“Sometimes if I’m being flippant I say basically my entire writing career is based on pointing out that some stuff is a bit like other stuff”
Category: Poems
Laurie Bolger: How I Wrote ‘Bants’
“[There] were scaffolders banging outside our window ‘talking loud’ shouting and swearing… I wrote this poem in my phone notes app whilst we listened to them and made ourselves a tea”
The True Story of a Sable Maid’s Appearance in the 18th Century
A poem by Jenny Mitchell, in solidarity with actress Francesca Amewudah-Rivers
Josh Smyth: How I Wrote ‘Billboard’
“During these visits, I am immersed in familiar company, and it isn’t until I have short moments away from family, in solitude, when I take stock of my surroundings and focus on the unfamiliarity of everything”
Deborah Finding: How I Wrote ‘valley burn’
“I’m always thinking about who gets to speak and be listened to, and who gets silenced”
Stuart Pickford: How I Wrote ‘Backchat’
“If you let your characters speak, you can give them enough rope to hang themselves: they reveal their own nature without the narrator having to comment; you’re showing and not telling”
Jefferson Holdridge: How I Wrote ‘Hands’
“She noticed my predilection for rhyme and then warned that using it should sound ‘blindingly inevitable'”
Katie Munnik: How I Wrote ‘The Invention of Rope’
“You might say that writing this poem was an act of unwinding”
Alyson Hallett: How I Wrote ‘Split Tongues’
“It seems to me that all language grows out of the dirt, the shapes of hills, the mud of the fields and barks of trees”