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…
Category: Wales
Semi-Detached
My last post was in May and a lot has happened since then. Summer is my busiest season and as work for my day job, PhD and freelance projects increased my blog posts and personal writing took a reluctant back seat. Luckily, things are cooling down, both literally and figuratively, and I can now take…
Vetoed Wedding Poems
I got married last week. After years of saying I would never get married, I did. I suppose I always believed that marriage would stifle me, take away my freedoms, hinder my ability to pursue my passions. However, over the last six years my partner has done the opposite: he builds platforms, creates more opportunities, supports…
Written Portraits
October is coming which means warm scarves, woolly jumpers, colourful leaves and Made in Roath are just around the corner! Although we’ve got an excellent poetry and literature programme planned, I am most excited to be organising another Written Portraits event for the upcoming festival. Run for this first time at Solstice in June, this…
Dignity
Not many of us think about our dignity on a daily basis. In fact, I’m not sure I’d truly considered what mine meant before being invited to develop two creative writing sessions on the topic for a project run by Making Minds and Interlink. Before planning these workshops, which were aimed at people dealing with…
Roath Writers Anthology Launch at RARA
Three years is not long in the scheme of things and yet there is something significant about it. When I started Roath Writers three years ago I could not see beyond the first session, could not imagine people coming again and again – the early mornings picking poetry, the late nights at the pub. I…
Places to Inspire Writing in Cardiff
Originally posted on Welsh Writers’ Trust:
All writers have experienced that dearth of inspiration; the time when we scrabble through articles in newspapers, sift through old diaries and scour every object that surrounds us to find something, anything, that might spark some much craved creativity. In those trying times when nothing seems to mean anything…
Solstice Festival
After freelancing seven days a week from September to May, I look forward to taking back my weekends each summer. For me these days mean lots of tea, new poetry collections, and as much writing as I can manage. Often, I also squeeze in a few walks, documentaries and drinks with friends. They allow me…
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…
Memory
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…
Christina Thatcher 