Last month a poem from Madame Ecosse was Poem of the Week in The Scotsman Newspaper (thanks to Colin Waters of the Scottish Poetry Library!).

I've been plodding away working on some occasional poems alongside some ballads. I have four poems on the go at the moment and finding it good to be able to switch between poems when I get stuck on one.

Reading-wise I've been enjoying reading Siren by Canadian poet Kateri Lanthier and I've just got around to picking up a copy of Jane Kenyon's Selected poems from Bloodaxe. Still enjoying Kinnell's Selected - some stunning poems in there. I re-read Jay Parini's book on Theodore Roethke which truly is a wonderful read.

I'm between odd jobs at the moment and hate the lack of routine and uncertainty though all should be resolved in the next month. I've applied to do Counselling Skills - a part-time course at Strathclyde Uni starting later this year. My plan is to train as a professional counsellor part-time over the next three years which I'm excited about but a little daunted by the thought of juggling - work, family, study plus finding and clocking up the necessary volunteer counselling hours to qualify - and preserve my sanity by having writing time! I guess we'll see how it'll go!

So Dunoon now has its own annual book festival!

I so enjoyed hearing Liz Lochhead read in Dunoon Cinema on Friday night, Vagabond Voices fiction and TV drama writer (including writing for Taggart!!!) Chris Dolan read with Vagabond Voices publisher Allan Cameron last night. Today I heard Jess Smith tell stories about her life and about the Scottish travelling community as well as sing a couple of traditional gypsy songs. I also read today to a super friendly audience with Tariq Latif - it was good to try out my new Dunoon pier poem and Mary Stuart poem.

I was pleased to be mentioned in The Scotsman the other day amongst writers reclaiming childbirth as a legitimate source of inspiration!

I've been doing a lot of unedited writing - just writing pages and pages of images and lines - without cleaning them up into poems. I'm waiting on a new theme, bigger picture to work on and bring all of these images and thoughts into. I'm always looking to move onto something hopefully bigger and better, to really expand my writing.

I'm so enjoying reading and re-reading Theodore Roethke's On Poetry and Craft - so many great quotes from him which I've been twittering occasionally!

I received my contributors copy of Paris Lit Up in the post the other day - what a gorgeous book and collection of poems, stories and artwork!

It's taken a while but it's beginning to dawn on me that Ruby starting school wasn't just another milestone in watching my babies grow up in the way it was when Sorley started school but is actually the end / culmination of a period in my life that began when Sorley was born almost eight years ago.

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 doing
something right"

I'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!

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. 

So pleased to have a poem from Tree Language and a lovely wee write up in last Saturday's The Scotsman newspaper. Colin Waters from the Scottish Poetry Library contacted me last month to say that he wanted to pick a poem from the collection for the newspaper and that he wanted to arrange for me to do a podcast at the Scottish Poetry Library which I plan to go through to Edinburgh next month to do.

Colin has also taken three of my poems for an anthology of new Scottish writing he's putting together and which Liz Lochhead is writing the foreword for. I'm really pleased about it as an American professor at StAnza was bemoaning to me the lack of anthologies of new Scottish writing!

The lovely Australian poet Julie Maclean has featured a couple of poems from Tree Language on her blog here. I met Julie on Pascale Petit's wondeful poetry course in France last year and so enjoyed her poems. 

The very nice people at Transmission Magazine asked me to record a reading of one of my poems for their website which you can listen to here.

I have, I think, a solid seventeen poems towards a new collection so far. Quite different poems to the ones in Tree Language - much more expanded with the help of Vicki Feaver and Sujata Bhatt's Collected poems which have made these new poems possible.