Last night I had the pleasure of performing at Vineyard Arts, which is a lovely biweekly arts group taking place in a church space in Partick. That evening—a very rainy one, even for Glasgow—the attendance was fairly low, and the folks who showed up were mostly fellow spoken word artists. I realised that most of the … Continue reading Reflections on Publishing Homing
Hello all! This week I'm delighted to feature a guest piece by my dear friend Freddie Alexander on this site. I met Freddie the first time I moved to Edinburgh, in 2012, and was blown away by his tight writing and his energetic, intense performance style. Freddie currently organises the monthly Edinburgh Open Mic Inky Fingers, and has … Continue reading Guest Post: Freddie Alexander on Crowdfunding
One of my hopes for the new year was to try out new ways of writing and performing, and the start of 2016 has happily involved just that: I've been composing and performing lots of collaborative poems! Before this year I'd never written collaboratively before. Writing poetry had always been an intensely solitary event for me, involving … Continue reading Writing Collaborative Performance Poems
Hi everyone! Last spring I ran a Kickstarter campaign to crowdfund the publication of my first poetry collection and the production of my first poetry video. It was successful beyond my expectations, and now both the collection and the video have been finished and released (you can purchase Homing here and view "Polos" here). The production of both … Continue reading Crowdfunding: Tips & Tricks
Hi everyone! I'm so excited to announce that today we're publicly releasing the new video for my poem "Polos"! The poem is linked at the bottom of this post, but rather than just posting the video up here I thought I'd also share the creative process that went into conceiving and producing this work. It's the product … Continue reading Dance & Spoken Word: Making Polos
Hi folks! We're halfway through the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and I'm writing with some brief reflections. This month I've been working with the spoken word collective Loud Poets on our Fringe show at the Scottish Storytelling Centre. It's a dynamic slam poetry show with a live band improvising onstage, with ten poets swapping out each … Continue reading Mid-Fringe: Brief Reflections
Ed note: This week we're featuring a guest post from writer Derek White. Derek's post considers something I've been thinking about a lot lately: how do we determine whether a poet is a "proper poet" or "professional poet"? What differentiates those "formal" poets from the "amateurs": money, talent, publications, experience, how they market themselves? Derek's post explores … Continue reading Guest Post: What is a “Proper Poet”?
This site has been rather quiet for the past couple weeks, but for a good reason: I've been touring with the Loud Poets in London and at the Brighton Fringe Festival! They had me along as a guest poet on their show, a techie, flyerer, and social media manager, among other roles everyone played as … Continue reading Touring with Loud Poets: Reflections
This week we have a guest post from poet Georgia Bartlett-McNeil. Georgia is an Edinburgh-based poet who maintains a strong online presence for her creative writing through Tumblr (her blog, A Poet's World, is here). In this post she shares her experience of gaining confidence to share her writing publicly with the support of her online … Continue reading Guest Post: Online Poetry Communities
Ed. note: This post has sparked discussion on Facebook and Twitter since being published, with feedback from a wide range of perspectives and opinions (some Facebook comments here, Twitter Storify here, some comments on the blog below). I'm delighted that a public conversation is occurring on the importance of trigger warnings, since for some they are … Continue reading Trigger Warnings for Poems?
