Well it's been a busy month. A flying visit to London for the launch of Madame Ecosse - the launch went well, it was good to hear the other Eyewear poets read. I got to spend a few hours in the British Museum and in the British Library between train journeys.


Then it was a week up at beautiful Moniack Mhor with nine of this year's Scottish Book Trust New Writers awardees. It was an interesting week - we spent two of the evening reading some of our work. I particularly enjoyed hearing the prose writers as mostly I only go to poetry readings - lots of beautiful work being written.

It was great having access to the Moniack Mhor library and the northern branch of the Scottish Poetry Library which is there also.

My favourite discoveries were Anne Carson's Antigonick which is a gorgeous hardback with illustrations by Bianca Stone. Carson's translation of Sophocles' Antigone is hilarious, darkly comic and hard hitting. I loved it.
I also loved reading through the Selected Poems of Galway Kinnell and have since bought my own copy.

Between all of this, followed by a wee camping trip with the kids, I'm looking forward to not going anywhere else anytime soon!

Very happy to have my 'Twilight Sleep' poem showcased on Abigail Morley's The Poetry Shed which you can read here. It's from Madame Ecosse.

I'm excited to be working on a new series of poems based on old Scottish ballads. It's an idea I've been toying with for a while but just didn't have the time to throw myself into.
Now is the time and after much reading and absorbing (finally finished my close reading of the Golden Bough) I'm in writing mode.

There's something about working on a project / theme over several poems that very much attracts me - I can really get absorbed in as opposed to writing occasional poems here and there.
I hope to be working on this intensely over the next couple of months.

Thanks to the wonderful Scottish Book Trust I'm going to Moniack Mhor for a writer's retreat at the end of March with this year's intake of New Scottish Writer Awardees. It's 14 miles outside Inverness and sounds/looks amazing. It will be wonderful to have a week in the Scottish highlands away from all responsibilities just to write.

However before then I have a quick jaunt to London for the official launch of Madame Ecosse which will be at the London Review Bookshop on Friday 17th March. Also hoping to plan over the next few months reading/launches in Glasgow and Edinburgh.

Hello blogger, my old friend. I've come to talk with you again...

It's been rather busy since I've updated. The most miraculous news is that after all these years of writing alone on my little peninsula I've finally come across some other local poets and we have formed a monthly poetry work-shopping group. Wonderful to get a chance to meet up and talk poetry with real live people - there are four of us and bizarrely we all live within two streets of each other!

Dunoon hosted it's first Mini Book Festival which I read at with Tariq Latif - it was a good opportunity to try out some of the new poems. Hoping it'll be the first of an annual local book festival which would be wonderful. Tariq and I also did a poetry reading in the summer in the local bookshop which seemed to go down well - it's so good having someone else locally to read with!

I put together a book list for the Scottish Book Trust of some of my favourite contemporary female poets which you can read here.

I was pleasantly surprised to come across a lovely five star review of Tree Language on Amazon. It feels wonderfully good to get the feedback and simply that my book has found a happy home in some complete stranger's life!

Very pleased to have some poems in Be The First To Like This, an anthology of new Scottish poetry with a foreword written by Liz Lochhead. Colin Waters from the Scottish poetry library (editor of the anthology) has put together a great webpage for it here. It's being launched next week in Glasgow and Edinburgh and tomorrow we're all getting our picture taken at the Scottish Poetry Library for the Saturday Herald and Sunday Herald Magazine, so that's quite exciting!

Next month I'll be reading and chatting at the Portobello Book Festival in Edinburgh as part of a Scottish Book Trust event along with two other recipients of the SBT New Writer's Award. Check out the dates of the book festival here and if you're around please come along - I've heard there will be wine!

Finally, good old Highland Mary's voting yes and so am I. Only four more days until the referendum and it's all up for grabs!!

It's coming up to the end of my nine months of being mentored by Vicki Feaver which was part of the very generous package put together by the Scottish Book Trust. It's been a wonderfully encouraging, stretching experience.

When asked by the SBT who would be my dream mentor (within travelable distance), I mentioned Vicki Feaver without genuinely expecting to be paired with her and was utterly surprised and delighted when I found out that she had agreed to do it. Every couple of months since last July I've been making my way through to Edinburgh to Vicki's flat and spent the afternoon with her poring over the poems I had written for our meeting as well as some poems by contemporary poets that we had brought to share.

Apart from the week I spent on Pascal Petit's course this was the first time I really had any experience of face-to-face thorough input from someone on my work so it was initially incredibly nerve-wracking. What I wanted from the mentoring was help to extend, open up my poems and develop the voice in my poems. It's been so good to have someone there to check with what exactly is and isn't working in my poems and it's given me the confidence to expand my writing knowing I'll get the all-important feedback on it.

Vicki herself is incredibly intelligent and astute as well as being a very generous and good-humoured mentor - I really don't think I could have had better. The pressure to keep writing in order to produce poems for our meetings has helped to make me much more of a disciplined reader and writer. Regular blogging is one of the things I've had to let by the wayside in order to keep my creative energies focused on writing. The challenge after our last meeting will be on keeping up the momentum and self-discipline.

The exciting news is.... my book has come back from the printers and now I'm just waiting for my author copies to be posted up to me.
Now that Paris is out of the way I'll be planning the Glasgow launch which will be held in Tell it Slant - Glasgow's new poetry bookshop on Renfrew Street, 7pm on Friday 15th May. Also reading at the launch will be Ross Wilson, Katherine Sowerby and Samuel Tongue - very much looking forward to it!

I have a poem from Tree Language up on Colin Will's Open Mouse here.

Had a really good night at the Scottish Book Trust showcase event in Edinburgh. It was great to get a chance to hear the other readers especially the fiction writers who all read so grippingly well that I can't wait for all of their stories, books to come out. I also got to meet and chat with some of this year's New Writers Awardees which was really nice. The Scottish Book Trust produced a great little book with a selection of writing from all of us plus a page of info we wrote ourselves about our writing. You can download the online version of the book for free here.

Here's what I wrote about  about Tree Language - 

The poems in my first full-length collection, which I’ve been working on over this last year, fall into four distinct sections which I only became aware of when putting the collection together; though the same, generally dark, themes are carried through each section.

My main interest in writing these poems was to explore themes of love, death, sometimes violence and how they are played out, reflected in and contrasted against the backdrop of nature and the landscape the poems are set in. I also have a tendency towards the surreal.

Many of my poems begin from observations in the natural world: the shape of a tree and its shadow, the sun on the back of the Clyde, the flowering orchid on my windowsill. I find that through examining the physical details of nature I’m able to gain a level of distance and objectivity which allows me to explore broader human and personal themes.

The focus on nature also enables me to sidestep the confines of narrative logic, tap into the unconscious dream – like processes but at the same time stay rooted in the physical, tangible world.     

 The next event is StAnza. I'm reading on the Saturday as part of the Scottish Booktrust Showcase. There are four of us reading so we get fifteen minutes each. I'm only able to get to St Andrews by the Friday night so I'm gutted to be missing Sujata Bhatt and Brian Turner reading. However I have booked tickets and will finally get the chance to hear John Burnside which I'm incredibly excited about and also the masterclass with Paul Muldoon. 

My next mentoring meeting with Vicki Feaver is the week after Stanza, I have four poems ready for it so far which I'm pleased about. Really working hard to expand my writing and I feel hopeful that these poems are doing just that.

Finally it has reached Dunoon!! -

I was asked to contribute a recent book reading list for the Poetry Foundation blog which you can read here. Mostly still mulling over the same books with the inclusion of W.S. Merwin's The Shadow of Sirius and Vicki Feaver's poetry. For those not on facebook or twitter you can hear a wonderful series of radio essays here by five different poets doing their own take of Rilke's Letter to a Young Poet. I so enjoyed them, especially (of course) Vicki Feaver's essay to a young woman poet which was amazing for me to hear and read (I was lucky enough to have seen her first draft of the essay). 

It's the end of my year as a Scottish New Writers Awardee and what a wonderful year it has been. I have two meetings left with Vicki Feaver and I'll be sad when they're over. As an end-of-year finale the Scottish Book Trust has put together a Showcase Event where all the 2013 award winners will do a short reading of their work in front of an audience which will include publishers as well as the new 2014 award winners. That's this Thursday (30th Jan) 7.30pm at Summerhall in Edinburgh if anyone is interested (it's free!).

Ready to burst with excitement!
Part of the Scottish Book Trust award was the opportunity to be mentored for a period of nine months. In February I went for an interview at the Scottish Book Trust to see if mentoring would be, I guess, cost-efficient for them to 'invest' in me at my stage in writing. I was asked who I would like to mentor me, someone within reasonable traveling distance. So I mentioned a couple of names of poets who would be great to be mentored by but wouldn't be what I would call 'dream mentors'.
Then one evening, reading online, I noticed that Vicki Feaver now lives in Scotland, something I'd forgotten about. So I fired off a quick email to the SBT to say that she would be a dream mentor for me if it wasn't too late to put in a request. I didn't dare get my hopes up, perhaps she wouldn't be interested in mentoring or available etc but today I received a wonderful email from the SBT to say that Vicki Feaver would be mentoring me for the next nine months and our first meeting will be set up as soon as possible. So I don't know how long this stupid grin will be plastered all over my face but I imagine for a good while!

I've been having a busy time of it with family and life in general. I had a meeting last week with the Scottish Book Trust people where they interviewed me to see if setting me up with a mentor was going to be beneficial / worth the money in terms of where I'm at in my poetry and my ability to devote time and energy into it. They're definitely going to provide a mentor for me, which is fantastic, and I'll be paired  up with someone after my Pascale Petit course in May for a period of nine months.

I was back in Edinburgh yesterday for a meeting at the Scottish Poetry Library (SPL) where I got to meet the SPL Director, Robyn Marsack, and the other poetry award winners. It was my first time in the SPL building and it is poetry heaven! I was looking through their old issues of poetry magazines and came across issues of  The London Magazine, where Sylvia Plath published fairly frequently in the 1960's. I was delighted to see the original mags from that period with Plath's poems and stories in them just as how she would have seen them in her contributor copies.

I joined the library and borrowed:

 

 Next week I'm off to Cove Park for a writing retreat. It's supposed to be for a week but I think I might just manage three or four days without using up all of my babysitting goodwill. Plus it's going to be strange being essentially just across the Clyde. I'll almost be able to wave to my house!

Cove Park

I've lots of good things, poetry-wise, to look forward to next month.

I have a meeting at the Scottish Poetry Library (SPL) in Edinburgh with  the SPL Director, Robyn Marsack, and the Programme Manager, Jennifer Williams. I'm really looking forward to this. I've never actually been to the Scottish Poetry Library before though I use their webpage (here) very regularly, it's a great resource for all things poetic! Hope it's easy to find, I'm much more of a Glasgow-girl! 

I also have a mentoring interview with the lovely people at the Scottish Book Trust. Apparently I can put in a request for who I would like to mentor me over the next year and they then approach that person. It's all very exciting, I guess my plan is to work on putting together a full-length collection so I'd be looking for someone to give me advice on that, my poems and on how best to approach publishers etc. Also it would have to be someone within reasonable travelling distance. So lots to think about!

Also The Cove Park retreat takes place next month too where I'll get a chance to meet the other award winners. Not sure if I'll be able to get babysitting cover for the full week but they've said I can go for a long as I can manage, which is great.

I've a wee poem in the next Gutter Mag which I'm happy about, it's one of my favourite literary magazines. The online mag, Ofi Press Mexico, is publishing a four-part experimental poem of mine in March!

For someone who usually barely makes it out of the sticks I'm starting to feel incredibly busy!

So I've had my first meeting with the lovely folk at the Scottish Book Trust. They took a mug shot for the website... :)

I received my cheque of £2000 and was terrified of losing it all the way home. I confess the first thing I bought was a kindle having been sold on the idea since Israel where I was the only person in the airports lugging around a bag of books to read and everyone else had a dainty little e-reader. Since, I've barely put it down. It's like having access to an instant university library in my home, so many free books and books for a pittance. I am loving reading through Virginia Woolf's diaries at the moment, I been wanting to read them for years. 

The plan is to set me up with a mentor for a series of meetings over the next year. I'll be meeting up with some people from the Scottish Poetry Library next month to talk about what I'm hoping to get out of the mentoring so they can find a suitable mentor. I'm looking for someone who will challange me in my writing, give me critical feedback and hopefully help open new directions for my writing. Since the point of the money is to 'further my writing', I'm thinking of using the rest of it to go back out to Israel for a week or so myself this year and spend the time solely in the old city in Jerusalem writing. 

Other good news is that someone has requested to use a poem of mine in a tree poetry anthology, look forward to seeing that!

It's been a year of the most unexpected ups and downs!

I wish you all a wonderful, peaceful Christmas.

   

I'm now allowed to shout it from the rooftops (and believe me I am)...

I've won a New Writers Award for poetry from The Scottish Book Trust!!!!!

The Scottish Book Trust annually out  gives out  eleven New Writers Awards: four for fiction, two for children and young adult writing, two for writing in Scots, two for poetry and one extra awarded in memory of Callan Gordon.
The Award is an amazing package of a whopping £2000 cheque to further my writing, a year's worth of mentoring with PR and publishing advice and a week at Cove Park which is a residental retreat for artists, musicians and writers and is, funnily enough, just across the Clyde from me!

I head up to Edinburgh on Monday to pick up my cheque and hopefully find out about what kind of mentoring I'll get and who I will get to work with over this next year.

I am so blown away by it all, never in a million years did I dare hope that I'd actually win an award!