The amount of daily freedom I have now is daunting and surprisingly unconducive to writing - an overwhelming pressure to be super-productive which freezes me. However thanks to the mentoring with Vicki Feaver, this year overall has been productive for me - I'm about ten poems off another full-length collection, and I'm happy with the poems I've written - they are so much more opened up / expanded than my previous poems. Of course it'll take about another three years odd to place them in mags etc! I'm feeling the need to work on something bigger - something I can come to and plough at daily as opposed to the arbitrariness of poems, I just have no idea what that could be.
I really enjoyed reading alongside my fellow New Writers from the SBT at the Portobello Book Festival, especially enjoyable to read with excellent prose writers like Catherine Simpson who has just signed a book deal for her latest novel Truestory which you can read an extract from here.
Tree Language was reviewed very favourably in Lunar Poetry -
"McCready’s work is characterised by strikingly original language"
"McCready is ready to take risks with some of her word-coinings, too, with a frequent and creative use of hyphenated compounds, a trick which hasn’t been fashionable in British poetry for quite a while. McCready has the good sense to know that it does not matter whether this is ‘the done thing’ if you can make it work: So here we have ‘sun-carved’, ‘frost-flower’, ‘crackle-comb' and even 'fish-O'clock', to name but a few."
"any poet who describes the Firth as ‘punk-black’ has got to be doingI'm starting to get used to being referred to as 'McCready'! And I had no idea hyphenated compounds weren't fashionable :) just a writing tic of mine!
something right"
My Dunoon poem was featured on the StAnza Blog as part of the Poetry Map of Scotland project and I got a wee mention in The Scotsman review of Be The First To Like This: Anthology of New Scottish Poetry.
