A new year’s look at the old…

I’m sorry for the lack of updates to my blog for some time – one of my New Year’s resolutions is to keep it more up to date in 2015.

However, this does seem like a good time to take a look back at 2014 and review, in the traditional manner, what I’ve been up to for the past year.

The year started with the Fenland Poet Laureate Awards judging, and from a fine crop of poets we selected the super-talented Poppy Kleiser to be our Fenland Poet Laureate 2015 She has done amazingly in her year and proves we made the right decision!

In March I published my first poetry pamphlet, Fur, Feather and Fen, a collection of the poems I wrote as Fenland Poet Laureate in 2012.

Signed first edition, no less… in Toppings bookshop, Ely

Next was Napowrimo, National Poetry Writing Month, where poets are challenged to write a poem a day for the whole of April.  I took up the task with some fine fellow poets around East Anglia and we blogged the results here – it was a very creative time, if exhausting! Perhaps I will try it again this year…

I celebrated two publications, with poems appearing in Ariadne’s Thread and Dream Catcher.  June was my annual Pimm’s and Poetry event at the beautiful reserve at WWT Welney in Norfolk.  Poppy Kleiser, Leanne Moden, Emma Danes and I read nature themed poetry to a lovely backdrop of lapwings, avocets and a ghostly barn owl quartering the fields… Other highlights included taking our local spoken word night, Fen Speak, to the new spoken word stage at Strawberry Fair in Cambridge; and a fantastic day’s workshop on Beowulf and the fens at Wisbech Museum with writer Sue Burge.  The exhibition of compelling photography and accompanying poetry connected with these workshops is still on show at the museum, including my own poem, “Fen Song”.

Over the summer I became a ‘poet who gives talks,’ speaking to enthusiastic writing and social groups at Bury St Edmunds and in Ely.  It was lovely to share my passion for poetry with others.

Most of this time, however, was spent with my head down finishing my dissertation for the MA in Wild Writing at the University of Essex.  An ecological and historical study of the North Sea islands of Heligoland, I was subsequently invited to speak about it at the War and Travel Writing conference at UEA in November, and in December it was longlisted for the New Welsh Writing Awards on the theme of “People, Place and Planet”.  I am really pleased with this achievement. Fingers crossed for the next round, when Mark Cocker has read it…  I was also very pleased with my Distinction final result for my MA.

Sometimes I wonder what I do with myself all day, but once it’s written down it looks as though 2014 was quite busy, after all…

Wishing everyone a creative 2015.

 

Reading at the Wild Strawberries stage (Photo credit: Hannah Chutzpah Eiseman-Renyard)