My Creative Process

An example of my creative practice.

I began to write the poem One Day I’ll Hold your Hand In Mine during 2020, whilst keeping a lockdown diary for The Museum of Ordinary People. I was going through a ‘spoken word’ phase and felt it needed to be read aloud for best effect.

I finished writing it in the following workshops.

This is the finished collaborative poem as a video. (I’m the first to read in the video)

I practiced reading it out loud 96 times before filming.

The poems were put on display at Curve Theatre, Leicester for a few months, along with the video playing on a loop. (Yes, I was recognised in the street!)

Me at the exhibition in Curve Theatre, Leicester. The artist who created this installation used extracts of my jottings and scribbles from the notebook that the poem was written in as part of my display. Online tutors have said they could see my hand tapping out the beat of a poem in progress during a creative writing prompt session. The writing process gives me immense joy. Public validation of my work boosts and inspires me to keep creating.

The poet Safiya Kinshara told me in a poetry class that I should resist explaining what my poems mean. Each audience member will interpret the work differently. I often feel that sharing my work is like blowing a dandelion clock. It scatters into little pieces that go everywhere, to people and places that I never imagined.

As the poem was of a unique period in history, I wanted to increase its audience, so read it out at a Zoom salon for Liquid Amber Press, who are a poetry publisher based in Australia. (The video includes the introduction by the host before my recital).

With advice from the poet Rose Lucas, I edited it and a revised version was published by Liquid Amber Press in November 2021 in their Lockdown Anthology.

It is always my intention for my writing to reach as many different people as possible, and I actively seek out collaboration with others to enable this to happen. If my writing was published in a book, then I’d record it (such as when I read ‘Minted’ on Micro Podcast). If it was online, then I might include it in a handmade zine, or print it onto a postcard. I can see from the analytics on my blog the number of countries it is read in and how far and wide my words have reached.

I have short fiction and poems published in the following anthologies.