult verse novels, which is not a description I love for this book. It is written in poem-type-things which use poetic aspects, but mainly serve to provide narrative of the story in vignettes, cutting to the important bits. The protagonist, Allison, is not ready to talk about the trauma that has brought her together with the elderly and confused Marla, and one particular incident i...

I've mentioned Picaroon Poetry before on this blog. It's a web based poetry magazine that I really love, and I've been really happy to have had a couple of my poems published in it. Picaroon Poetry is run by Kate Garrett, who I am delighted to say has agreed to be my very first interviewee on Skeleton Architecture. I'm planning to do this as hopefully a regular thing, and if it's as easy to work with everyone else I'd like to interview as it has been to work with Kate that will work out beautifully! Kate has a new poetry collection out now, The saint of milk and flames is published by Rhythm & Bones Press, and you can get print and ebook versions of it here , alternatively, you can get a signed copy from Kate for £10 (or £15 international), which includes postage, just go to her Paypal, here . Let's get on with the interview.... Many thanks to Kate Garrett, for agreeing to be my first interviewee.  Kate, I first came across you as the editor...