Blogs

Awoke terrorised by an injured crow with loud-hailer outside the window. On closer inspection, it turned out to be a refuse lorry reversing into a nursing home. Still a little unsettling. Over breakfast, considered the day ahead and tried to recall the lyrics to "It's All Over Now Baby Blue". It's still not daylight as I head down the hill to the station. Daylight may not make it today. What is rain, but an opportunity to unfold my Parisienne...

It's such a privilege to be one of the co-editors of ABCtales and to be in a position of reviewing all the wonderful work that piles in every week. This week in particular has been excellent in terms of new talent and the work that they have brought to the site. The newbies made it a very tough job of making the choices for the picks of the week but the accolades go to Silver Spun Sand for her fantastic poem Albatross: http://www.abctales.com/...

Please please please support our final books on Unbound. If you haven't done so yet, then now is the time to do it! Celticman is lagging behind and badly needs your help. He's done so much for this site and helped so many of you - now is the time to give him something back: http://unbound.co.uk/books/lily-poole And Ewan is so nearly there - just a few more of you and he'll be over the line. Go, give him a boost: http://unbound.co.uk/books/...

Hi everyone, I want to alert members to a forthcoming and prestigious poetry competition. It's a collaboration between the RSPB and The Rialto magazine based on the theme 'Nature'. The cost of entry is £6 for a single submission with subsequent submissions costing £3 each thereafter. A maximum of six poems are allowed in any one batch per individual entrant. Generous cash prizes are on offer with £1000 for the winner, £500 for the runner-up and...

Slam poetry is a contest with rules, so my shot at the Bike Shed theatre in Exeter is probably the same set up as anytown. You get 3 minutes and get scored by 3 judges out of 20 on the poem, performance and intensity of audience response. The bad news is that scoring is public. The good news is that all the poets were good and I would enjoy hearing any of them again. There were about 70 in the audience they seemed friendly if a little bland; a...

I’ve been thinking of writing a book about poverty, and the cancerous growth of agencies as middlemen that add nothing but misery, leaving the rest of us to deal with the hidden costs. It’s too big a subject. You start getting lost in minutiae. What does it mean in a changing world, for example, to be working class? What does it mean to be poor? These are relative concepts. I once asked my former best mate Liam what the girl he got off with the...

Every day is All Fools Day when you’re just being yourself. Same beginning. Then two trillion -or more- cells later, we come apart. In between we acquire a repertoire of habits. Vincent Deary’s ‘How we are’, the first in his trilogy of How to Live, picks apart what makes us ourselves. In essence, a person and their reality, make up their personality. That’s me speaking, not Deary (and what a wonderful name for a pseudo-philosopher). I was...

Congratulations this week go to Mark Brown for one of the best pieces of flash fiction I've read and to Ewan for his wonderfully dark poem: http://www.abctales.com/story/markbrown/those-we-leave-behind http://www.abctales.com/story/ewan/light-gibbous-moon This week's Inspiration Point is poetry or prose on the theme of moving - and you can interpret that any way you want. Don't forget if you have an idea for the Inspiration Point we'd love to...

It’s National Poetry day so I thought I’d look at Edward Hirsch’s (2014) Gabriel: A Poem . I’m not qualified to write about poetry. I’m not qualified to write about grief. Edward Hirsch is qualified on both counts. He wrote A Poet’s Glossary and How to Read a Poem both of which I intend to buy. Poetry is a foreign country and I’d like to learn the language. I might even attempt a few of the mangled phrases that novices use and, with a lot of...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p025zl7d/the-secret-life-of-books-5... I’m a big fan of Jane Eyre and that Charlotte Bronte, well, she’s well hot too. We all know the story of little orphan Jane Eyre all alone in the world. She’s a plain girl with a fiery temper. In the opening pages she bests her bully of a cousin, John, and tells her Aunt Reed, who is her guardian, what’s what, which isn’t a winning combination. Only beautiful girls are...