Last year, when the pandemic was really picking up in the UK, I decided to compile some prompts for National Poetry Writing Month inspired by the ones I had been using for my Cardiff-based writers’ group, Roath Writers. It was so nice spending the long days of lockdown reading, writing and connecting with other poets. I can…
My Poetry Bookshelf – What I Learned
In January 2020, I started a hashtag on Twitter and Instagram called #mypoetrybookshelf. I outlined my aims for this hashtag in a blog post last year but, essentially, I planned to reread a poetry book everyday and share one poem that spoke to me. I had no idea that two months after picking up the…
The Landscape(s) of Home
The turning of the year and the current lockdown has gotten me thinking closely about home. While I am grateful for my home here in Wales, I realize that it is going to be a long time before I am able to visit my friends and family back in America. It has already been over…
My Poetry Bookshelf – March
In January, when I started revisiting collections for #mypoetrybookshelf, I never imagined that my life would utterly change just three months later. In March, one of my students tested positive for Covid-19 and I went into self-isolation for two weeks. My university teaching moved swiftly online, my husband could no longer work and our busy…
National Poetry Writing Month – Poetry Prompts
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…
Striking the Match – Introducing the How to Carry Fire Blog Tour
Back in 2012, I was asked to design and run a blog-writing course for a community organisation in South Wales. Although I was no expert, I said yes! and started reading blogs every day to prepare. I loved the versatility of this form and feeling connected to people through their posts. It wasn’t long before…
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…
My Poetry Bookshelf — February
I was introduced to the work of Jorge Luis Borges back in 2009 when I started my Creative Writing MA at Cardiff University. Richard Gwyn, who later became my PhD supervisor, used Borges’ writing in one of our early seminars. I cannot remember which piece he brought but I remember the sense of cracking open….
Proofs, Previews, Pre-Orders
I submitted my PhD on February 4th and since then I have been spending my time catching up on sleep and ‘decompressing’. This deserves a whole blog post of its own which I hope to write after my Viva in May. For now, I am enjoying having space in my brain again and time to…
My Poetry Bookshelf — January
Last year, I read Mary Ruefle’s book of collected lectures, Madness, Rack and Honey, and have thought often since about this passage on rereading: ‘And there was a curiosity too, the curiosity of revisiting and remeeting. Some gigantic memory might strike me as being rather small in the flesh, or the altogether unremembered might strike me…
Christina Thatcher 