The useful thing about having your book listed for publication and appearing in ‘forthcoming titles’ is that some websites like Waterstones provide a form of count-down to publication so it’s 110 days to go. Between now and then I am going provide on this blog more information about the people who inspired the poems. There isn’t…
Category: Malta convoys
My Next Big Thing
I’ll start by thanking LIndsay Stanberry-Flynn for tagging me in the Next Big Thing which provides the opportunity for writers to answer questions about their current writing project. Lindsay is a novelist and short story writer. I recommend that you buy and read her prize winning novel, Unravelling and her next novel The Piano Player’s…
Are we there yet?
October is the month in which I hand over my collection to my publisher, Jan Fortune of Cinnamon Press. It is going to be so hard to let go if these poems. I worry about them needing more work. I worry that they don’t do justice to the merchant seaman and others whose stories they…
HQS Wellington and Operation Pedestal
HQS Wellington is currently hosting an exhibition about Operation Pedestal, which took place seventy years ago. During the summer holidays I took my sons to see it and the ship. To be honest this was really an outing for mum as I wanted to have a look round the ship and although I’ve done plenty…
The rest is silence
I have been thinking about ‘voice’ a lot recently as many of the poems in my Malta sequence are written in men’s voices, apart from the section in my mother’s voice as a young girl. We discussed the use of voice at the end of the last Cinnamon Press course. One of the other participants…
Boxing Day Seventy Years on
I’m thinking of my Taid today, my grandfather, Jim Honeybill who, seventy years ago, will have spent the day getting ready to leave Malta with MV Ajax, in the company of the Sydney Star, Cty of Calcutta and Clan Ferguson, accompanied by Force K and heading for Egypt. I expect he will have been relieved…
Stateside – Jehanne Dubrow
Stateside This was one of my finds of 2011. I can’t quite remember how I came across the book, not in a bookshop that’s for sure. It was undoubtedly somewhere on one of my rambles round the internet. I often castigate myself for spending time browsing, hopping from link to link, then realising how much…
Distinction
Just before going away on holiday I received the result for A363 and to my astonishment discovered I’d been awarded a distinction. I suppose I should have had more confidence in the Malta poems’ ability to stand on their own two feet and take on the world but… being on the inside of how tough…
Catching up
Although I haven’t been writing on this blog I have been doing plenty of writing since last summer. This includes a treasure filled week in North Wales in March with Jan Fortune and Pete Marshall on one of the Cinnamon Press regular writing weeks– http://www.cinnamonpress.com/writers-services/ The project which has been preoccupying me for most of…