Rising to the Challenge of Summer.

Solos – whether living, working or otherwise alone - need to be just as creative as parents occupying children, double as much if you’re child-minding alone as well.

At the gates of a play-school last year I met a Grandmother, child-minding for the summer. She was visiting from England and lamenting the absence of activity groups to join. ‘Every group I contact has stopped for the summer months.’ I recommended investigating the Meet-Up site online but, living alone myself, I fully appreciated the challenge she was facing. At least her adult family would return home in the evenings but they’d have their own commitments. She needed a life of her own – temporarily in suspension across the Irish Sea - to complement child-minding and acting adjunct to her younger family, so busy themselves they’d be unlikely to fully appreciate her difficulties which could lead to problems. She could quickly find herself isolated, or at odds with the family she had come to assist with little left to contribute in terms of company after a day of child-minding alone.

Solo, whether through living alone, working alone from home, recently: retired, widowed separated, with a spouse working away or simply absent with their own activities – is a challenge to rise to if you are not to disappear into yourself and feel body-less. Without the synergy of engaging with others, as interested in you as themselves as you collectively engage in a shared enterprise, it takes a lot of creative energy to simply keep on track. Don’t dismiss that as valueless. This creative engagement can have you more consciously weaving life than those who are more engaged. It would be worse were there no challenge to keep you creative. This realisation is a good place to start.

Setting up a structure that works for your day and week, once you’ve practised it for a while, will save you from wasting energy. President Obama bought suits of only two colours, with matching ties for each, when he began his presidency. He wouldn’t have the time or energy to be daily deciding on clothes. I’ve also taken this advice from a seasoned solo traveller heard on radio before I took my first trip away alone to Rome a few weeks ago. ‘Decide beforehand what you will do when you get there, give yourself an itinerary -otherwise, when you arrive, you won’t bother and find yourself wandering aimlessly’. It worked a treat. Tired from simply getting there, it was great to have sought out the city tourist travel bus before I’d even left the station on arrival and to take it up next day without effort. All that was left to decide was where to get off and when to get back on!

Exercise needs to be part of your structure. A daily walk, tai chi or yoga exercises or whatever you fancy yourself. At the worst of times: movement of any kind is a first step back on track – even if it’s walking across the kitchen and stretching before you put the kettle on. Already your brain is re-activated. I love Julia Cameron’s idea of Artist Dates – from the book The Artist’s Way. Choose to visit or do something you wouldn’t normally select and go there, or go somewhere that will stimulate your creative side - and don’t think about creativity as something that is only for artists, it is not. Engage in a project: make something or learn. Wellbeing research indicates that anything that absorbs you to self-forgetfulness leverages happiness and August is a good time to visit special events and put a toe in new waters.

‘Power poses,’ I’ve been known to chant as a mantra on occasions. The research indicating that people who have taken power stances before interviews – hands on hips, leaning on a table with your hands, or punching the air – instead of only sitting curled over to surf the internet on a smart phone before being questioned, not only performed better in their interview but felt better too. Their cortisol levels, associated with stress, were down and testosterone levels up leaving them more sense of agency and action.

Smile, it changes your brain chemistry and there is something to be said for the old adage about the world smiling with you but I wouldn’t rely on it. You need company and it is good to do everything you can to find it but failing that there’s a lot to enjoy and, meanwhile, you’re building resilience, toning muscles readiness to rise to your next challenge – maybe the new group you’ll join in September or the skill you’ll take to the next level when you add it to the familiar friends and activities you enjoy during the rest of the year.

The Honouring of Poets: Derek Mahon

     I was listening to poet Derek Mahon’s controversial biographer, Stephen  Enniss, last night - as he was interviewed by Vincent Woods on  Arts Tonight on RTE Radio 1*. Savouring the pleasure of hearing Derek Mahon himself, in excerpts from previous interviews and hearing him read a few of his poems. Stephen Enniss acknowledges that Mahon and Seamus Heaney were good friends but also, inevitably, rivals. He linked the withdrawal of Derek Mahon from the public sphere of poetry, including his refusal of an OBE from the Queen of his birth-place, Northern Ireland, to the awarding of the Nobel Prize to Heaney. The wisdom of which withdrawal Enniss absolutely regrets and he hopes his book will provide a counterbalance, keeping Derek Mahon’s poetry closer to the foreground of international attention. It will be good if it achieves that although the poems speak for themselves.

     Whatever his own reasons, such as he knows them, Derek Mahon himself, however, has not only done the right thing in withdrawing but given the greatness of his commitment to serving poetry; he has, arguably, taken the only possible option open to him. This is, I predict; what the greats of his generation, his early friend Evan Boland, perhaps, and friends Michael and Edna Longley - along with other present and future great writers will say, or may have already said privately or in public.

     There is a paradox at the centre of a culture of awards and prizes. True poetry and art is beyond such things – there can be no single winner, given the diversity of poems and poets  - yet they are crucial to maintaining a framework that ensures it can continue to be formed. The humanness at the centre of it, also paradoxically, requires sufficient recognition to battle on in the face of few material rewards. The greatest prize in literature was awarded – to Heaney.  The only thing left to a true poet and candidate of similar stature is to transcend that culture, put himself beyond the question of current acclaim and leave it to history.

     It is important that Seamus Heaney was awarded and accepted the Nobel Prize. It was important that in the year of his seventieth birthday the laureate could be heard on radio at the centre of Irish life reciting his poems - in the midst of the collapse of so much. He held, and held us, to poetry.  It is equally in the service of Irish and all poetry that Derek Mahon has not second-placed himself by accepting less prestigious awards, however honourable in themselves, but rather holds for us the space in poetry that is beyond all such.

    In the greatness of time in Northern Ireland it will not be the creeds and identities of the relatively petty wrangling that will be remembered but the bloodshed. Neither will it be awards of literature, whatever gratefulness is felt that the artist received recognition in their time. It is poetry that endures. The words and the due honour inherent in the manner it has been served.

Reference & Link:

Book: After the Titanic: The Life of Derek Mahon by Stephen Enniss. Gill & Macmillan.

*http://www.rte.ie/radio/utils/radioplayer/rteradioweb.html#!rii=9%3A10440736%3A1538%3A%3A

*First broadcast Autumn, 2014

.

Postcript and Prelude

An Apprentice Verse-Maker’s Take on the Exhibition -

Postcript: Visual Artists Respond to Seamus Heaney’s Poem.              

Transfixed, I was listening to the radio in my kitchen when I heard the Chair of the Irish Countrywoman’s Association, Bridin Twist, say that she was in favour of legalising divorce. There was now every chance something heretofore unimaginable could happen. I was reminded of that as the votes were counted in the recent referendum.  It was one of those heart-stopping moments when time is suspended and you know the landscape has irrevocably changed. A few years later I met my hero in her home The Burren Holistic Centre below Mullaghmore Mountain, where I was to facilitate a workshop.

Bridin, who sadly died a few years ago, brought my attention to the poem Postscript, by Seamus Heaney.  I bought a copy from the Kinvara shop named after the poem and had it hanging in my own house afterwards.

On Saturday evening last in the Russell Art Gallery, just north of the flaggy shore road that inspired the poem, I attended the opening by Micheal O’Suilleabhain of ‘Postscript: visual artists respond to Seamus Heaney’s poem’ - an exhibition curated by Tim Emlyn Jones. Introducing Micheal, Tim spoke of the transformative powers of the Gallery space where, if you stop by for a cup of coffee before walking the flaggy shore, anything can happen. You can even find yourself agreeing to curate the exhibition to which you had agreed to contribute!

The response of the artists he invited was so generous that the Burren Art College is now going to host more of the exhibition. It will be formally opened there by Fintan O’Toole on Thursday 9^th July at 7pm. Both sections of the whole exhibition will continue until the end of July. Just over a week later, on Friday 17^th July, The former RTE radio producer, John Quinn, will introduce and present “Remembering Seamus – interviews & correspondence,” a selection of radio interviews with his friend.

The RHA artist, Donald Teskey’s Longshore II - a wild seascape created in mixed media, waves crashing the rocks of the shoreline, immediately grabs attention on entering the Russell gallery space. To the left of that is an exhibit where lines drawn in black interact with thick white paper, drawing attention across the waves to the horizon and the sky’s lines above. This picture had me smile without quite knowing why - the horizon, with its persistent waves, its sense of timelessness maybe. It is the work of Tim Emlyn Jones himself and there is a smaller similar piece of his further along the wall, with more variety in the waves and light. The juxtaposition of colour and black-and-white is striking in the montage of images in mixed media in Judith McKimm’s work, while The Blue Flower, in oil, by Nick Miller and Geraldine O’Reilly’s work give a more immediate take on the Burren landscape - as does RHA Charles Harper’s, striking piece Burren Day highlighting mountain and flagged Burren landscape – although in a very different style. I was also particularly taken by the abstract work of the other artists: Ann Quinn, Lorraine Wall and David Ferry.  Conor McGrady’s ‘Borderland 1’ and 2, undertaken in Gouache on Paper, revealed to the returning eye of this observer a zen-like sense of stillness. I wondered was the artist influenced by Japanese landscapes: a black sun above a strong I Ching-like line was suggested to this novice when I reflected further. And the placement of the scene on the paper in his second piece, reminiscent of rocks planted in the Japanese landscape – timeless and natural, yet carefully placed, this time here in Co Clare, suggested it further. The blurred boundaries of the gouache medium somehow only strengthen the outline. Again, there’s the suggestion of a here-and-there-ness.

The boundaries of the exhibition itself are blurred in the Gallery. Hunting for treasure, glance moving from catalogue to walls, it became clear all the paintings on the walls are exhibits. The other work, enjoyable for itself any other day and propped on shelves among exceptional craftwork, cards and jewellery that, one suspects, assist the gallery to host such exhibitions – they have related books too – inevitably distract somewhat from the exhibition.

‘Heaney’s “…neither here nor there” might be taken as an insult but it also reveals something of poetry’. ‘It is the place where poetry meets you’, Micheal O’Suilleabhain suggested as he reflected on Heaney’s lines. ‘Everyone should have a flute carrier’ he remarked as the young man kneeling at his feet unbent himself to extend the instrument. The musician did not want the audience to be trying to imagine wild swans or any such – ‘we’ll just see what happens’ and the notes trickled and danced.

Across the road, as I left, across the fields and the grey sea in the bay the white and yellow light was highlighting dark edges in the white clouds. Silver glanced the arms of the wind turbines lit from the disappearing light behind them as they turned on the hills – straight across from the place Heaney visited and wrote, in Postcript, ‘You are neither here nor there,/a hurry through which known and strange things pass/As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways/And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.’

Relevant links:

Russellgallery.net

http://visualartists.ie/listings/exhib-munster/postscript-group-exhibitions-at-the-burren-college-of-art-and-the-russell-gallery/

aica.ie/postscript-group-exhibitions-at-the-burren-college-of-art... 

How is Money, Money? Bitcoin and Other Currency Questions.

I was on holiday in the 1970s, on the Ring of Kerry, when the recently graduated husband of my friend from earlier days, shocked me into thinking differently about my bank account, then happily in credit despite its low value. I was reminded of this, on Monday 18^th May, at the UCD workshop on Gaming Money.

‘I threatened to move my loan to another bank,’ he said. Far from feeling himself at the mercy of his bank because of the significant loan he had had to take out to equip his dental surgery he realised that the interest he would be paying on the loan for a long time to come made him a valuable customer. It was the first time I realised that my careful ‘staying in the black’ strategy was only that and not necessarily the best one. Credit is valuable. A credit history can be valuable too, if you want to take out loans in future. Banks sell loans to us and to each other and in the process create more money. Contrary to what is often thought to be the case, most money nowadays is created by commercial banks rather than Central banks.

The ‘nice’ history frequently taught in College courses on Economics describing the humble beginnings of money as token object used as substitutes to barter, is only one way of looking at the money story. Another begins, by seeing money as credit – debt. As money becomes increasingly complex exploring the stories and histories that best describe how it works may be the most realistic way to understand it.

How is money, money? No longer backed by gold (Nixon fully and finally removed it from the Gold Standard in 1971), with only a fraction of the value of credit given, or ‘money’, backed by reserves of savings it is no longer accurate – if it really ever was – to think about money as a thing. All of this was the starting point for ‘rules of currencies, and how they are and could be twisted by digital currencies’. The Workshop was part of the UCD Centre for Innovation Technology  and Organisation’s (CITO) research on coding value. The invited speaker, Professor Ole Bjerg from the Copenhagen Business School, explored the question, ‘How is Bitcoin Money? He finds the question ‘How is money?’ more effective than ‘What is money?’.

Bitcoin is growing in significance. It is the best known of digital currencies using block-chain coding – a kind of linked computer coding that is considered to be particularly secure. The European Union takes it seriously enough to have brought out a report last year advising Central Banks as to important considerations to bear in mind when considering it.

Author of Making Money, Bjerg employs a model from Lacanian Analysis to propose three overlapping circles one of which he calls ‘Real’, placing within it an image of a house - but it could either, arguably, be a block of gold bullion. The second one he labels, ‘Symbolic’ and places within it a hundred euro note. That note, or any such, is backed by Nation States and has ‘sovereign power behind it.’ In the third circle, titled ‘Imaginative’ he puts a Visa card. In this circle money is credit. ‘The banks owe us a lot of money and that is what we use as money’. These overlapping circles give the fuller picture of how money is.

Professor Donncha Kavanagh – at UCD, proposes a further circle he labels ‘Shambolic’ to include  ‘excess’ – the value added by leveraged derivatives and more. Kavanagh considers stories and mythologies useful aids to better understand business: his paper, with Majella O’Leary (2004), considers heroic leadership styles within business organisations in the light of Irish Legends -The Tain and Chu Chulainn. Think of the myths about alchemy, the eternal search to turn base metal into gold – powerfully symbolic in our collective imagination.

Bjorg points out that Bitcoin, although it can’t be held in the hand, has similar characteristics to gold in that its story includes ‘mining’. Would be miners have to spend considerable time on a computer bank on which they have to rent time on very expensive powerful computers, or pool resources with lots of other miners if they want to get themselves Bitcoins. Most will, instead buy them from those who have already done this.

A member of the audience high-lighted the significance of this difference: the distributed power is in the hands of the miners - and much is made of this de-centralised, democratised, non-State power  (‘Symbolic circle’above) backing the digital currency - and not with the majority of holders of Bitcoin who are more likely to have bought or exchanged the ‘coins’.

The second guest speaker was Nigel Dodd, who talked about ‘Origins and Utopias of Monies’. He is a sociology professor from the London School of Economics who has made the sociology of money the focus of a long career. He talked about local currencies, such as the Brixton pound in England: they definitely add value to local economies; it is best argued that they add resilience to the greater picture by being currencies within the framework of other currencies.

The workshop suggests that so far the most valuable aspect of digital and other forms of currency may be the way they force and assist us to think further about what and how money is.

Fat is Not Immoral and Those Who Claim the High Moral Ground Are in Danger of Bullying.

I wish I could be as smart as Derek Davis was.

Fat is no longer ‘a feminist issue’ alone. It’s a health and fashion issue - for all. It always was. Face facts: fat is most associated with having a low income, although genetic make-up and many other factors play their part; once it has been put on, the body has an in-built tendency to return to its former highest weight. This is why many who diet fail to sustain their weight loss and why attacking those who have weight on is inappropriate and counter-productive. To demonise those putting on weight, or their parents, is to bully those often already suffering.

You may have a lean mean physique. You may work hard to keep it that way, sweating the calories off in the gym or on the road. Well done.  I celebrate your success, health and wellbeing. If you also need to hit out at the less fortunate then I question your motivation. You want to add moral high ground to your accolades? Is your self –worth so low? Is it built on body image? You are then about as unwell as the rest of us.

All the indications are that we live in a society with an eating disorder. Magazines sell best, now that Princess Diana is gone, when they have something about weight, fat or food on the cover. We have anti-weight campaigns and more cooking food programmes promoting sugar and fat ingredients than ever before. See-saw weight gain-loss and an obsession with food are clear indications of addiction. We photo-shop images that no-one can live up to because they are not real and then we make them an ideal to fail to live up to. It makes sense to be obsessed with food when it is genuinely in short supply other than that, we have to ask: what else is going on.

The short answer is that an industry is going on, an industry with as many charlatans as academic experts. The second answer is that industry as a whole needs more output from fewer workers to keep the economy going. 

Last Sunday,10th May, 2015, the retired broadcaster Derek Davis contributed to a conversation on the Marian Finucane Show about Obesity Policy, This week we are mourning his death. The panel agreed the focus needs to be on prevention, starting with children. Children need to be allowed to play. They need to be given space to run around and allowed out to safe-enough spaces we need to ensure are created. We do need to exercise. We also need to get out more. We need to address our false fears of the world out there. Having been a pscychotherapist for many years I want to say that many of those are generated by fear in here – internal fear generated by the false myths we need to stop promulgating. We also need to face the fact that life is uncertain: we can contribute to outcomes but we can’t control them. Counteracting obesity begins best with breast-feeding which brings us back to the question of work lifestyle balance and the need for companies to be more conscious that mothers need to breastfeed and that companies need women if they are to succeed best so action is needed here too.

I never thought I’d write on this issue. I didn’t want to join the obsession. It is a tragedy that in the last week of Derek Davis’ life he had to say, ‘I am sitting here getting angry…’ as he listened to Sinead Ryan, introduced as the Consumer and Property Analyst from The Irish Independent, who had castigated the parents of overweight children. Davis talked about what is known as Fat Guilt and how G.Ps. and others are ‘not up to speed on obesity.’ It is ‘profoundly anger inducing …only feeds the so-called fat industry’ including its' charlatans’. 

We owe it to the memory of a generous man to deal with our communal addiction: face our fear and address best eating and exercise habits in a way that is both fair and respectful. I wish I could be as smart as Derek Davis was. I loved hearing a replay of him talking about books to George Hook this week. I wanted more.

http://www.rte.ie/radio1/marian-finucane/   Sunday 10^th May. Click on Obesity Policy

http://www.newstalk.com/podcasts/The_Right_Hook/ click on ‘Remembering Derek Davis’

Cupcakes, Blogging, Poetry and Sleep – Build a Sustainable Blog and Lifestyle.

Notes from An Apprentice Verse-Maker (4)

We may not all want – or have the expertise and experience – to blog about cupcakes and style, however we may enjoy both or either.  But Jeff Haden’s interview with Emily Schuman, author of the highly successful business that her Cupcakes and Cashmere blog has become, has a lot to say to anyone seriously interested in writing a blog and building a sustainable following.

If literature and poetry is your thing, Cupcakes and Cashmere may seem a little frivolous and the best-selling book of the same name further evidence that a large Market Share is inevitably not for you. An argument I dispute – at least to the same extent it is held to be true.

Best-selling poetry Anthologies such as those edited by Bloodaxe UK publisher, Neil Astley, are among the poetry books that have given the lie to the suggestion that poetry isn’t for everyone or won’t be loved by many who haven’t yet found it accessible. By accessible I don’t mean easy to understand, I mean the poetry flag found and followed because it stands out among the clamour of flag-flying products and services vying for attention. There is always poetry easy to understand amid the intrigue of greater challenges. In the midst of all the clamour poetry is a refuge you can bring home – more immediately accessible (time-wise and geographically), by click, purchase or browse than the restorative power of any Spa, beauty product, cupcake or other splurge - although it can as equally complement as provide an alternative to all of those.

The poetry anthology or collection by your bed is the best night-time dip you’ll find on those nights sleep is determined to elude you or your mind is humming with events properly belonging to day-time. One sound, image or penny-dropping melt leads to another. You are diverted and captivated. How come, someone has captured in a few lines the distress you’ve been secretly hoarding, or your obsessional hidden desire? How do poets do that?

If that doesn’t do it, you can give your attention to learning a few lines by heart. You’ve toned your brain, given your imagination a quick fix and taken ‘time-out', it’s probably  time to settle down and go back to sleep. Those lines repeated to yourself, an oasis you instil in your brain for the future as you drift away, will easily win out against counting sheep.  Even better, a poem or two before bedtime can become an essential de rigueur transition between digital drives, the obligations of daytime and night-time peace. There cannot be a better way to obey the strictures of sleep experts and build a bed-time routine that prepares the body for sleep. If the pages do become a little damp and curled because you can’t resist dipping while in the bath then, there is nothing to worry about. Any book is better damp than dry-leaved and closed.

Emily Schuman adjures bloggers hoping to build a successful business to

       ‘Be patient…success will most likely come slowly, if at all’.

       ‘Be authentic and learn to differentiate yourself’.

She reminds her audience that

        ‘…creating original talent…will take a lot of your time’.

Warns against

     

        ‘...sacrificing quality over content. Your audience will be built on trust and the entertainment      

        value you provide. If your quality slips, so will they.’

Warns against,

        ‘…taking every offer that comes your way. (Advertising offers! You wish.) At first it’s very

        tempting to accept ….ultimately, it degrades your credibility if you become an advocate for

        anyone willing to pay you.’

Now, why does that sound more convincing coming from that source than it did when I heard it from poets and artists?

Start Blogging, Start a Business, and Build an Authentic… - Inc.com

Bestselling author and successful entrepreneur Emily Schuman of Cupcakes and Cashmere on building a thriving business.

An Interview by Jeff Haden

Is at  www.inc.com/jeff-haden/start-blogging-start-a-business-and-build-an-authentic-brand.html.

Other relevant websites are:

cupcakesandcashmere.org

bloodaxebooks.com

I Have My Ass Kicked at the Thirtieth Cuirt International Festival of Literature, Galway Ireland, 2015. Notes from an Apprentice Verse-Maker (2).

Mattie kisses me on both cheeks. There’s a jazz band playing. The boathouse doors open onto the terrace where people are talking their heads off in summer dresses and flowery tee shirts and a team of rowers are sculling the river behind them. We’re at the launch party for the thirtieth Cuirt International Festival of Literature. Perhaps the warmth of his greeting is in honour of the workshops I have on offer in the Cuirt Programme this year. While moving the black box that served as a stage, the year I read for Doire Press at the Cuirt Literary Brunch, Mattie told me that everyone contributing to Cuirt gets the same treatment from him. This is whether they are Seamus Heaney or are undertaking their first reading ever. It is ten years since I saw Mattie welcome Mr Heaney to Cuirt, on the steps of the Galway Town Hall theatre. That handshake made a lasting impression. It was the first time I’d seen the Nobel Laureate for literature, the first time I attended a literature festival. For five years of my move west to Galway I’d gauge my progress through greetings: first I knew no-one; then I could recognise people; then they’d recognise me. When I found myself being greeted on the street by people I didn’t yet know, I knew I’d finally arrived.

The Agency I’d set my sights on for my Memoir, the one that didn’t get short-listed for the competition - the deadline for which  I’d aimed it at last year, has written to say that although they like what I’ve written they just can’t see a large enough audience for it. They think it would appeal in particular to women in later life. But they do sweeten the pill with a comment that ‘this is nicer than that’ (a best-selling memoir I’d mentioned) and suggest submitting it to one particular publisher, giving me his e-mail address. That’s generous consideration. I push away the thought they are just letting me down gently. I am grateful.

Yet, what bigger audience could there be than women in later life? These are the women who fill book-clubs, provide theatres with at least sixty per cent of their audiences, who have always read – as distinct from surfed – books. They are keen to know about people of their age trying new things and to have a go at writing themselves - and they actually have a little more time now to read. Almost weekly, someone proclaims -in print or on air - that the ageing population is the fastest growing population in the Western world.  But, no doubt the Agent is right. The publishers they pitch to may be keen to target a younger audience, dare I say a more masculine audience? That last is unlikely. Does targeting a younger audience mean they have to neglect their long-term paying customers? It shouldn’t, but it may well be what’s happening. I’m glad I received the rejection notice while I can be distracted by the buzz of Cuirt and my big opportunity in this year’s festival – the chance to transfer skills from my former profession to augment my poetry writing by facilitating two workshops, Having a new Conversation – About Dreaming. The workshops use poetry as a springboard and container for conversations about particular topics.

The first workshop Conversation goes well. Returned questionnaires evaluating the event give further details – a few participants expected more on working with their dreams, either therapeutically or as writers. I’ve given up therapeutic work but I’ll include a poem likely to have been inspired by a dream in my Sunday workshop. How much time it gets will depend on the group. Regardless of having wished for a bit more of this or that, it seems the Tuesday participants at GMIT overall enjoyed their experience greatly. Inspired by encouraging questionnaire evidence I search my online documents, start editing and save the brochure I draft onto a memory stick I bring to the printers. As with so many requests printers suffer from receiving: I want copies yesterday. I’ve woken up to the value of designers though, so I pay the extra bit to have them work their magic. I place copies of the resultant flyers beside the till in Charlie Byrne’s bookstand at the Town Hall theatre.

Naomi Shihab Nye and Kay Ryan – both of whom have won myriad prestigious awards, while Kay Ryan was also United States Poet Laureate 2008-2010 - blow me away with their poems. I leave the theatre full – and inspired. I wish now that I hadn’t done anything as crass as having put out leaflets for possible festival organisers to pick up in the hope they might consider me for future events but I haven’t the courage to go and retrieve them.

I attend the workshop on Journalism -with a particular focus on interviewing - led by Olaf Tyaransen of Hotpress fame. It seems that the fact that a poet I interviewed for the poetry broadsheet Skylight 47 allowed me longer than the time ordained by her press agent was a good omen. Tyaransen says this can happen if you are lucky enough to be getting along with your interviewee, so it’s important to allow extra time for an interview in case you get lucky. Similarly, Sinead Gleeson, leading the Friday workshop, ‘A Guide to Working Freelance in Arts Media’ encourages me, with the news that the fact an editor of a newspaper gave me the word count he would want for a feature while turning down one of my submissions means he considered my work sufficiently promising to want more. She goes on to point out I should consistently follow up with offers of further submissions and ‘doggedly’ persist. His mail was received well over a year ago! However I have been getting the vital practice she urges us to get by continuing to write whether or not I submit or post the resultant articles. She believes that, contrary to pessimistic proclamations, there is still work for Freelance writers. A lot of pages have to be filled daily and editors are keen for new voices. She included radio in this. Turned down by an Agent? She suggests a particular London Agent for the next try ‘…and try publishers at the same time.’ She proffers the name of another one. We should write daily, ‘you’ll get better’, be blogging regularly. It’s no good having someone look at your blog and see that you haven’t written anything for a while. Ouch!

By dinnertime I’ve written the first draft of this blog to allow it a couple of days’ further consideration. I have been reminded that the real writing is the re-writing that will have to happen before I post it. As one participant said to two of us as we left the freelance writing workshop, ‘I’ve had my ass (usefully) kicked’.