Memory

How Poetry Burns

This blog post could be called so many things: how time burns, how love burns, how loss burns. I have stepped away from this blog for 18 months to attend to various fires in my own life – some destructive and some restorative. I will be returning, slowly, to say more about these experiences over…

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…

In Anticipation

Tomorrow is the day. After nearly four years of lock-myself-in-the-house-at-night-poetry-making, my debut collection, More than you were, is launching in Cardiff. Friends are already messaging me this morning – ‘Are you excited?’, ‘Can’t wait to see you!’. I am certainly excited, but I am also humbled and grateful and blooming with joy to see these…

Lessons

After my father died, my childhood memories came flooding forward with a force I wasn’t expecting. I remembered his swooped back hair, his over washed jeans, his too loud laugh. I remembered watching the same films with him over and over again, lazing on the couch during hot summer days, threading worms onto our fishing lines. At his…

Grieve, Read, Write

My Dad would have been 48 this Boxing Day. I wished him a happy birthday three years ago, chatting casually about the ham he was cooking, what he and my grandmother did for Christmas, what his plans were for New Year’s Eve. He seemed happy. He’d finally won a disability settlement he’d been after for…

Mobile Home

Lately I’ve been thinking about home, where it is, what it means. Although I live in the UK, I was born in America and there are people there I miss – friends, family, former professors, the lovely strangers on the train to Philadelphia. But, I don’t feel at home there. When I am away from…

Last month I led my first Death Writing session of 2015. Participants of different backgrounds, ages and experiences came together to discuss their relationship with memory, write about significant objects and places, and compose poems for people they’d lost. One of the attendees, the lovely Jodie Kay Ashdown, has kindly posted the piece she wrote…

Letting Go

My best friend growing up was a painter. She had long wild hair and enjoyed a command over colors that I never had. I always admired her and, once, when she was abroad at an art college in Rome I sat in the extension of her parent’s house and got lost in her canvases –…

Cam wrth Gam – Step by Step

I have always believed that people should follow their passions – find the thing they love and do it with as much energy and dedication they can muster. This belief often makes me a difficult party guest. I ignore the small talk and ask questions instead, try to uncover what the person uncomfortably holding their…

Being Grateful

This time last year I asked my Roath Writers group to make a list of things they were grateful for. Not generic things but specific people, experiences, qualities, places, and anything else that mattered to them. My initial list included both my ankles and my energy. Since then, I have continued thinking about the importance…