Mat Riches: How I Wrote ‘Tomato Plants’
“I’d love to say that was a deliberate choice, that it was a way of showing the protagonist is boxed in like the tomatoes, or like the holes you cut into a tomato growbag, but I’d be lying.”
Author: Zoë Brigely
Editor of Poetry Wales
Zoë Brigley is an award-winning poet, editor and academic. As well as editing Poetry Wales, she shares the role of Poetry Editor for Seren Books with Rhian Edwards, and is an Assistant Professor in English at Ohio State University.
Megan J Arlett: How I Wrote ‘Fresh Meat’
“My poems often float around in fragmented and incomplete drafts until that first, encapsulating line arrives on the page”
Bethany Handley: How I Wrote ‘Cling Film’
“Poetry provides the space for readers to bear witness to ableism. This calling out of ableism in poetry can be unsettling for audiences if they recognise their own attitudes or behavior.”
Rakyah Assam: How I Wrote ‘The Scientist’
“I think the way that foreignness affects your relationship with the place that you’re in has a lot of parallels to the way that we operate in dreams in this way.”
Hussain Ahmed: How I Wrote ‘Yoruba Abecedarian I’
“In most cases, the poems are hardly fully made, they come in lines, phrases and flashes.”
Thomas Jackson: How I Wrote ‘marinara as the world ends’
“I didn’t write this with an agenda, but it pulled together several fractures in my nostalgia.”
Des Mannay: How I Wrote ‘Hoxton girl in a “Last Poets” t-shirt’
“[Voices] were the first musical instruments, therefore all poetry has a music, and in some cases rhyme, repetition, and participation built into it…”
Shefali Banerji: How I Wrote ‘Fine Print’
“… I do love how language evolves within a certain context. How a word when taken from one language is reborn in another. How it switches, changes, subverts its past meaning in its new form.”
Matthew M. Cariello: How I Wrote ‘The Cowbird’
“The writing process involved the two competing impulses – invention and harmony.”