It is April 1st which means we have now entered National Poetry Writing Month! Back in 2012, I founded a Cardiff-based writers’ group called Roath Writers. For the past three years, I’ve been keeping track of the prompts I’ve given to this group. I thought I’d share some of them here in case anyone would…
Category: Community
A Poet’s Return to Finland
Today I held the initial meeting for the lucky Cardiff Metropolitan University students who will accompany me to Finland for a Creative Writing Summer School in June this year. In anticipation of hosting my first international writing school, I thought I’d share a piece I wrote for Cardiff Met’s staff news page, Insite, about this…
A Writer’s Decade
Recently, I bought a dozen doughnuts from the baker and was given 13 instead of 12. A baker’s dozen. Apparently, bakers in the Middle Ages were afraid of being beaten for ‘cheating’ their customers out of bread. Strict punishments would be handed down to any bakers who were found skimping. So, to avoid these penalties,…
Begin as you mean to go on
It’s the third week of 2018 and I am finally starting to feel human again after an extremely busy period and a long-standing chest infection. Despite the occasional cough, I am now getting back to a healthy routine of early nights, early rises, poem writing, editing, reading and more. Soon I’ll be teaching again –…
Five Years with Roath Writers
September saw the five year anniversary of my writer’s group, Roath Writers. I am still in awe of how the group has grown into its own kind, enthusiastic, thoughtful and creative community. My dream of carving out a small space to talk poems and write with new people has been so far exceeded I wonder if…
To San Jose with Thanks & Poetry
I am sitting in bright sunshine under a blue clock tower in Prague but all I can think about is San Jose: the thick humidity cloaking its streets, the shelves and shelves of poetry written in a language I cannot yet reach, and the school I visited on the outskirts of the city—the Institute of…
First Stop: Costa Rica
For weeks, I have been asking myself how to write about my book tour. Or, more specifically, the first stop on my book tour: Costa Rica. It has been two months since watching the mountains fade from my tiny-plane-window-view and, still, I am questioning. How can I articulate the magic that happened there? How can…
Dying Matters
‘Dying Matters Awareness Week’ in the UK ended yesterday. For those who don’t know, Dying Matters is a coalition of 32,000 members across England and Wales — including the NHS, bereavement charities, social service organisations, academic bodies and more — which aims to help people talk more openly about dying, death and bereavement, and to…
Warmth & Writing at the University of Jyväskylä
During Cardiff University’s reading week in February, I could be found on the University of Jyväskylä’s snowy campus in Finland. Both institutions are members of the European Association of Creative Writing Programmes (EACWP) and formed a link in 2015 with the first teaching exchange between Dr. Shelagh Weeks and Terhi Forssén. I was delighted that my visit…
The Joys of the Pre-Order
Last year, I pre-ordered two debut poetry collections: The Sobbing School by fellow Marshall Scholar Joshua Bennett and The Knowledge Weapon by the winner of Bare Fiction’s Debut Poetry Collection Competition, Annette C. Boehm. I was desperate to read these collections so I ordered them the first chance I got. Then I waited, full of the…
Christina Thatcher 