Shaking out the Colours

Steel and Ice

2012-01-16T09:31:00.001Z

This morning's walk brought to mind this poem - written on a pre-Christmas visit to the City of Steel one year. Crystallising a certain moment.

SolsticeCity

alate dawn brings

smudgeof yellow

arim of hill light

breakingthe fog

eighto’clock sleep

walkershooting air

climbwarily

ablack-iced

footbridge

thenthe full beam

wintersearchlight

scouringthe city

illuminating

texturesof raw frost

pavementpock

marksand brown

spatter,an early

sowingof salt

atthe station

menin yellow hats

areblinded by

thestainless steel

waterfeature

andprecinct pagans

torchthe afternoon

withbonfire bonanzas

cabledtricks of light

thisshortest day

soonspills its shine

inthe rush of dusk

agiant wheel

spittingcolour

slicesthe sudden

nightwith shrieks

invokinggods

andother desires

END

House of Horrors

2011-11-21T08:05:00.001Z

It'sworth taking a moment - while decrepit 'granpa' Dodge hollers sournothings at his wife Halie - to study the extraordinary design ofthis CurveStudio production.Sam Shepard'sdarkly comic and disturbing Pullitzer-winning play Buried Child isset in an Illinois rural backwater in 1978. The stage bristles withtowering stalks of corn growing out of a giant wooden rack that liftsto become the roof of a prairie homestead. It makes the ramshacklehouse appear like an underground bunker into which this dysfunctionalfamily have retreated. Earthy roots might thrust through its ceilingany day now. Grimy windows are lit by sloshing rain. Mesh screenspartition walls, doors and verandah so that characters seem to movebetween grey veils. A fine mist drifts across the living room, caughtin light shafts which colour with changing hours but also pulse withthe emotional undercurrent of this psycho-drama. The whole structureseems creepily alive.

Matthew Kelly & Matthew Rixon

Eventually,Matthew Kellyreels in your attention towards his shambolic patriarch stranded on afilthy sofa that hides more than whisky bottles. Good as he is, themost mesmerising performances from an impressive ensemble cast werethe two brothers, Tilden (played by Kelly’s own son, MatthewRixon)and Bradley (MichaelBeckley).As broken as the furniture, these two lumber through interlockingrooms, trapped in the wooden interior. Rixon's portrait is moresubtle. A scene where he spreads shelled corn husks over his sleepingfather is both clumsily reverent and sinister, funereal even. This ismatched by Beckley creeping up on his prone father with an electricshaver. Beckley plays this son as a horror movie grotesque but histwitching angularity and twanging voice are never less thanstartling. Even grovelling on the sofa, whining for his prostheticleg, he is menacing. A looming nightmarish figure amidst the grimyrealism, you look to him for the violence this play persistentlythreatens.

WithAct Two, the pace picks up as two youngsters arrive; Vince and hisgirlfriend Shelly. Vince (LloydThomas)is disturbed to find that his father and grandfather fail torecognize him after a six year absence. Except we don't know if theyare his family. Shelly, (CatrinStewart),a brash but winning young city woman, articulates our unease and asksthe questions. She eventually concludes it is the house'sinhabitants, not her, who are the 'strangers'. Shelly unpicksallusions to a family scandal but the play's title means it's neverhard to guess where this is going. What it lacks in mystery though,it makes up in a sullen festering tension.

Lloyd Thomas & Catrin Stewart

Finally,matriarch Halie returns with a bumbling Father Dewis (GaryLilburn)who might or might not be her beau with his garish bouquet of yellowroses. JaneLowe,in vintage fifties frocks, blends the faded glamour of a BlancheDubois with the cracked facade of a Baby Jane. 'I don't know what myrole is here,' mutters the priest in a recurring Absurdist complaintabout muddled identities. Through the miasma of secrets andconfusion, it is the staging which delivers a climactic moment. Thecornstalks pierce the rotten heart of the family in an uncannymutation and Shepherd's armoury of symbols is once more re-arranged.

It seemed only afterwards fitting to tumble into a city under siegefrom swirling November fog. 'Buried Child' runs tillDecember 3rd at the Curve and deserves full houses throughout forthis impressive revival of an American Gothic classic.

Small Press Secrets

2011-10-28T13:44:00.000+01:00

A year of immersing myself in the icy world of Antarctica and polar exploration finally bore fruit last night with the launch of my new chapbook, MAD, HOPELESS & POSSIBLE: Shackleton's Endurance Expedition. And not only that but a chance to interview my editor, the lovely Sam Smith of Original Plus books. The event was hosted by Leicester Writers' Club, a wonderful community of writers, and Sam's comments struck a real chord with them.

Sam spilled the beans on how the world of small press publishing looks from the inside. Sam explained that as an aspiring novelist, it took him 23 years to break into print. Editors would accept his books only to find that the salespeople wouldn't run with it. Finally he turned to poetry and got published within months. This fuelled his desire later to get into small press publishing himself as a way of contributing to that community of poets:

'I do it because it was so important to me to get something into print. I wanted to give that opportunity to other writers.'

We discussed the economic realities of small press publishing. This is a one man press - virtually a cottage industry with all the chapbooks printed up at home. With his poetry magazine, The Journal, his biggest cost is postage for subscribers. It's a 'hand-to-mouth' operation and very much a labour-of-love for this dedicated writer and editor. To find out what Sam had to say about how English Poetry changes, what he looks for in submissions and the future of print publishing as e-books take off, have a look at this fascinating interview: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4A-5jCLusw&feature=youtu.be (many thanks to Ambrose Musiyiwa for posting this)

It was timely that as I prepared for this event, I was being captivated all over again by Attenborough's ravishing images of the white continent in FROZEN PLANET on TV. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00mfl7n Here were the wind-tortured icescapes, the mighty glaciers and the wild creatures of the South that early polar explorers encountered on foot. Don't miss this beautfiul series. And you can catch readings of my poems inspired by all that magnificence on: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9VusaWXVW4&feature=share&noredirect=1

And if you're wanting to find out more about my book on my website, hang on! My trusty techie is working on a revamped website right now and we will unveil this in a week or so.

So watch this space ... and have a look at Original Plus for this and many other titles. See: http://www.freewebs.com/thesamsmith/originalpluschapbooks.htm

Sledge Rations

2011-06-11T11:25:00.017+01:00

Huskies fed, sledge unpacked, now for the diary ...

I feel like I'm back from a long expedition out on the ice. And I'm ready to break radio silence. This week the proofs arrived for my new chapbook, Mad, Hopeless & Possible. Based on Shackleton's Antarctic Expedition of 1914-17, it relates this epic story in poems and prose.

It's thrilling to have the pages in my hand already. My editor, Sam Smith of Original Plus press, is some kind of genius. Only days after my sending off the mansucript, here they are. So now for the careful work of checking typos, working out the best pagination and locating the illustrations I need. Maps to be drawn, for instance ...

In this long year, a very busy one at college, I'd thought my writing was rather bogged-down in the crevasses fields. Unable to make any of my schedules, months vanishing into the white unknown. But I brought back this little book and I love its stories, these voices of Edwardian venturers, the vast landscape they got lost in. The frazil ice and hummocks, the sastrugi and cliffs of sea-ice. And the tiny human details that got buried in it.

So now for the telling ...

The Lure of Scott's Hut

2011-04-24T19:12:00.049+01:00

With the 100th anniversary of Scott's dash for the South Pole running into this year and Shackleton's own Endurance anniversary looming, there's been a spate of documentaries on recently about Polar Explorers on the last continent. V. useful indeed for a Polar Poet, especially when they send out a celebrity/ explorer like Ben Fogle to present to camera. Suddenly I can see the texture of the ice, like ropes of sheer glass, running down the Beardmore Glacier. I can learn what pemmican looks like or what the body does when there is no more fat to burn. And I can take a virtual tour with the amiable Fogle into the darkness of a wintering Scott Hut - almost touch those ancient packs of Colman's Mustard and rusty tins of Real Turtle Soup ...

Last week's programme, The Secrets of Scotts Hut, was absolutely fascinating and raised many pertinent questions about both polar exploration and polar archaeology. Can we (or rather the New Zealanders) justify spending millions on painstakingly removing and preserving the 100s of artefacts from Scott's Hut, only to place them back in that same environment in which they are rotting - especially when only a handful of people will ever see them there? Though he might have made more of the burgeoning tourist industry which makes an ever greater imprint on Antarctica's 'pristine wilderness' - an appetite which Fogle's programme can only further whet.

Sir David Attenborough made the case that Scott's Hut is an essential historical marker of 'the human spirit' and its quest to journey into the unknown. I can see what he means if we read polar exploration in the light of millennia of human migration and colonisation of the globe. They were conscious, this Brotherhood of the South, of stepping onto the last uninhabited continent - as it then still was. 'The white edge of every map' as one of my poems has it. But pick up the diaries or the mission statements and it's clear their endeavours need also to be read in the more immediate context of turn-of-the-century European Imperialism - the same Scramble for Colonies that ushered in the First World War. Fogle was very struck by the wall of packing crates Scott erected between officers and men - a powerful metaphor for the class politics they unloaded along with the corporate sponsored foodstuffs onto the ice.

So Fogle was raking over the conflicting myths of Scott - a heroic leader who inspired undying loyalty - or a failed explorer whose obsession with beating first Shackleton then Amundsen led him to sacrifice his men's lives. Reading Scott's private diaries revealed a man of great tenderness and passion and his own photographs showed men pulling together to drag sledges across the vast Ross Ice Shelf. But any comparison with Amundsen makes Scott's party look ill-equipped and wantonly amateurish. On the other hand, Fogle's documentary shows how Scott's hut was packed to the rafters with scientific research materials and examples of the latest technology. Unlike Amundsen - or Shackleton - Scott took the science very seriously and his team amassed considerable data that contributed to the study of climate change for instance.

All key questions and debates. At the end of the day, I'm always drawn back to asking what were they really doing there? Why did they go? And why jeopardise all that was going on at Hut Point for a desperate dash to plant a flag in a wilderness? Theirs is such a very different endeavour from indigenous arctic peoples who never felt the need to stake such claims and who learned to be completely at home in their polar wilderness. From the opposite end of the century, we are still reassessing the myths. But the fascination of that frozen hut, heaped with the debris of Edwardian gentlemen explorers, remains irresistible and unarguably poignant.

Sometimes We Bless Each Other

2011-02-13T15:15:00.006Z

Wow! what a day!

see: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?id=799524860&aid=290025

And here was the wedding poem - which can hardly do justice to 20 years of companionship and so much more. But sometimes you have to try to say it anyway:

Cartography for the Heart

I

With you I am a traveller
a maker of maps:

charting the body's terrain
from stone rise of hip
to waist's sloping glen;
by navel's crinkled landmark
I divine the leylines
of your scent.

II

With you I reclaim lands
waterlogged, history bogged:

on Bohey’s raw hills
we navigate gradients,
search out the ruined tombs
of Tullyskeherny,
doorways of limestone
white as bone.

III

With you I am circling futures
the mind's latitudes

between trays of smoky tea
we cross Baltic blue seas,
skim ice water in Kvaloya,
drift with bergs in Jokulsarlon
where a midnight sun
is melting colours.

And the afternoons we make
are meadow sweet
puddled with sunlight

talking of places
and things to come ...

(c) Siobhan Logan 2011

Stitching the Cliches

2011-02-13T10:48:00.030Z

Spring is busy trashing my garden with wind and rain and I see poetry slams and events shooting up all over the place. Something is definitely in the air. But for me, all normal writerly service is suspended for the next week as THE WEDDING approaches. It even demands to be capitalised with barely 6 days to go. Life is now a whirl of menu-choice spreadsheets, table plans and sparkly accessories. For a wedding wraps a writer tight in the very thing s/he most abhors - yards and sequinned yards of cliche ...

However, this nuptial circus training has also entailed the writing of the Wedding Poem - the subject of this week's blog. A very tricky assignment. And not only writing and editing it but then getting it past the censorious scrutiny of the Registrar's Office. On Friday, I submitted my offering in person at Leicester Town Hall. A very helpful young woman cast her eye over the poem and looked uncertain. She passed it to her superior who scanned it with even more gravity and took it away for further checks. I don't know how many officials subsequently passed judgement on it or whether they used surgical gloves. What were the critieria for this entry? Were they hesitant about line breaks, thematic cohesion or the secular connotations of the verb 'to divine'? I'll never know. When it finally secured approval, no critique was given. Whew!

Because I certainly couldn't have produced another one. I'm quite lost when it comes to writing poems for occasions and it's very rare these days I write about personal experiences at all. I'm no Carol Ann Duffy, not a poet of the heart or human relationships. And how do you engineer a love poem that's not riddled with cliche - or a lyric that is authentic and intimate and yet immediately accessible to fifty or so guests? I had to rummage through notebooks as far back as 1994 to find the raw material for this one. Now give me an iceberg ... which did manage to make an appearance in this one:

we cross Baltic blue seas,
skim ice water in Kvaloya,
drift with bergs in Jokulsarlon

And that's all you're getting because even more than the dress, this adornment of words is under wraps. The only people who've seen it are my trusted critics, Leicester Writers' Club, who helped me edit it this week. Much snipping, pinching in and stitches in time. Certainly the groom has not had a peek. Because when you strip away all the language, all the civil ceremony and wedding cliches, he is what the day is all about.

Mad, Hopeless & Possible

2011-02-06T10:56:00.034Z

sledges packed; huskies fed; maps checked ...

By 2 o'clock in the afternoon, the expedition was underway. In the beautiful space of the Friends Meeting House, with 20 or so hardy companions, I steered into the ice pack of the Weddell Sea. For two hours, we hunkered down to haul the load of this epic story. White Warfare: Shackleton's Endurance Expedition, was my latest show and for the first time, I had travelled South to Antarctica for my inspiration.

It was seats of the pants stuff. A week ago, I was still writing new poems. We only tried out the new projector screen that morning. But thanks to my able techie, Rik, the slideshow ran without a glitch. And I was able to explore how much Frank Hurley's stunning images of ice hummocks and the beset ship added to the poems. (What would he have made of our pocket-sized projector after his enormous Kodak box-camera with its glass plates?) You can still catch an exhibition of his Endurance photographs at the Merseyside Maritime Museum till February 28th. Not to be missed by polar fans.

The event was designed to air the new material, test its mettle. I wanted to see how the whole narrative hung together and it was very useful for me. Lovely to get laughter at certain moments or hear the audience responding to the men's voices - fragments of their own expedition diaries that I was working into the poems. And the balance of illustrated talk with poetry performance seemed to work well.

At half-time, we stopped for cake. Unlike the store-keeper Orde-Lees, nick-named Belly-Burglar by his ship-mates, our cook, Gloria, has never been known to send anyone to bed hungry. We had our fill of her legendary plum-bread and chocolate cake too. Bally fine hoosh!

By that time, in the summer of 1916, Shackleton's Endurance crew had been rescued from Elephant Island. But now we plunged into the much darker story of the Ross Sea Party who had been sent by Shackleton to the other side of Antarctica to lay food depots for his Trans-Continental crossing. The suffering of the the men marooned there for two years belied any of the Boys' Own heroics of the Endurance story. And here were three men Shackleton never bought home. In a darkening hall that was beginning to feel like Polar Night, we hung on for the rescue of the last seven survivors.

My companions stuck with me to the very end. And here were some lovely comments posted afterwards:

It was a really vivid and enthralling description of an extraordinary experience.

Been in the white wilderness so long I now need to go turn on the central heating. No blubber smoke to worry about either.

The poems you read were beautiful and your historical information was
pitched just right...

We were utterly transported ...

... a most joyful afternoon. Marvellous performance!

Ice Floe Drifting

2011-01-26T07:27:00.013Z

Wedding maps and menus are being posted as we speak, OFSTED paperwork is piling up for this week's inspection and my poetry event on Shackleton's Endurance story is not much more than a week away. Yikes! January is indeed a full-on month.

But I was given a huge boost recently when the editor of my Northern Lights book, Firebridge to Skyshore, offered to publish this new collection of poems as a chapbook. Sam Smith did a great job on my first book and I'm thrilled that this new sequence will find a home and a pathway into print with Original Plus Press. Look out for news of that later in the year.

That gives even more impetus to my frantic editing. Although I'm also finding myself writing new poems to round the sequence off - five in the past fortnight. I've been workshopping as many as possible at Leicester Writers' Club and this week at the new Poetry Stanza group in Leicester. This group of poetry enthusiasts offer detailed critiquing off the page so was very useful.

So I have to reflect on my great good fortune - not only to have an editor who is so supportive of my work but to live in a city where literature/writing groups abound. This week, I'm hoping to make it along to the women's poetry group Soundswrite, who are also bringing out a new anthology this year that will feature 3 of my poems.

Meanwhile, as Caroline of Stanza said, I am still on my ice floe. Here's a poem in progress:

WHITE WARFARE

they set off
to hoist a blue flag
in an empty country
a jagged ice-barbed
no-man's land

nineteen hundred
and seventeen
was a speck in the long
geological calendar
of the continent

which resumed
its freezing, melting, fastening
throes; its volcanoes
smudging black funnels
of smoke on livid skies ...

(to be continued )

Glass Plate Visions

2011-01-17T08:25:00.031Z

These days many of my weekend breaks are research trips: Cardiff, Iceland - and now Liverpool. It was my first time in the city and I was here for an exhibition of photographs from the 1914 Shackleton Endurance expedition. The Albert Docks were beautiful on this bright January day and I wished we'd had more time to explore. The Maritime Museum was also very impressive with exhibitions on the Titanic, on Slavery, Art and the Sea as well as Shackleton. All good reasons in themselves to come here again but the Shackleton exhibition was so spectacular, it kept me busy for two and a half hours.

There seemed to be hundreds of photographs, all printed from Frank Hurley's original plate negatives. I learned so much about the expedition from trawling through them. And useful snippets from the men's diaries alongside. Even maps of the period were fascinating. In previous centuries, Antarctica was either completely missing from the map or 'the white edge' with no detail - the guessed-at continent. Explorers such as Shackleton had only been probing its shores for a few decades and were filling in the maps as they went.

The photographs painted a vivid picture of the hardships of the men, of their camaraderie and their increasingly desperate plight. But what shone through was the vision - literally - and the passion of one man, the remarkable Frank Hurley, a gifted photographer working at the cutting edge of his art in that era. So enthralled was he by what he saw, he even dived into the freezing waters of the sinking ship's hold to retrieve these plates. Inevitably, I started jotting a poem on the spot:

He loved the ice, this man,
laid his eyes upon it
with an illuminating caress;
sugar surface, snow pebbles, ice caves, stalactites ...
even when it defeated
them, wrenched them, imperilled
and appalled them,
he kept faith
stealing back with his tripod and plates
to spread his gaze
over its infinite broken form
its sea-changing, melting magnificence ...

I love a good museum and was astonished that this wonderful exhibition was entirely for FREE. Long may places like the Merseyside Maritime Museum escape the grasping fingers of government cuts and offer such treasures to all. I shall certainly hope to return to Liverpool.

Saturday Ice

2011-01-10T08:41:00.022Z

When Shackleton was recruiting for his 1914 Imperial Transarctic Expedition, he filed thousands of applications in piles marked 'Mad, Hopeless & Possible'. It's a good slogan for the whole ill-fated voyage and a wonderful title for a poem - which I've recently written. Perhaps I'm touched with something of the same spirit in deciding to put on an event on a Saturday right between an OFSTED inspection and my own wedding. But I couldn't resist the impulse to seize the moment, while winter's grip hangs on, to tell this astonishing story in poems and pictures.

So here it is. You are invited to a Saturday afternoon of cake, story and pictures. (Yes, Gloria's best plum cake!) Take a voyage into the white beyond and shiver at the men's accounts of icy peril. All of this in the lovely, warm space of Leicester's Quaker Meeting Hall.

WHITE WARFARE: Shackleton's Endurance Expedition

In 1914, as war broke in Europe, Shackleton's ship Endurance sailed for the frozen fields of Antarctica. Intended as one final push acorss the white continent, it turned into an epic and harrowing tale of surival and loss. Now Leicester's 'Polar Poet' tells the story, drawing on the men's own words and images.

Sat. 5th February 2011
2 - 4pm at Quaker Meeting House
16 Queen's Road, Leicester, LE2 1WP
Entry: £3 (includes coffee & cake)

Last night I was watching Bruce Parry on TV venturing out between pack ice in small boats with Inuit hunters. Ice closing in and bergs looming all around. Stunning scenes that recalled the Endurance crew trying to steer their little whaling boats to safety. But Parry explores the impact of climate change and fresh industrialisation on indigenous Arctic peoples as the ice melts quicker than anybody expected. Well worth a look.

And this week, I'm hoping to travel up to Liverpool to see an exhibition of Frank Hurley's wonderful photographs from the expedition. Courtesy of the National Maritime Museum there. More inspiration.

Can you feel that nip of frostbite pinching?

Listening for Ice

2010-12-29T16:20:00.018Z

While the post-Christmas thaw sets in here with its slush and grey skies, I've been hibernating in a corner of Antarctica. Mornings huddled over my Shackleton poems, wrestling sea leopards, hauling boats across hummocks, listening to the sounds of ice pressure and Emperor Penguins. Sometimes I don't even make it out of my pyjamas. The opportunity to fully immerse myself in this alien landscape, in the detail of the story, is too precious to squander.

Progress north is good so far. A dozen poems more or less edited, three new ones bashed out to plug some gaps in the narrative. Because it's all about story, this sequence - a staggering tale of 28 men drifting backwards and forwards in the pack ice while another party of 10 braved the worst conditions of the continent to lay food depots for an Imperial Transcontinental expedition that literally never got off the ground. The kind of winter tale you can really lose yourself in.

This afternoon, I'm checking out the scavenging habits of skuas, the blow-holes of killer whales and terms for ships's parts and ice-bergs. Binnacle for instance; and growlers, bergie-bits and brash ice. These words lend a particular texture and even music to the poems. I'm also trying to channel voices that might convey the story from within that tight-bound group of men. My sources, books and films, carry lots of extracts from the diaries that men were required to fill for the expedition. Shackleton was a consummate storyteller as well as a master of the psychology of survival.

And now that the sequence of around two dozen poems is firming up, I'm starting to think that I'd like to try them out for performance. A reading at the very least - hopefully with some pictures and context. Shake out the pages, open up those voices and see how the tale hangs together. Something to aim for in the New Year - we'll see. For now, I'm hunkered down in my tent with the prospect of blubber and dog pemmican for tea. I may be some time ...

Moon Gold, Solstice Dark

2010-12-21T17:09:00.018Z

At 6.32 am this morning, I was ankle deep in frost, dancing a jig in the middle of the park. Followed by running in wide crescent lines like a corn-circle faker. Not as part of some archaic druid ceremony to mark the solstice, I should say, but in a vain attempt to bring warmth to my extremities. I can tell you it was colder than the aurora-watching I remember in the Arctic. Frost-bitten fingers much more stinging whenever I removed my two pairs of gloves. But the sight was unmistakeably there in front of us, slipping through ninety freezing minutes - the lunar eclipse we'd been promised.

The poem came later - my mind was too numbed as we hopped around in the dark, swapping binoculars and thermos flasks. But it was after all lovely to behold. And here it is:

Eclipse

bone white moon
spinning icy
glitter-ball bright

stained edge
of brown umber:
thumb smudge

dark rose shadow
on lonely gold:
old master light

frail lamp
in tidal dark
ebbing ink

lunar sliver
last glimmer
gone

(c) Siobhan Logan Dec. 2010

Midwinter Skin

2010-12-20T20:51:00.012Z

I'm falling in love with Leicestershire's landscapes in this winter skin. Another frostbitten morning today, this time out at Beacon Hill.

Not a whisper of wind and yet it felt as cold as Iceland. My camera kept dying - begging for a warm pocket. But we coaxed these pictures out of it in between ...

The ice and rock looks as stark as anything we saw in the Arctic and the fogbank eclipsed the country below. A very magical morning. How I want this midwinter to last!

To see the whole album, hop to my Facebook photos.

Wintering out, Writing in

2010-12-19T14:10:00.022Z

Winter seems to have arrived with incredible suddeness this year. So I'm feeling if I don't slow down and really taste it, the season will be gone again in the blink of an eye. And this icy Christmas week seems a frost-wrapped gift, a time that's quite-dream-like to me.

So this morning we rose early, fuelled up with porridge and scooted up to Bradgate Park, one of the loveliest places in Leicester, to catch the dawn.

And a slow burn it was, stretched out over two hours, washing colours from Arctic blue to rose to liquid gold on the water. Here's some glimpses:

It's been bone-achingly cold in air blown straight in from the Arctic. And that's kind of thrilling too for someone who's been undertaking various expeditions to Arctic landscapes in the last few years. An opportunity to layer up in all those thermals and fleeces.

Over by the water, a flotilla of small white birds in amongst the ducks - maybe Arctic refugees themselves.

Of course, it's nowhere near as freezing as Iceland was because the Arctic also has fierce winds that give their winters a real sting. When you see frozen waterfalls everywhere, then you know it's cold! But this will do very well for an old-fashioned English winter.

And I still get giddy faced with a frozen puddle or ice flowers on the grass. In the park, the river was largely frozen over, with great swirls of white on its glassy surface.

I wish I could also conjure up the crunching of frost too, the splintering of ice - or the strange mewling of the deer as they crossed the track in front of us. The shrieking of crows stark in the frozen air.

That sun with its long reach and misted light is already dipping as the solstice day approaches. So tantalisingly short.

I'm hoping to get some hibernating time this week to catch up on writing too. Especially a sequence I'm writing about Shackleton's voyage to Antarctica.

Certainly - I couldn't ask for more inspiring conditions for a Polar Poet! Time to pull on another cardigan and get out the notebooks.

Crossing the Poles

2010-12-01T07:57:00.045Z

Another Arctic morning - very thematic for this Polar Poet who spends her time talking about the ice-bound aurora borealis. Last night nearly 30 people defied a 'Severe Weather Warning' to attend my talk 'Physics & Poetry of the Northern Lights' hosted by the Leicester Physics Centre as part of their Public Lecture series. I was impressed but maybe we're getting acclimatised to these spells of deep winter now.

A very responsive audience stayed on for a wide-ranging discussion about indigenous arctic legends, Siberian tribes, science/arts collaborations, global warming and something called 'archaeo-astronomy' - my favourite new word. The inter-disciplinary aspects of my talk seemed to appeal to this group of assorted lecturers/ students from different University of Leicester departments, local astronomers and several small children. I enjoyed the chance to chat to such enthusiastic and well-informed people.

We also discussed whether our recent 'cold snap' might be evidence of a slowing-down in the sun's activity, as suggested in recent research that linked low solar minimums to Europe's Little Ice Age in the seventeenth century. But my man in the Radio & Space Plasma Physics Group assures me that though the sun has been slow to 'awaken from its deep slumber', sun-spot activity has now quickened considerably. We may yet see the beautiful aurora this far south come the solar maximum of 2013. Watch this space ...

And the questions also led me to reflect on the science/arts collaboration that has me performing poems in a Physics & Astronomy lecture theatre. Darren Wright of the Radio & Space Plasma Physics Group spoke of how scientists like himself were interested in finding different ways of communicating with the wider community. His group have sponsored a number of artists like myself working on projects related to their auroral field of study. And from the events I've done at science festivals and venues like the Science Museum I can see there are some exciting approaches to engaging both adults and children in scientific discourse.

As a writer, the challenge of finding a language to communicate complex scientific ideas in poetry and performance has proved very stimulating. It's stretched my literary voice and my skills as a storyteller and I love presenting this material to very diverse audiences from primary schoolchildren to astronomers. And the narrative journey of the Northern Lights has led me from the Arctic Circle out into space - a place I want to write about more in the future. From physics to poetry, aurora to story - the cross-overs continue to fascinate me.

Snow-Witched

2010-11-28T21:14:00.025Z

Snow brings out my inner child. The thrill of waking up to a snow day hasn't faded after all these years. Maybe it helps that I'm not a driver.

At 8 am on Saturday morning I prised my partner out of bed to catch this Narnia-moment at our local park.

I loved the way the sky colour kept changing as the sun pushed through the trees sluggishly. This is my Blue scene - light that reminds me of the Arctic.

Another thing that reminded me of Iceland was the way my fingers froze whenever I peeled them out of my gloves. And the sweetness of plunging them back after the frostbite!

Look at all the blacks and whites and the extraordinary baroque curves of this bench. Or the skeletal forms of the trees on the skyline.

I find this kind of landscape utterly unique. Time seems to stand still. Details are etched in vivid monochrome. Sound is muffled but the eye sees everything with an ice-lit clarity.

And here's that fallen sun burnishing the ice on the canal. The trees, arching impossibly in a Gothic gesture, make one of those accidental poems in the viewfinder.

How can I not feel that I've stumbled into the territory of the White Witch? I'm happy to be under her spell, having no impulse to look for the lamp-post and the way home. In the end it was only the prospect of hot porridge and honey that dragged me back.

Sea-dog Shanties

2010-11-22T07:48:00.009Z

Send a writer to the sea-side and they come home with shells and a bundle of scribbled notes. My birthday treat this year was a weekend in Norfolk. Here's some of my ramblings:

Friday eve, Hunstanton

The sea is dragging its chains tonight
out-of-tune hounds baying in the fog
lunging at broken walls

detonating a salvo of sound-bombs
a trip-wired mine-field barbed with salt
ghostly no-man's land

shaking ruffled skirts along the shore
a ragged chorus-line staggering
into a memory of the can-can

Saturday Morning

The sea is a doubtful rumour this morning. The world beyond the cliffs vanished into fog. The muffled quiet of the strand is unbroken by wandering beach-combers and dogs. Even the rotting of its cast-offs is muted – more scent than stench today. It is a dream-scape in which time drops away: soft footfalls thudding into sand, a flock of birds cheeping tiny as insects. A long-ago tide heaped this border of razor-shells – pink claws of crab, limp star-fish, bloated wrack – dark clods of sea-peat from another epoch. I scavenge a few scooped shells the colour of amethyst, coral, porcelain blue – and a tiger-striped feather. As the winter sun cuts a disc in the gloom, we trudge back to the pier before we too are emptied.

We stayed at a wonderful B&B barely 2 minutes from the sea - Cori House. And Hunstanton's multi-coloured cliffs and endless beaches were no less enchanting in November's fog. Terrific swoops of starlings at tea-time too.

Physics & Poetry in a Test-tube

2010-11-18T10:20:00.024Z

Here's a thing that's weird and wonderful. In just under a fortnight, I'm doing a talk for the Leicester Physics Centre. Me - who was rubbish at science at school! Who thought it was all test-tubes and Bunsen burners, alarming chemicals and diagrams of electrical circuits. Who just didn't get it.

The talk is 'Physics and Poetry of the Northern Lights' and arises out of my book 'Firebridge to Skyshore' and related performances. I've been lucky enough to be involved in this really interesting collaboration with auroral scientists from the University of Leicester. And they've invited me to give this Public Lecture on Tuesday 30th November (see Events above).

And no-one can be more surprised than me to find myself talking on a regular basis about ions and electrons, explaining diagrams of magnetospheres and solar plasma, and beyond that, translating it all into metre and metaphor. I think of poetry as singing with words so my poem about solar wind is called 'Solar Arias'. In my talk I will be unravelling the science of the aurora borealis from a layperson's point of view. But I will also be taking the leap from aurora to story. For it was ancient legends and voices of the arctic that first drew me in.

I never guessed that my childhood love of stories about icy wildernesses would take me literally to the Arctic to see the Northern Lights but also imaginatively into the realms of outer space. 'If you could put your feet upon pure light/ Walk the trembling Roadway ...' this is where it would take you. I will be relating these extraordinary journeys, real and imagined, in my talk. And I look forward to the company I'll find along the way.

The talk is FREE so just drop in for 6.30. And make sure you wrap up well for some aurora-watching ...

Changing the Clocks

2010-11-17T20:45:00.019Z

As I dip my toe back into the blogosphere after so many months, I have to ask some questions. How do you juggle the job that pays the bills with the creative work? How do you get any kind of balance? Where does the time go?

Maybe you're lucky and they're one and the same. But lately I've been teetering all one way. For me, the teaching work is technically 4-5 days a week. And I'm supposed to keep Fridays clear for the writing and performing work. I've gotten used to the rhythm of the year and accept that at certain times - start of term, mock exam weeks etc. - teaching just sweeps all before it like a bore-tide. Except this year, the September rollers have just crashed on into November. How did that happen?

Teaching doesn't just pay the bills of course - it keeps me grounded and stimulates my thinking and learning. I love studying new books on the syllabus with the students - this year it's 'A Streetcar Named Desire'. I like those conversations and the shared purpose of it.

And despite the onslaught, I was lucky enough to have a few literary events this autumn that kept me engaged as a writer. Seeing my poems turned into beautiful art objects in Terri Bradshaw's wonderful exhibition in October. Hosting a National Poetry Day event with Leicester Writers' Club as part of the Everybody's Reading Festival in Leicester the same week. And best of all, an exciting Polar Poets gig as part of the Manchester Science Festival at half-term. You can read about that on my sister-blog.

However - it's high time I caught up with making some plans for the rest of the year. So if you're one of those people who's been wondering if I'd dropped off the face of the earth, the good news is I've been hacking my way through that avalanche of overdue emails. Radio silence is about to be broken!

But above all, November is probably my most fertile time for writing and immersing myself in new projects. So I need to get that balance back. As darkness falls and mist and frost push up against the windows, that outer hibernation gets some inner processes firing up. I'm restless to be in that place again. The hush of early mornings in the study before the bell beckons ...

Witching in the Library

2010-07-14T16:35:00.060+01:00

What magic was this in Southwell Library? First there was a busy huddle of readers, IT browsers and bookshelves. Then several hours later, thanks to the dauntless efforts of Sheelagh's 'technical wizard Stuart' and the Man from Nottingham Council, Anthony, there was a whole little theatre going on. We had a lighting rig, sound system, projector and screen, raised stage and seating - the works! Even a clip-on mike to lift the poetry over the silent shelves and into the corners. All to bring the Arctic to this midsummer festival.

The occasion was my show Firebridge to Skyshore: A Northern Lights Journey, hosted by Southwell Library Poetry Festival. And very hospitable they were! Like the village of Lowdham down the road, this little Nottinghamshire town is steeped with history and charm but also blessed with a nest of people passionate enough about literature to take on the work of staging a major festival that attracts big names as well as local talent and enthusiastic audiences. Yesterday it was Michael Rosen wowing an audience of Nottinghamshire schoolchildren, tomorrow they will have Sir Andrew Motion in the Southwell Minster, and there's still John Siddique, Jenny Joseph, Joan Johnston, Don Patterson and Jo Shapcott to come!

As I suggested, 'all the dreams must have started in the library, because where else as a child would I have stumbled across Narnia or the Snow Queen or any of those wonderful stories of the North that captured my imagination?' So it's almost a nostalgic thrill to be presenting my poetry in this wonderful space. And years later, those stories have led me to visit the Arctic for real (three times!) and create this show to bring audiences into a landscape that I love. What I added to the magic concoction were ancient tales of the Northern Lights, a green sari, a dose of solar physics, beautiful auroral images and music from Norway, thirty coloured glowsticks and a bundle of poems garnered from my journeys. The audience brought the essential alchemy of imagination.

It was a delightful night. Once 'The Last Legend' faded into a mournful Saami joiku, we had some questions & discussion and then a busy book signing session - which always keeps a writer happy! Here were some of the audience comments:

'The descriptions were so lovely and really brought it to life.'

'I liked the way you moved with the poems - it added so much.'

'Thanks for our fabulous visit to the Arctic circle via Southwell! Loved the poetry, colours, photos and words!'

I'm indebted to Sheelagh Gallagher for inviting me to appear at the festival and her whole team - what a friendly bunch of libarians and council folk! One of the most welcoming venues I've been to and the tech. support was really impressive -so hats off to Stuart and Anthony. And Michelle snapped these evocative pictures of the event. I've yet to enjoy my gift of a Bramley apple - which originates in Southwell - but I shall certainly be hoping to get over and sample more of this festival. It runs to Sunday 18th - so treat yourself!

Ledbury: Shall I Compare Thee?

2010-07-09T17:48:00.046+01:00

I think I dreamt Ledbury. This wonderful poetry festival set in a gorgeous timber-framed town opened its arms and really hugged us. The sun shone but not too fiercely. Lunch in The Olive Tree was delicious - and you know food really matters to me! I had a very happy hour browsing in The Three Counties Bookshop where poetry texts were heaped high in front of the doorway. And then we met Pat, our Event Manager, in the Poets' Hospitality Room, where drinks, food and chat spilled over. Pat attended to our every whim and the whole thing was so beautifully organised - something else I do appreciate.

We had more than 4 hours in the Market Theatre to set-up and do run-throughs to our heart's content. The technician Stuart was really on the ball and worked the lights and sound throughout our show. I even had a dressing-room and bottles of water provided! I can't tell you how much these little details help.

Suffice it to say that I had such a happy, relaxed afternoon in Ledbury that we delivered our best ever show that evening. This was 'Poetry and Physics Under the Northern Lights', a fusion of solar physics, performance poetry and powerpoint images of the aurora. I was working with Dr Darren Wright of the University of Leicester, reprising a show we'd first staged at London's Science Museum and later in the National Space Centre in Leicester. Darren delivered several well-judged introductions to the causes of the aurora and current research, illustrated by some stunning animation sequences, including images of the aurora seen from space. You could tell how much this captivated the audience by the questions later, covering cycles of solar activity as well as how and where to best see the Northern Lights.

My own strands explored first the mythology of the indigenous arctic peoples and then the story of the sun-dust's journey through space. We had a very warm and responsive audience who were game for a bit of interaction, delivering gusty cheers during the 'Auroral Football' poem. The intimate space of the Market Theatre allowed me to move amongst them too in 'Last Breath Singing' as I travelled 'this stairway ... lit by the torches of friendly spirits.' Afterwards I whizzed out to the stall run by the Three Counties bookshop and they sat me down with a pen to sign copies of my book, Firebridge to Skyshore: A Northern Lights Journey. It was lovely to hear feedback from enthusiastic audience members. Here's some of their comments:

'Wonderful blend of the science and the poetry - it worked so well!'

'I'd have loved to buy this on a CD - great poems.'

'You should go on the Hurtigruyten ships in Norway - they'd love this show!'

and from the organisers:

'Many attendees have remarked during the week how much they enjoyed the event and how good it was to have something so very different on the menu. Best of luck with your future efforts to illuminate others on the Northern Lights and the mystical side of science!'

At the close of a really enjoyable evening, Darren and I were presented with our own Ledbury 2010 glazed bowls. This is typical of the welcoming bonhomie of the festival. Ledbury Poetry Festival is blessed with volunteers such as Pat and also Jenny who kindly offered us accommodation for the night. Many thanks for all the hospitality.

I am certainly planning a return trip to Ledbury, with time enough to properly experience the enticing programme of big name poets and interesting poetry themes and activities. But first I will have to wake myself up!

Midsummer Marathon

2010-07-04T09:59:00.011+01:00

Notes from a Long Distance Poet

Friday 2nd July 7.49am

A blessedly cool morning as I set off for our first Polar Poets expedition proper. We've had a frantic week of rehearsing and prepping – well, not so much frantic as excited anticipation. Yesterday the powerpoint show of arctic images all went pear-shaped as my computer declared it a 'corrupted file' – not as bad as being stranded in a blizzard with rotten supplies, I guess. But it kept me up till midnight last night putting together a rescue package. That and packing a bag of props: sari, lasso, clipboard, woolly hats, reindeer … And now for the slow train to North Wales.

You can read how this polar venture turned out on my sister blog:

http://polarpoets.blogspot.com/2010/07/arctic-ulating-in-wrexham.html

Sunday 4th July

More reflections later on the particular pleasure of collaborating with another performer like Susan Richardson. But right now I'm in the midst of a midsummer marathon of festivals. Friday was the Wrexham Science Festival, a very inspiring place for a poet to be, and next comes the Ledbury Poetry Festival on Wednesday - where I'll be performing alongside an auroral physicist! So a whole different kind of collaboration. Today I'm tweaking the powerpoint show we did at the National Space Centre gig and slipping in a few more poems. Here's hoping the technical stuff is better-behaved today. My tech. support is under a tent at a Bluegrass festival right now ...

Summer Ice

2010-06-22T18:24:00.022+01:00

Well, summer has finally kicked in and I'm already melting like a freckled candle. Things are also hotting up on the performance front as I'm busy preparing for three summer festivals in as many weeks. I'm just hoping that the Arctic theme will keep me cool! This week it's off to Cardiff and the University of Leicester for planning meetings and then lots of rehearsing. I love this phase of creating the shows and I'm particularly looking forward to working with Susan Richardson on our first ever Polar Poets gig. See: http://polarpoets.blogspot.com/

So you can catch one of my Northern Lights/ Arctic shows at:

Wrexham Science Festival 2010
Organisers say it 'promises to be more spectacular than ever before. The programme ... is packed with a diverse mix of events ... to encourage the investigation and enjoyment of science and technology.'

Siobhan Logan and Susan Richardson, the Polar Poets, will be presenting their new show Arctic-ulate as part of the festival's EARTH AND THE UNIVERSE theme. The Polar Poets use poetry, storytelling and multi-media performance to evoke the unique appeal of one of the planet's last great wildernesses. Having experienced this landscape first-hand, they explore the heritage of the Arctic from indigenous peoples and Viking women to European explorers. Their show also highlights the fragility of this landscape at a time of climate change.

Friday 2nd July
7.30pm, Glyndŵr University, Plas Coch Site, Wrexham
This event is free and aimed at adults aged 16+.
For bookings call 01978 293466 or email wsf@glyndwr.ac.uk
www.wrexhamsf.com/en/

Ledbury Poetry Festival 2010
The Guardian says ''This celebration of verse is the largest of its kind in the UK and also the most energised, giving a real sense of poetry as an important living, contemporary literary form.' The festival will present some top names in UK poetry, including Fleur Adcock, Mario Petrucci and Jenny Joseph, as well as international figures like the ' iconic American poet' Michael McClure. I will be appearing with a scientist from the University of Leicester in an exciting poetry/physics collaboration.

Dr. Darren Wright works for the University of Leicester's Radio & Space Plasma Physics Group who are 'at the forefront of research into the interaction of planetary environments with the solar wind.' Together, Logan and Wright will blend science, poetry and images of the aurora in Poetry and Physics Under the Northern Lights. This is based on a show they first staged at London's Science Museum in 2008 and in February this year at the National Space Centre in Leicester. Audience members said it was ''Good for the brain and good for the soul!' and 'This show really brought out the WOW! factor in astro-physics.'

Wednesday 7th July 2010
8.30pm - 10pm, 7 July. Market Theatre, Ledbury. £8
Box office: 0845 458 1743
http://www.poetry-festival.com/index.html

And a week later at the Southwell Poetry Festival 2010

Organised by Southwell Libraries and boasting 'a fantastic line-up of big names' this year such as Michael Rosen, Andrew Motion, Jo Shapwell and Don Patterson, Southwell's Poetry Festival is 'fast becoming a major highlight in the region’s cultural calendar'.

With the aid of music and images, Siobhan Logan will conjure up the arctic wilderness, its people and the magic of the aurora borealis in her own show, Firebridge to Skyshore: A Northern Lights' Journey.

Tuesday 13th July
7.30pm - 9pm
Southwell Library
Tickets £5
Bookings by phone: 01636 812 148
By email:southwell.library@nottscc.gov.uk
www.nottinghamshire.gov.uk/home/leisure/libraries/poetryfestival

Somewhere in this whirl of festivities, I'll be blogging to let you know how it's all going ...

Polar Poet at Holmfield Primary

2010-06-11T15:04:00.046+01:00

Just back from a lovely morning trekking across the Arctic with the kids from Holmfield Primary. You can't ask for a better warm-up act than a headmaster with a puppet. My thanks to David Lloyd for that. The tots on the front row were shrieking with excitement at an assembly where a long-serving Premises Officer, one Graham Gummage, was presented with the Golden Screwdriver. A hard act to follow ...

When the dust had settled, I was left with 2 classes of 7 - 9 year olds waiting to see the Polar Poet in action. They seemed impressed with my thermal vest - 'really warm' - they agreed. Knew about the volcanoes of Iceland. And were definitely up for some Arctic Warming-up exercises. But they really took off when we did my 'Auroral Football' poem together. In World Cup Week, all the kids were primed for the football chants and lifted the roof when I reached 'and now he SCORES!' I also had some very able 'frost giants' to hold up my magical 'Firebridge' ( a sparkling green sari).

We went on to learn how to say 'hello' in Saami, how many seasons reindeer have and why Rudolf was really 'a girl'! Once shuffled into pairs and threes, they had a pretty good crack at the Reindeer Quiz with some excellent guesses. I ran out of time to take them on a mass reindeer migration but they listened very attentively to the Mansy legend (from Siberia) of the White Reindeer. Another flying, talking reindeer all-rounder. Asked about 'ice melt', someone was immediately able to explain about greenhouse gases - I was impressed - and we explored how climate change is affecting animals of the arctic. The Snow Queen had the last word in 'The Last Legend of the North' and then we were ready for a half-time munch.

They'd been very enthusiastic and involved in the poetry performance but I was even more impressed with their storywriting session. After break, they got to name their own White Reindeer and we talked about what it would feel like to fly for the first time. What does the earth look like so far below? The people are like ants, they said, and cars are like 'mini-beetles'. One boys said the people below looked like 'tiny crumbs'. Another one worked in words like 'tundra' and 'flickering lights'. There were beautiful descriptions of the stars 'blasting light' and the many colours of the Northern Lights. And some lively snippets of dialogue between the talking reindeer and his/ her human friend.

Where did their aerial arctic journeys take them? To the South Pole, to outer space and Mars (whose surface is brown like chocolate) and to the World Cup. We didn't get to hear which team the deer was supporting. Can we guess? For myself I can only hope their imagination was fired in the way mine was when I first read the story of the Snow Queen and Gerda's strange and perilous journey. How could I know back then that stories like that would later take me all the way to the Arctic Circle and back? I look forward very much to receiving some promised letters from the Holmfield kids who proved to be excellent companions for my latest expedition.

postscript:

and here are the letters which I loved. They show how much the kids used their imaginations and how they really engaged with the writing too, including these letters to the Polar Poet.

'I loved the brige of fire. I also liked the way the poems were said. The way the poems were acted. Now that's what I call Polar Poem DRAMA!'

'The one thing that I enjoyed with her was writting and learning. + especially loning about the norern lites, that was magical!!!'

'Thank you for coming to Holmfield and teaching us all about the North pole! I liked it when you showed us the Northern Lights, the Snow Queen, The Reindeers and the reindeer story. When we had to get into partners, I really enjoyed it.'

'The children in my class loved it. They thort that your were Beautifull. I loved the football poem.'

'And I like the football and all of ower class like the polar poet ... you have been so friendly to us.'

and some lovely comments from their teacher too:

'The children thoroughly enjoyed the visit. They found the stories of visits to the Arctic, and tales related to the Northern Lights fascinating. The poetry was wonderful and the children enjoyed the audience participation element ... It really opened up their world.'

(Holmfield Teacher)

A Door into Story

2010-05-22T14:16:00.066+01:00

If we could open the door into a writer's mind, what would that be like? Perhaps like pushing past those fur coats in the wardrobe and catching the icy blast of Narnia. Or squeezing down that dark rabbit hole into a disturbing surreal wonderland. Or like Salley Vickers' talk to Leicester Writers' Club last Thursday - where we rambled through a labyrinth lit by church frescoes and Renaissance paintings, following a cunningly laid thread that took us back and back. A clue literally means a ball of yarn to lead us through the maze and Vickers has been following her own clues into the dark to stunning effect as a writer.

I know other writers were equally fascinated by her reflections on the creative process - see Rosalind Adams' excellent summary on her blog. Vickers is not only a highly successful novelist and Booker prize judge but also a very experienced and engaging speaker on such topics. She has understood very well that the writer too is a story and she charmed us with an account of her first novel at the age of nine, called 'A Door into Time' (was it?). In this fable, four orphaned children are packed off to live with a reluctant uncle and in his garden see a tortoise and a shaft of sunlight hitting a sundial which opens the door into another time. She tells us this story (surely Narnia-influenced in its beginning) contains all the elements that recur in her grown-up novels.

This thread lead off down a side-shaft to an intriguing account of her first novel Miss Garnett's Angel. A bizarre series of coincidences across different decades led to the impulse to write this novel: 'the experience of something in my past dovetailed with something in the present and that's how all my novels begin'. But I will jump to the story of her novel The Other Side of You which particularly struck me. Vickers found herself drawn to writing in a male voice for this one and her protagonist turned out to be a psychoanalyst, a discipline Vickers herself has practised. So far so good. The man's problem is his patient Elizabeth, a woman set on committing suicide who will not 'open up' either to the psychoanalyst OR the author. Vickers is actually a third of the way into writing this book and knows NOTHING about this reticent woman.

At this point, Vickers goes on a speaking tour of Australia and this gives her the opportunity to attend a series of lectures about 'What Happens when Two People sit in a Room and Do Therapy?' Listening to this, she has the image of two people walking along a road together. And she finds herself thinking of a very old and haunting story - the Road to Emmaus - in which two grieving disciples walk along a road and find a third joins them. Of course they fail to recognise this third figure and it's only later at the inn, when he breaks bread, that they see who is on 'the other side of you' and he vanishes. Vickers has likened this apparition of the third reality to the healing process of therapy.

But to follow my clew - Vickers returned home with this insight and an unfinished novel. As she so often does at this point, she wandered into the National Gallery 'in a brown study' to pursue her thread. And found herself in front of Caravaggio's painting of 'The Road to Emmaus'. This painter turned out to be the missing piece and the silent woman's story now began to unlock. The novel gets finished - and is now waiting on my juicy 'To Read' pile.

And that is just one of the delightful and thought-provoking stories Vickers shared with us. Along the way, we mused on the Darwinesque survival of ancient stories like the Road to Emmaus and how they still chime in our consciousness. Or the connection between the visual arts and her inspiration for narratives. Or how an early love of poetry shapes her approach to editing prose - 'I always hear my books - the sound of the spoken voice is key to it'. I'm looking forward very much now to reading the novel but the threads of her talk will be leading me down sideways for many days to come, I think.

And before I close this rambling blog, can I thank the Abbey Park Over-50's Club for the welcome they gave me on Wednesday when I presented my own talk on 'The Science and Mythology of the Northern Lights'? All were entranced by stories of the aurora, my new mini-projector worked a treat and I was surprised by the gift of a sketch of me in action and a Caramac at the end. My compliments to the artist Kanti. Art and chocolate is always a winning combination!

Vintage and Vimto

2010-05-15T19:49:00.042+01:00

In between the May-time madness of mock exams, I got to two lovely literary events this week. If that's not too much alliteration all at once ...

The first was my talk, The Science and Mythology of the Northern Lights, at Leicester's Central Library. Lovely both because of the setting and the people. The staff there made me very welcome, got my powerpoint projection all set up for me and we had a good crowd in for the talk. As usual, images and stories of the aurora worked their magic. And it's always interesting to hear other people's experiences of witnessing this strange spectacle, even in Leicester city apparently!

The Central Library is situated in a beautiful old building. I've enjoyed sitting at their desks to catch up one some writing time when I'm in the city or go on the hunt for research books. Not as often now it's true, but still it's a comforting and creative place to step back into.

'The library building was originally built for the Liberal Party by the prominent local architect William Flint, and later was used as a concert hall, where such musicians as Nicolo Paganini and Franz Liszt performed. The entrance hall was a separate building, built as a cinema.'

I mention all this because the library is the subject of a somewhat controversial proposal to close this building and merge the Central Library with a nearby reference library, almost certainly leading to job cuts and a reduction in stock. Which seems a great shame. Whatever happens, I hope it won't deter the many current users who enjoy amongst other things, a new Knit and Think group, led by the library's friendly Book Doctor, Alison Dunne.

And hot on the heels of my library visit was a book launch in the building next door, Leicester's Adult Education Centre. Hosted by Leicester Writers' Club, my good friend and wonderful writer, Maxine Linnell, was sending her first book out into the world, a novel called Vintage. This is a young adult story based around the snazzy concept of two teenagers who swap bodies - one from 2010 and one from 1962. Nice concept but it's the execution that's so enjoyable - witty, thought-provoking and often moving. It's published by the Nottinghamshire press, Five Leaves.

But the launch also plunged us deep into nostalgia for own childhoods. Maxine's daughter had cannily devised two buffet tables representing the book's two locations. On the 1962 table, we were treated to dandelion and burdock, dairylea sandwiches, Victoria Sponge and cheese & pineapple chunks on sticks - while on the 2010 table, we found glutein-free tortilla chips, fat-free chocolate cake and dips from around the world. It was the 1960's plate that I wallowed in, I have to say.

And this week, as pre-exam nerves reach fever pitch, I will retreat on Wednesday to a leafy corner of Abbey Park to give another talk to their Over-50's club. What era will their refreshments be from? I'll let you know ...

Virgin - A Bundle of Pain

2010-05-08T14:39:00.006+01:00

So for three days now I've had no broadband access - ever since Virgin Media just switched it off for no reason. Again. After several tortuous hours on the phone, they can't even admit they did it and suggest instead that we uninstal and reinstal our software. It looks like I'll never get my ntlworld email address back and we'll be looking for another server. Meanwhile I've had to go out and buy a mobile dongle to get on-line.

So if you're thinking of going anywhere near a Virgin Media broadband package, take heed:

As the Big Lebowski's mate would say ... YOU'RE GETTING INTO A WORLD OF PAIN!

As Dante would say ... Abandon Hope - all ye who enter here!

Oh and my main point was - please send all e-mail from now on to siobsi@yahoo.co.uk .

Tuesday 11th May

A curious post-script - after all that hair-tearing and tears before bedtime - I do a tester today and find my broadband and ntlworld mailbox is back to normal service.

Was this anything to do with the twitter mesage - offer of help from VirginMedia - following my on-line rant? I have no idea. But am mightily relieved to be getting e-mail again. Panic over for now.

May Day at Middle Stanley

2010-05-03T11:42:00.029+01:00

Sunday May 2nd 6pm

Well, here I am in my little room at Middle Stanley farm, gazing out to a rolling Cotswolds hill and listening to the birds' evensong. And if that isn't idyllic enough, I've just finished typing up a half-dozen new poems at this writers' retreat. I'm here with Leicester Writers' Club for our annual May Day weekend of workshops, feasting and discussion.

We're very fond of this secluded spot with its wonderful converted cottages and barns and grounds that are a delight to explore in this spring weather. But it's as much the chance to socialise and share ideas and resources within our writing coummunity that makes Middle Stanley so special. And lest partners and pets are feeling neglected, here's a run-down of the workshops we ran this year:

Creating Your Characters' Story

Writing about the past

Poetry workshop on the theme of 'Still'

Social Media for Writers

Books in the Digital Age
Voicing Your Work

A Blind Reading
Where is Your Writing Going?

We rely on willing volunteers from our own ranks to provide these workshops (no fee – not even bribed with cake!) and it works really well. My job is putting the programme together and keeping things on track. For myself, I particularly enjoyed the discussion on Digital Books where Chris de Lacey drew on comments from his publishers and agent to give us the inside story; the sharing of writers' stories and tips in Where is your Writing Going?; and the feat of a sonnet in 20 minutes in the poetry workshop. One of my own workshops was Voicing Your Work - great fun with an enthusiastic group. It's now known as 'the Humming Workshop'. I even had them doing Intercostal Diaphragmmatic Breathing (not as painful as it sounds!) and here's the photo evidence.

Unusually, I gave myself sometime out for just writing this year and finally got a chance to dive into some new writing based on my trip to Iceland at Easter. So there's 6 poems for an Icelandic sequence – with an eye on our first Polar Poets gig – and ideas for more. They're rough drafts but it's a joy to be in the flow of a fresh project. Exactly why you sometimes need a writing retreat to get going.

And now it's my turn on the rota to help with preparing our final feast. Liz and Gwyneth, our indefatigable Middle Stanley organisers, have whipped up some kind of Hazelnut Dream Dessert to follow. But I think you'll agree we've earned our treats with 8 workshops in 2 days and a torrent of creativity behind the scenes. Thanks again to all who attended and made it so enjoyable – and to Nick, my unflappable chauffeur!

PS Liz's Hazlenut Bread & Butter Pudding went into my top spot of fave desserts - so much so I snapped a picture of it! - now uploaded with more Middle Stanley pics. ...

Volcanic Spurts & Small Press Melts

2010-04-23T16:41:00.015+01:00

What can I say? my hand is bandaged with the first twinges of RSI. Seriously - that's not hyperbole. This is because my desk is piled with towers of pre-mocks marking - my students are doing timed essays left, right and centre.

But SO much news to catch up on!

First, there was an amazing 4 days in Iceland at Easter - yes, land of the smoking ash! We hopped in between eruptions and it blew us away - a breathtaking wilderness of lava and glaciers, steaming geysers, walking through a continental rift, being regaled by Viking stories and another spectacular auroral show to boot. Catch the first instalment of my Iceland blog on:
http://polarpoets.blogspot.com/2010/04/iceland-at-easter-before-ash.html

And then I come home and hear that my publisher, Sam Smith, will be retiring from the small press scene. Original Plus is an example of how small presses on a shoestring budget nurture emerging poets that would never make it into print otherwise. All Sam's books are printed on his own computer and sent on to a low-cost press for binding. That press was run by another poet-editor, Martin Holroyd, who is now shutting up shop after many years service. Fair dos. And my book, Firebridge to Skyshore: A Northern Lights Journey, published only last May, will suddenly be looking for a new home. This is how it goes in the poetry world.

But while I'm musing over possibilities for re-launching my book, I want to dwell on the unique achievement of small presses like Original Plus and the special place of poet-editors like Sam and Martin. Here's what I wrote last year when my book took flight:

'My friend Rod Duncan was chatting about whether new breakthroughs in publishing – the digital download, print on demand, electronic 'books' – could mean more and more books appear in electronic form in the future. And would actual paper books, lovingly crafted as Sam's books are, become a niche market for those that can't resist the tangible object? When my own arrived, I sniffed it, listened to it, weighed it in my hand. And the pleasure of seeing the books yesterday fanned out on the table is beyond description. As good as Gloria's plum bread. '
http://siobhanlogan.blogspot.com/2009/05/paper-ceremonies.html

Time to rest this dodgy wrist. Next weekend, I'll be in the Cotsworlds with my writers' group, Leicester Writers' Club, for our annual weekend away. Workshops, feasts and hopefully new writing when the ash clears ...

Polar Poets Summer Gig

2010-03-23T10:30:00.008Z

NEWSFLASH !! !

First ever Polar Poets gig now Booked for this summer's festival - see:

http://polarpoets.blogspot.com/2010/03/polar-poets-at-wrexham.html

see my sister blog for more details on the adventures of the 2 intrepid Polar Poets - myself and Susan Richardson - as we bring our new show Arctic-ulate to science festivals and other venues this year.

can't wait now to start rehearsals - somewhere in the ether between Wales and the Midlands ....

States of Independence

2010-03-21T15:27:00.030Z

I don't think I've ever been to an arts event quite so well organised as States of Independence at De Montfort University in Leicester yesterday. It came as something of a shock. A website that actually spelt out the whole programme in advance. Lunch vouchers for the stallholders. And for the punters - stalls by dozens of independent publishers, workshops, readings and book launches - all for FREE! I'm still pinching myself.

This event was a very successful collaboration by Five Leaves Publications in Nottingham and the Creative Writing Team at De Montfort University. Let's hope we see more from this pairing. Ross Bradshaw, of Five Leaves, is a force of nature let loose in the regional world of literature. A force of something anyway. He also organises the Lowdham Book Festival in the summer. And this event has the same passion about it. Bringing together regional publishers, writers and readers in one whirl of excitement, the building buzzed all day.

Every meeting I went to was packed out and the bookstalls were thronging. I enjoyed the panel discussion by my own group, Leicester Writers' Club; the launch of the latest snazzy literary magazine, Staple; readings by two authors from Birmingham's Tindal Street Press, and an introduction to the work of Crystal Clear Creators, an innovative arts organisation promoting writers across a range of media. If I could only have cloned myself, I'd have sampled more. In between times, I met so many friends and fellow writers, followed up contacts and caught up on news from across the region.

And I got some free exercise carrying home a bag groaning with new books ....

Word Count Funk

2010-03-18T11:08:00.008Z

So I've just printed out my 2 copies of the finished story. My last writing session was spent revamping that crucial first paragraph so that I had an opening line with a hook to it. Amazing how one paragraph can use up several hours. Final tweaks done and I'm patting myself on the back for being well under the word count at 1878. I gather up my notes to file away and notice ...

word count is 1,500 max. - not 2,000. DOH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Talk about a nail-biting finish! If I ditch the marking I've a couple of hours before I'm in class.

How the heck am I going to lose 378 words? Time to slash and burn.

12.40

Whew - down to 1482 words. Tight as a drum now and just in time for lunch!

Babbling in Fog

2010-03-17T11:42:00.025Z

I've been in a story haze this week since the Sunday crunch to meet a deadline. But three early mornings later, my rough draft is hammered into shape - still under the word count - and it's finished. Till the next time I look at it, of course!

This is my entry for Leicester Writers' Club's latest competition on the theme of Metropolis. Without these competitions, it's doubtful I'd ever get around to writing stories these days. I need the theme or genre and I need the pressure. Only that pushes me through the foggy stage of creation where all seems hopeless and contrived. I once heard a writer say, 'all that doubt and despair - that's like the weather - you just have to ignore it and get on.'

I've had to be obsessive and uncommunicative to get it written this week but there is also the pleasure of it. Discovering images that appear from nowhere and knit the story together. Finding it's taken you somewhere you never expected. Inhabiting the voice and skin of another person - who sees the world differently to me.

Once these stories are done for a competition, I'm very bad at submitting them anywhere else. So I was delighted to have one of my stories, The Chatterbox, selected for a spoken word evening last night. The Short Fuse monthly event at the Y Theatre in Leicester is great fun, a cocktail of themed stories in a cabaret setting with a live audience.

So - 4 storytellers babbling beautifully on the Babel theme & the Last Mango in Paris was superb - warm funny sad surreal endlessly entertaining - till the last train beckoned. This performer, Shane Solanki mixes song, stand-up, slides and banter to draw us into his stories of life on the cultural rift. Mad e-mails from relatives, India's top skin whitening cream Joleen and a mesmerising rap-poem all featured. Believe the hype - he's not to be missed!

Anatomy of a Short Story

2010-03-14T10:11:00.017Z

I'm up against a deadline for a story. Four days and a bit to go and so far I've only typed about 150 words. I do have a pile of notes I've scribbled in bed during my recent spell of illness. Some sheets I've copied from my Google searches. Yesterday I cut out photographs from the local newspaper of faces that would do for my characters. Names from the captions and classifieds - I find names really hard. It must be nearly 2 years since I've written a story and I'm well rusty. But the clock is ticking. Can I pull it off and make the Thursday tea-time deadline?

The title, since you're asking, is 'Metropolis' and word max. is 2,000 words. Gulp! And today is the only full day of writing I can spare. So I need a rough draft by evening. In my early morning sessions before work, I'll then have to edit it. Find out what it's really about since I'm not yet sure. I have a mess of a plot and a heap of problems. The blu-tacked faces of my characters are staring at me from various corners of my computer desk. One is made of stone. Today I find out if their voices will speak, if they can shrug into the bodies I've assembled and walk into their own stories.

Hmm. I've gotten out a yellow highlighter pen and marked up the snippets of conversation and narration from my notes that most interested me. Trying to seek out where the energy of the writing is. I'll try typing these up and see where it goes. I'll let you know ...

SUNDAY LUNCH-TIME

So 979 words typed up and it's still a mess but there's sticky raw material. The characters haven't really taken off yet and the dialogue's very one-sided. I wonder if other people are as rubbish at writing stories but I also know that this doubt and fog is part of the process for me. Part of my difficulty was working out whose story it was. Two women on a bus. My narrator's story is missing so far and I think she's the one who's going to arrive somewhere. So she gets the afternoon. Let's see what boiled eggs and crumpets can do for my back-brain ...

4.40pm

Up to 1737 words on paper. A rough draft of sorts. Time to print it up, walk away from it and see if I'm any clearer tomorrow morning.

Auroral Magic at the Space Centre

2010-02-24T13:02:00.052Z

All night long the blue glowstick shone out in my room - a souvenir from a wonderful evening at the National Space Centre. When we kicked off at 7.30pm by lighting the Shuttle Suite with glowsticks in pink and blue and green, it gave us just a glimpse of Northern Light enchantment. So maybe there were kids - and adults too - still enjoying that glimmer of memory this morning.

The event was the Northern Lights Spectacular, a show that had its première at London's Science Museum in 2008 . This fusion of poetry, physics and film about the aurora borealis was sponsored by a group of auroral scientists from the University of Leicester, the Radio & Space Plasma Physics Group. And despite the sleet and ice, the Space Centre's Shuttle Suite was packed out with families and auroral fans who came to enjoy a taste of the Arctic lights.

Brian McClave, an award-winning photo-video artist, also travelled to Leicester to introduce the world's 'first successful stereoscopic video of the Aurora Borealis', a film he'd created with physicist George Millward. Donning spectacles to watch his 3-D films of the aurora and solar flares, we saw a green aurora unfurl itself in the dark and watched eruptions and storms on the surface of the sun. As Brian said, these fiery images were somehow 'chilling' to see in all their ferocity and beauty.

Meanwhile I performed ancient stories of the Northern Lights as told by indigenous Arctic peoples. (See: Firebridge to Skyshore: A Northern Lights' Journey published Original Plus 2009). I particularly enjoyed Last Breath Singing where the audience become 'friendly spirits' waving coloured glowsticks in the dark to re-create the eerie spectacle of the polar lights.

The Space Centre provided the perfect setting for this other-worldly phenomenon. Where Inuits and Saamis saw the 'Land of Day' as a realm of spirits, science reveals the dimension of space opening in our skies.

Dr. Darren Wright unveiled the story of how the aurora are created by solar plasma interacting with gases in the earth's atmosphere. Dr. Jon Nichols was able to show film clips shot from space of the aurora. His presentation included a recent film of images of the aurora on Saturn he collated from the Hubble Space Telescope. Our audience reacted enthusiastically to the mix of physics and imagery and poetry. Here are some of their comments:

'Good for the brain and good for the soul!'

'This show really brought out the WOW! factor in astro-physics.'

'Beautiful poems, and so well performed.'

Belling the Quarter-hour

2010-02-20T14:23:00.035Z

No writing this half-term, or even reading. (Unless you count these blogs, which I do. ) We're just home from a blissful few days in the Derbyshire Peaks, wrapped in mist, frost and snow. Out in the landscape, I've been soaking up the seasonal inspiration. Maybe I could even get a job writing tourist blurbs for the Peaks website. What do you think?

Here's one of my journal entries:

Wednesday 4.30pm

We're lured out again by fat snowflakes whirling past our window. And find ourselves at length in Hathersage churchyard among the slate tombstones. In the stillness of that corner, we're treated to an extraordinary recital. Birds I've never heard before, maybe migrants brought in by these Arctic winds? Two high in a tree send out a rich chi-chi-chirruping song and across the way, another answers. Her call is a muted echo of theirs. At the end of a timeless triplet, she lifts up and away across the valley. Hidden over there is North Lees Hall whose Gothic ramparts and rookery so inspired Charlotte Bronte.

Turning back between the stones, Rik's boots shed patterned cakes of snow. St Michael's interrupts the steady crunching of our feet, its brassy tones belling the quarter-hour. Tea-time. Down in the village, light is fast leaching away. The whole hillside is a study in greys, studded with orange dots - the streetlights suddenly on. A brown smell of woodsmoke escapes.

We're up on the high road now, back to the Booth. The flakes are finer than ever, sparks of wetness hitting the face. A goods train shakes the valley with its tooting and rattling. Around the corner, the Millstone Inn awaits us, fires and dinner. Some days are one variety of contentment after another.

all pictures (c) Siobhan Logan or Richard Thomas

Shadows of Poetry & Politics

2010-02-13T19:41:00.057Z

Home from another Saturday afternoon in the padded seats of the Cinema de Luxe. We thought we'd see what all the 3-D fuss was with Avatar. From the first moment of the Shrek trailer, I was thrilled. But actually, the eye and brain soon adjusts to the 3-D effect. I was reminded that Silent Movie spectators in the 20's gawped as trains seemed to roar straight at them out of the screen. In the end, what had me spellbound for two and a half hours was the old-fashioned quality of the storytelling.

Avatar seems to juxtapose the best and worst of human endeavours. This beautifully crafted film weaves imagination and visual dexterity with cutting-edge technology. And the human locked into the mercenary machine, waving its metallic arms, offers a heart-breaking and all too familiar image of American imperialism doing what it knows best. Scorched Earth. Slash and Burn. Shock and Awe.

More than once I was moved to tears by the narrative. Because the luminous fairytale with its light trickery is itself an avatar, a shadowing of our own world. It mirrors the slaughter of so many indigenous and colonised peoples over centuries, including this one. The rapacious, deadly looting of resources - grey rock, black oil, whatever you've got. And how the outnumbered, doomed people are always characterised as the 'savages'. As they gain ground in the inevitable guerilla war, I almost shook my head at the too-easy come-back. But then again, I remembered the Vietcong and others who have humiliated the military machine, if not in 160 minutes.

A review in Empire - well worth a look - said: 'Avatar is a hugely rewarding experience: rich, soulful and exciting in the way that only comes from seeing a master artist at work.' I had a little shock when I saw the name James Cameron in the end titles. Perhaps I shouldn't be too surprised that the director of Titanic and Aliens should have produced a box-office record-breaker that's also an intelligent and visceral film experience.

Anyway - if avatars are your thing - take a look at the series Caprica on Sky 1, the closest thing I've seen to TV poetry since its parent-series Battlestar Galactica. For years, Battlestar was the best kept secret on television and an outstanding example of what the genre can deliver. ('Better than The Wire' suggests the Guardian review: 'What really sets the show apart from the original, though, are its politics.' ) Dip your toe into Caprica and maybe you'll want the whole story. And for confirmed BG fans, the Cylon child does not disappoint.

The Hunger Down South

2010-02-08T19:48:00.080Z

Novels, the longer the better, are perfect for this winter season. And the more I feed my hunger for stories, the more I crave. So here's what I've been reading this past month.

From the icy landscapes of December's reading, I stumbled straight into the steamy heat of Louisiana. I picked up the first of the Southern Vampire novels by Charlaine Harris after watching the TV series, True Blood but the books proved far more addictive. Within three weeks, I'd devoured all 9 novels Harris has published to date. What really sustained me through this vampire marathon was the wry, sassy voice of Harris' heroine, Sookie Stackhouse. A young waitress, she's somewhat naive at the outset but quickly wises up. Holding hands with her new date, Quinn, she thinks to herself:

'His own hand was warm and hard. He could crack my bones with it The average woman would not be pondering how fast her date could kill her, but I'll never be an average woman.'

This is because Sookie is a telepath with a thing for Supes - men with a supernatural twist - vampires, werewolves or in this case, a Were-tiger. I read somewhere recently that Sookie is one of a new brand of feisty, modern heroines - women like Bella Swann, Katniss Everdeen or Lyra Belacqua emerging out of the fantasy genre. Or Paranormal Romance as the bookshelves have it. But though Sookie is hard-working, independent and resourceful, she'll never meet the day without paying attention to her make-up, no matter how beaten-up she is. Her clothes too are always described in lingering detail - so appearance really matters to this girl.

Sookie gets plenty of action, in all senses of the word, but I do like that Harris portrays the bone-crunching awfulness of the violence she encounters and Sookie's distaste for it. She makes a New Year resolution in one book to stop getting hurt but loyalty and determination to help others in crisis draw her inevitably back to danger. Would you head for a Vampire conference when you know someone/something is trying to assassinate you? By this stage, Sookie is so embroiled in the labrynthine politics of the overlapping fiefdoms of Vampires, Witches and Weres that detachment is proably as deadly as engagement.

And this is a big plus of the 9-book series. Harris' fictive world is so vivid, so detailed, so interlocking - that I did feel as if I lived in it for weeks on end - a virtual reality. And I am still missing my Sookie fix. I read on Harris' website that she is a great fan of Jane Austen and it figures. She draws out a great deal of humour from portraying the etiquette of Vampire manners and Were rituals, the culture clashes and petty squabbles. It is as finely observed a social hierarchy as Austen's. The latest word on her website is that the next Sookie book is out in May. For now, it's still in the blood and I'm gulping down other stories to assuage The Hunger ...

Burning Gold in Botcheston

2010-01-29T14:34:00.050Z

'Bring me my bow of burning gold
Bring me my arrows of desire
Bring me my spears o'clouds unfold
Bring me my chariot of fire ...'

Do Blake's lyrics sound out a patriotic pastoral hymn or a cry of rebellion to your ears? The rhetoric of a visionary poet perhaps? I can only tell you that hearing Botcheston WI sing last night of 'the dark Satanic mills' in this 'green and pleasant land' gave me a shiver of delight. It was the opening to an evening that featured firebridges and solar storms as well as a candles, cakes and correspondence. So very apt. And I took the role of guest speaker at this friendly gathering in the beautiful space of Botcheston Village Hall.

I was there to give one of my talks on The Myths and Science of the Northern Lights, complete with Powerpoint images and dashes of poetry. And I was trying out my dinky new micro-projector and notebook laptop. Both of which decided to die on me about 10 mins. in. The ways of Technology - and its cryptic error messages - are as mysterious as Providence in this situation. Happily, one of the regulars, Jane, had brought along a spare projector and laptop, just in case. That's my kind of thinking. Not only did she have them assembled in a jiffy, she handled all the image switching on my cues as if we were well-rehearsed. Again, many thanks Jane.

The acoustics were fantastic in the old hall and you could hear a pin drop as we roamed imaginatively around the Arctic, hearing ancient stories and modern scientific accounts of the aurora borealis. One gentleman had brought along his own inspiring photographs of the aurora seen from a plane. And at break-time, as we chatted, I was plied with a startling pink fairy-cake - very tasty - baked by somebody's granddaughter. Full marks for the sugar hit. Given the honour of judging the Unusual Candle Competition, I was particularly taken by the giant sliced apple, complete with pips, and a fetching green fir tree.

We don't sing enough these days - I don't mean in the shower or when the radio's on - but out loud together. So I've resolved to learn the lyrics of Jerusalem next time I'm asked to do a WI talk. And I hope there will be a next time because it was a very pleasant evening and enthusiastic crowd. I'm grateful to Christine Fagan who, asked to find a speaker on the weather, picked me instead. And to her lovely husband Ron who chauffeured me out there.

Moonstruck and Adrift

2010-01-21T08:15:00.031Z

Wandered past the telly last night and saw James May in an aeroplane with a NASA pilot, hanging from the rim of the world. They were cruising at the outer edge of the planet's atmosphere, gazing down at the curve of the earth's sphere. A band of blue sky below, a great dark space above. 'That might be a view of eternity,' May murmered. 'Technically speaking, you are correct,' the pilot said.

I so want to write about space and space travel. To climb imaginatively into that cockpit ( in the real world I can't stand heights) and cross over the edge. To go with the rocketeers and starjourners in a tin can into the astral realm and hang adrift - with or without strains of the Blue Danube in my ears ...

Anyway, I had another giddy moment later when I checked my e-mails and saw that tickets for our event at the Space Centre had SOLD OUT within hours of an article appearing in the Leicester Mercury. All 150 seats. Never underestimate the power of a well-paced press release (all credit there to the Press Office at the University which is sponsoring our Northern Lights Spectacle.)

Where does that leave disappointed punters - including friends of my own that I hadn't mailed yet? The department is taking contact details for people who want to be informed if/when we re-run the event. We're already thinking we'll need a much bigger venue next time so fingers crossed - there might well be a re-run.

As for me, I'm moonstruck, giddy and adrift ...

Northern Lights at Space Centre

2010-01-20T09:59:00.005Z

So at last, after months of preparation, this show is on the road. And I can't wait to shake out the sari and count-down to lift-off in the Shuttle Suite! The same event which wowed audiences at the Science's Musuem's Dana Centre will now to be staged in the exciting venue of the National Space Centre in Leicester. It's next month and it's FREE - book early and don't miss out!

Northern Lights Spectacular on Tuesday 23rd February 2010

A magical fusion of poetry, physics and film, revealing the spectacle of the Northern Lights. Marvel at the world's first 3-D film of the aurora borealis, hear ancient Arctic legends and let two auroral physicists unravel the secrets of the lights. Featuring Professor Stan Cowley & Dr Darren Wright, poet/performer Siobhan Logan and film-maker Brian McClave.

The sell-out show from London's Science Museum comes to Leicester!

7.30 - 9pm in Shuttle Suite, National Space Centre, Exploration Drive, Leicester

Free entry but ticket only. Bookings from: Kiri Rhodes (Dept of Physics and Astronomy)
Email: kr124@le.ac.uk Tel.: 0116 252 3570 during office hours. Book early to avoid disappointment.

'This event rolled scientific and artistic interpretations of the Northern Lights – both equally beautiful – into one.' (Holly Cave, Dana Centre at London's Science Museum)

Polar Snaps & Snippets

2010-01-18T20:40:00.057Z

Well, I was all blogged out by last Friday after a week-long launch of our Polar Poets blogpage. It was fun thinking of new items to fill each day with and we were very pleased with the number of visitors we got and particularly, the people who posted comments and entered our competitions. Now we just have to live up to the launch!

You might like to take a look at the interview with Susan Richardson, my fellow Polar Poet, or the one she did with me. We got to share some of the secrets of our separate journeys to arctic regions. There's also a couple of our poems to sample - and piccies of course - plus captions from our guests.

As for me, I'm already getting nostalgic for the snow. I can't believe it's only 9 days ago I was tramping around in it. And I thought I would revive the mood by posting some of the photos I snapped on that magical walk around my local park. If I wasn't snowblind, I was certainly mesmerised by the long tree shadows it threw, mapping the ground with ghost branches and a maze of boot tracks.

So much of the news has reported this as 'bad weather', a catastrophe we've battled through with a 'Blizzard Spirit'. Yet it seems to me we only get to experience this kind of deep winter landscape once in a few decades, if that. And so I hoard every rumour of returning snow, every morning of frost-crusted rooves. Don't even mention spring ...

Promises in Glass

2010-01-09T12:32:00.031Z

She has returned. I've been longing for the crunch of blanketed snow under my boots, its muffled thuds, feathers on my face. A trip to the park this morning ushered me into a world I'd almost forgotten. There was the Victorian lampost with its red signs and there was me, wearing the contents of the wardrobe. Trees were giant creatures, frozen under her spell. Lakes were fallen fields of white, across whose surface a moorhen picked delicately. Boundaries were lost. Birds hushed. Black railings traced hieroglyphic warnings. This was a world etched in ink and light where skeleton beeches threw impossibly long lines of violet shadow.

In the Japanese garden, red dragons snaked between weeping willows, their writhing forms echoed in the twisted branches of the maples. The mirrored shadows across the lawn had me mesmerised but as I turned, easterly winds were shaking a fine ash of snow from the pines. And then came real flakes, fattening on these icy gusts, whipping across my vision. I heard jingling high above me. It proved to be a rag of cloth flapping on the flag-pole. But it might have been reindeer. She is close by, the White Witch, and I am one of her minions. Specks of glass glitter even now in the sunshine like promises she scattered.

I was urged on this morning by the voices of two writers on the radio, enthusing about how winter landscapes inspired them. The poet Susan Richardson and novelist Margaret Elphinstone, told John McCarthy on BBC Radio 4's Excess Baggage, how they relished the disruption to routines and the usual rush of life. Susan spoke of 're-learning to wait' in the snow and mentioned the Finnish tradition of 'keeping the twilight'. Margaret recalled being snowed in for weeks on end on a Shetland island and how it allowed her to just settle into 'being here and now'. Both of them felt they did their best work in the winter and I'd echo that.

So could there be a more perfect time to launch the Polar Poets website? Yes, we've even arranged the weather. From Monday 11th January, Susan Richardson and myself will be joining forces, to bring poetry and stories of the arctic across the country. We will be going live on Monday and all through the week, there'll be interviews, competitions and blogs, with something new each day. I hope you'll drop in, add a comment, maybe even win a prize! And for this week only, I'll be linking up 'Shaking the Colours' with this sister-blog. Just let the ice enchantment last a little longer ...

Footsteps into the White

2010-01-01T09:15:00.031Z

White roofs but no snow. I'm dreaming of Iceland - February hopefully - now that my appetite has been whetted by the Christmas flurries. It's surely time for another journey to the High North. I can't wait.

All my reading this Christmas has been ice-bound and thermally insulated. I've just finished a thick, heavy wildlife book on 'ANTARCTICA Exploring a Fragile Eden' by Jonathon & Angela Scott (Collins). This wonderful book weaves accounts of whales, wandering seabirds, penguins and seals with stories of polar exploration from the indomitable Captain Cook and later Shackleton, Amundsen and Scott through to modern scientific research bases on the white continent. The impact of whaling and the fur seal trade is set out in painful detail along with the pressures of climate change on polar eco-systems and the prospects for the future. And it's illustrated with a treasure-hoard of stunning photographs and beautiful drawings. A book to lose yourself in without having to wonder where the blizzard blew your tent to or whether the frostbite is turning nasty.

It's New Year's Day and I see that this blog is nearly reaching it's birthday. And blogging, Facebooking and lately Twittering, have all kept me busy this year. But a review of my calendar also told me that I'd packed in far more workshops and courses than I remembered, learning about the job of writing from the likes of Liz Lochead, John Gallas, Mimi Khalvati, Jean Binta Breeze and the editors of Smiths Knoll, as well as a collection of publishers, agents and industry professionals. So that's all helped.

And the past few months have been packed with meetings to get new projects off the ground, in particular two exciting collaborations for 2010. In January, we hope to launch the Polar Poets, a twinning of myself and Susan Richardson, to take our poetry about the arctic around the country. Look out for an on-line launch soon ... And in February, I get to join film-maker Brian McClave and my sponsors, scientists Stan Cowley and Darren Wright of Leicester University, to present an evening show, the Northern Lights Spectacular, at the dramatic venue of our National Space Centre.

2009 was a year in which I enjoyed sharing stories of the Northern Lights with very diverse audiences, from primary school children to writers, astronomers and festival-goers. It's been wonderful to get to meet people who are so enthusiastic about the material. The aurora certainly continues to work its magic. And this will also be remembered as the year I got the thrill of my own book Firebridge to Skyshore - A Northern Lights Journey (Original Plus Press) arriving in the post. It's an extraordinary feeling, to hold the first book and hear the crinkle of the pages. I look forward to seeing how 2010 is going to top that one!

Death on the Ice

2009-12-27T10:11:00.017Z

I'm hugging a mug of ginger and cloves today as I succumb to a bout of Christmas cold. But I have relished the past week of ice and snow. When not trekking over treacherous pavements or catching up with family, I've been lost in a story landscape of polar wastes. Robert Ryan's 'Death on the Ice' (published Headline Review) made for perfect winter reading. At 546 pages, I felt as if I'd camped out at Hut Point for a few seasons myself. If you like tales of derring-do and flag-waving heroism, then Ryan is your man. His characters, in this fictionalised account of Scott's 1901 + 1911 expeditions to the South Pole, say things like: 'What an echo they'll leave on this world … they died doing something great.' This reader is more struck by the folly and even arrogance of The Owner as Scott's men referred to him. In some of the closely-fought versions of this history, Scott has been accused of incompetence and even 'murder'. But more than 8,000 applied to join Scott's 1911 expedition and right to the last, men competed to be amongst the four who would claim the glory of standing at the Pole with him. So perhaps it tells us as much about the time and the country as it does about the man.

This is a meticulously researched book and sometimes, like Scott's sledges, the narrative groans under the weight of all those salvaged facts and reputations. I was surprised by how slow the first section of the book was. Ryan spends 200 pages juggling between short chapters relating Scott's first venture to Antarctica in 1901 and accounts of the army postings of Captain Lawrence Oates. I found it aggravating to be continually yanked away from the ice-bound Hut Point to the dusty veldt of the Boer War or the heat of Egypt. I'm not sure why Ryan decided to give so much attention to the backstory of Oates rather than any of the other men. Maybe because his reported last words, 'I am just going outside and I may be some time,' have become a key part of the Scott myth. Despite the continual disruption to the main narrative, one thing this achieved was to set Scott's venture in the context of the pre-war Empire. We see Oates fending off the Boers – 'mere Dutch farmers' – and heading up the summary flogging and execution of Egyptian prisoners. By using Scott's one Norwegian man, Tryggve Gran, as a kind of implied narrator, Ryan also points up the nationalistic tensions that riddled the attempts at the pole, with Scott becoming locked into a race with the far better prepared Amundsen.

But why read a novel about the race to the Pole when there are letters, diaries and survivors accounts as well as countless biographies? Ryan's skills as a novelist come to the fore when he's evoking the landscape of Antarctica and the harsh physical regime the men endured. There is one stunning scene where a group of Scott's doomed ponies are stranded on an ice floe during an attack by killer whales. Oates and another man try to save the ponies by leapfrogging across the floes but most of the horses go under to a terrifying death. I absolutely felt I was a witness to this scene just as I heard the strange cracks and sobs of the ice during those everlasting nights. Ryan is very good at capturing the penned-in atmosphere of Hut Point, the segregation of officers from the 'lower deck' men, the cliques and rivalries that form as well as deep loyalties. And when Scott confesses to Oates in the final bitter days, 'I've got us in a bit of a pickle, Soldier, haven't I?' - you really want to believe that clipped understatement is exactly what he said.

Scott's approach to the expedition has been much criticised in later years. Unlike Amundsen who lived for a time with the Inuits and learnt arctic survival skills from them, Scott's men were more enthusiastic amateurs. His refusal to wear furs or rely on huskie dogs smacked of not wanting to 'copy the natives'. Yet they did wear 'finneskoes' or reindeer boots and did stuff Norwegian grass down into them along with their homely woollen socks. Scott clung to the scientific justification of their expedition. He wanted to test out the efficiency of horses and dogs versus motorised sledges. Yet he also insisted on the moral superiority of 'man hauling', putting his half-starved men under greater pressure as they lugged sledges weighed down with geological samples as well as supplies. A photograph of the five men at the pole, devastated by their discovery that Amundsen had beaten them to it by a month, says it all. Defeated in 'this awful place,' they still had to face trudging back eight hundred miles, man-hauling all the way. Ryan's final section, as the catastrophe closes in around them, was the most compelling. And though it was an exhausting read, I was reluctant to leave behind the glacial landscape of the Ross Ice Shelf and the men lost in its white wilderness.

A White Weekend?

2009-12-11T17:14:00.053Z

Today I trekked up through the fog and spooky tree lines of Victoria Park to see Stan Cowley and Darren Wright of the Radio & Space Plasma Physics Group at the University of Leicester. It's a familiar route by now because since they first sponsored my poetry project on the Northern Lights back in June 2007, we've enjoyed a no. of collaborations. In March 2008, Darren and I took part in a Northern Lights evening at the Science Museum in London. A sell-out event which was reprised in September last year. Now we're planning to bring that event to Leicester and where better than the dramatic Space Theatre in Leicester's own National Space Centre? The innovative film-maker, Brian McClave will be showing his spectacular 3-D films of both aurora and solar flares. And under that domed ceiling of the planetarium, we hope to recreate some of the magic of the Northern Lights, as we mix poetry, physics and film. Are you hooked yet?

At our planning meeting today, we were joined by Ather Mirza of the University's Press Office to think of ways of getting the word out there. We're dreaming up a blizzard of press releases, e-mails, tweets - you name it. And this weekend, I'll be busy on a design for the flyer. So here's the first flake ... It's fab, it's free and it's Tuesday 23rd February!

POLAR POETS GO ARCTIC

And continuing the arctic theme, I'll also be working on a webpage to launch another poetry adventure. In 2010, I'll be teaming up with poet, Susan Richardson, to form the Polar Poets. We're hoping to tour the country with multi-media performances, talks and workshops around the Arctic. She can offer Viking women, hardy Antarctic Explorers and penguins - I can throw in Saamis, scientists and reindeer. And together our material traverses the icy wastes of both poles.

Inevitably, our poems reflect on climate change in these regions. With the Copenhagen Summit on Climate Change opening this week, this theme has never seemed more urgent. You might ask what use is it for 2 poets to versify about melting icecaps. I can only say that 2 years ago, I went to Tromso in the Arctic Circle to see the Northern Lights for myself. And I think too I wanted to follow in the footsteps of the little girl in my favourite childhood story, The Snow Queen, and journey across the ice and snow. What I found was rain and darkness. They were experiencing summer temperatures in December. The same week we were there, a White House press conference announced the Polar Bear was a 'threatened' species facing possible extinction by as early as 2050. By this August, for the first time in human history, so much summer ice had melted at the North Pole, that it was an island. It seems impossible not to write about this. And the least the Polar Poets can do is celebrate the extraordinary beauty of this wilderness that we so depend on - while it is still within our power to conserve it. It's not enough, for sure - but it's one thing storytellers and poets can do.

Kabatic Winds on the High Street

2009-12-06T16:37:00.035Z

Deluged by a blizzard of reports and coursework drafts at the day-job, I've been taking solace in a sumptuous book I found in the library last week. Antarctica: Exploring a Fragile Eden by Jonathon & Angela Scott made me long all over again to head off for the poles. It has breath-taking photographs of glacier caves, katabatic winds blowing up storms and colonies of penguins stretched across the ice-bound horizons. A book to get lost in.

There is one image of a gentoo penguin being shaken to death by a leopard seal. I was thinking of this as I digested a talk by literary agent Elizabeth Cochrane of Greene & Heaton Agency last Thursday. Her visit was hosted by my writers' group Leicester Writers Club and offered many insights into the world of publishing today. It was undoubtedly a 'very tough industry'. The harsh truth is most books make losses - only a few make money for the publishers. And there are thousands of novelists out there. 'Many writers will write perfectly publishable books that never get sold.' With the crash of Borders bookstore chain last week, the industry is in the throes of the credit crunch. Writers too will feel the pinch. After maybe 3 years work on your first novel, you might be lucky to get a £1,000 advance. Try living on that.

So that was just some of the tough talk. However, Elizabeth Cochrane was there to throw us a few lifelines, not just beat us about the head with home truths. She worked through several hours of detailed, practical advice about what agents were looking for, how to present your pitches and how they would fight for your interests in this climate. The talk was supported by Creative Leicestershire so free. A large room was packed with maybe ninety-odd aspiring and professional writers.

I've been lucky enough to hear a few agents and editors speak at LWC events so a lot of it was familiar. But there are always little gems. Having mentioned the horror story of an unnamed leading agency that kept the 'slush-pile' in a cupboard till some intern could send out all the rejection slips (gasp!) - she explained the routine in her own agency. They refer to 'the unsoliciteds' - not the 'slush-pile' - and take turns each week to do the initial sifting. I liked the mention of 'a little place in the kitchen' where other agents make their tea and get a second look at some of the submissions. A lot of the sifting inevitably has to go on in the margins of a busy day representing existing clients. So the question is always: 'Can I put this down yet? I've got all these other things to read - is this unputdownable?' That's the challenge with sample chapters.

Some DOS and DON'TS:

don't say your friends loved it

don't ask them to sign a security clause before they can see your top-secret manuscript ...

don't mention your holidays

DO mention other writers that your book is 'in the vein of'. But Elizabeth doesn't take to Hollywood-style pitches along the lines of: 'It's Smiley's People crossed with Anna Karenina'. Her talk also reinforced the importance of networking and making full use of any opportunities to meet agents at courses, parties, writers' conferences etc. And indeed, she was generous in her time during and after the event, handing out a great wadge of business cards.

So we were lucky indeed to hear an agent who was both witty and dedicated to getting up-to-date info. out there to writers. She also works for a consultative agency, Cornerstones, that writers can make use of to get in-depth reports on their books. With the freezing winds of recession blowing in, we need all the help we can get. Above all, Elizabeth Cohrane revealed, you need 'to see the joy in it' to sell books, and that's the hallmark of the kind of agent or editor you want to find in this business.

But How do You Make Money?

2009-11-25T07:47:00.057Z

Is a writer someone who publishes books? - or someone who works with story and words to help a community explore its identity?
Can an author's on-line writing become more important than their actual books?
could self-publishing - maybe to a niche audiences - play a vital part in building careers of new writers?

These were just some of the questions we tossed around in Damien Walter' fascinating talk, The Entrepreneurial Writer, offered as part of the Writing School's series on New Ways with Writing. Walter is a writer himself - of Weird & Speculative fiction - as well as a Literature Development worker and a professional blogger for The Guardian. So well placed to discuss some emerging trends in the writing economy.

With 1300 Creative Writing graduates emerging every year in the UK - and a similar no. of manuscripts appearing on the slush pile of one publishing house in that time - it may be time to review what exactly does a writer do? One answer could lie in the realm of Social Literature - where writing is about social outcomes rather than producing books. Damien gave us the e.g. of the US best-selling author Dave Eggers who in 2002 founded the 826 Valencia project in San Francisco to raise literacy amongst the Mexican population there. So a writer with a social conscience - but this also helped build his own career and profile. The same can be seen locally with poets like Lydia Towsey and Rob Gee, involved in Bright Sparks and WORD events.

Damien went to to look at the traditional divide between commercial literature and arts-subsidised literature. He told a wonderful story of the best-selling sci-fi author Neal Stephenson attending a writer's convention where another author asked him:
'So where do you teach?'
'I don't teach anywhere.'
(Pause) 'Yes, but what else do you do?'
'I'm ... a writer.'
'Yes, but - what do you DO? How do you make money?'

And so it went on. But Walter suggested that this 'never the twain shall meet' barrier was breaking down. He cited the e.g. of Graham Joyce, a highly successful fantasy author, currently writing screenplays as well as the script for the Doom 4 computer game, yet also lecturing in Creative Writing at Nottingham Trent University and winning literary fiction prizes. Walter believes the traditional market for genre fiction is collapsing with readers demanding more originality and literary technique. Commercial publishers are seeking out graduates of Creative Writing courses and universities are looking for successful commercial authors to staff their courses. Other means of authors making an income may lie with offering workshops or performances.

We turned to the advantages the new social media present for writers. Walter thought this media was changing the writer's role dramatically. It's now possible for authors or poets to go directly to an audience interested in your subject. The best-selling author Neil Gaiman - what is it with these Neil/ Neals? - has 1.5 million followers on Twitter. The 5 nominees for the Hugo Awards this year all had a huge blog following and arguably, their on-line writing is now a much bigger part of their role as writers than producing fiction. But it also sells books to a loyal and enthusiastic audience. Which led us on to the potential for new writers to find a niche audience to self-publish to, breaking ground perhaps before mainstream publishers think about taking them on.

Is that where the future-present of new media is taking us? Who knows? But this course of seminars for writers has given us a chance to take stock of an industry in the throes of enormous change. And like all change, while some time-honoured structures come tumbling down, other opportunities emerge. The The Entrepreneurial Writer, according to Walter, is looking out for these, whilst also opening up to the wider question of what are writers actually for?

See my blogs on the previous talks:

Your Web-presence as a Writer - Will Buckingham

Independent Publishing - Ross Bradshaw

Online Magazines - Farhana Shaikh

Angel of Brooklyn

2009-11-21T21:33:00.028Z

Are you looking for the ideal present for an avid novel-reader? Or maybe it's you that likes to snuggle into the armchair with a ravishingly good story that lasts for days. 'Angel of Brooklyn' by Janette Jenkins didn't last many days because it was a page-turner that kept me up at night. This was one of the year's best-reads for me with its spellbinding story and beautiful prose. How are you going to resist a book with the opening line: 'A week before they killed her, Beatrice told them about the dead birds ...'?

If you start with the promise of that line, you have to deliver a helluva story and Jenkins does. She's helped by a heroine who has emerged remarkably sane from a bizarre and lonely childhood. Glamorous yet good-natured, she's an American stranded in a Lancashire backwater just as the First World War breaks. Inevitably, her terribly English husband, Jonathon, abandons his new bride to sign up for the adventure in France. This leaves Beatrice to the mercies of the Anglezarke's small-town wives. You're rooting for her as soon as you hear one of them comment: 'You might speak English and have the same coloured skin and everything but it's the little things that turn you into a foreigner.'

Jenkins, like me, is a Bolton girl and knows her Northern landscapes. I loved her first novel, Columbus Day, set in my childhood summer haunt of Blackpool. But her writing has grown and 'Angel of Brooklyn' is in another league. This is storytelling that simply doesn't put a foot wrong. She has captured convincingly the hushed world of an Edwardian village with its back-room grocer's shop and annual day-trips to Morecambe. But she has cunningly juxtaposed this with the strange home-life Beatrice endured in Normal, Illinois, with her amateur taxidermist father and would-be preacher brother. As the back-blurb says, Jenkins expertly mixes 'American Gothic with gritty Northern realism' and it is an enchanting if disturbing concoction.

Birds flit through the novel, knitting narratives together. The stuffed birds of her father's kitchen-table. The migrating birds swooping over Anglezarke reservoir. And the angel wings Beatrice wore for her Coney Island show-girl act when she escaped to New York. The pre-war chapters begin as a list of 'Ten (or more ) True Things' our heroine can reveal about herself to her English neighbours. But they open into a nightmarish account of her father's degeneration from obsession to lunacy. In between, the English chapters move us through the unfolding bitterness of wives damaged by the fall-out of 1914.

It only takes two years for all semblance of politeness to unravel. Jenkins expertly stitches these two narratives together to build to the tragedy implied in her opening line. The resolution doesn't disappoint but I was sorry to leave her heroine and both fictional worlds behind.

Polar Embarkations

2009-11-21T16:11:00.034Z

As my profile says, writing takes you places. Yesterday I headed west to catch up with Susan Richardson in Cardiff. Beside the Bay, we took in the Captain Scott white mosaic sculpture before diving into the Norwegian Church cafe. Cardiff, she told me, was twinned with Bergen and was Scott's departure point. As I tucked into a Norwegian Fisherman's Platter (delicious sweet-cured herrings), we traded arctic obsessions and planned a collaboration. Susan's beautiful collection, Creatures of the Intertidal Zone, is drawn from her journeys to Iceland and other arctic countries in the footsteps of 2 Viking women. My own collection, Firebridge to Skyshore, similarly traces a journey to the arctic to gather stories of the Northern Lights.

It felt like the beginning of an expedition into some white unknown. We took stock, mapped directions, drew up costings. Where are we headed? North certainly. We want to tell our stories of the arctic to diverse audiences who are off the beaten track of arts events. We want to celebrate this frozen wilderness and its heritage even as the thaw sets in. We want to entertain, to bind with word spells. And we figure two polar poets can exert more magnetism than a lone voice. Between us, we can conjure Viking women, arctic explorers, reindeer herders, auroral scientists, penguins and polar bears. Right now, the ship is in harbour waiting on a name ( suggestions on a postcard please).

Meanwhile, back in Leicester, another collaboration is underfoot, this one taking the aurora borealis as its theme. Following two sell-out shows at London's Science Museum (Dana Centre), we have decided to bring this Northern Lights spectacular to the National Space Centre in Leicester. It looks likely to be February 2010. Two auroral scientists from the University will join film-maker Brian McClave and myself to present a fusion of physics, poetry and film of the Northern Lights. It should be a knock-out show in the dramatic Space Theatre and thanks to funding by Leicester University's Radio & Space Plasma Physics Group, it will be entirely free! (Keep checking my website for date and details which should soon be sorted).

On-line Magazines

2009-11-21T12:27:00.021Z

Last Monday, I attended another in the excellent series of talks on 'New Ways of Writing', run by the Writing School, Leicester. This time we had Farhana Shaikh of 'The Asian Writer' introducing us to the world of On-Line Magazines. This enterprising young woman set up her site in 2007, addressing a niche market of Brit-Asian writers/ readers and now gets 20,000 hits for each edition. There is no budget as yet to pay contributors but the site is regularly visited by agents and editors so it's a great showcase for emerging talent.

Farhana wasn't out to promote her own magazine to us but it's an excellent e.g. of the potential audiences of such magazines – far beyond the scale of small press journals with a readership of maybe hundreds. She showed us that the format of on-line magazines varies widely. Some are modelled on print magazine pages and may even be digital offshoots of such titles (see Marie Claire or The Guardian). You might sample and then pay to download a pdf file (see Five Dials). Or a site like The View from Here uses newer technologies and the style of social media with Flash design, You-Tube clips, hyperlinks etc. Typical features of on-line magazines include:

regular updates
original content if digital version of print mag.
Website channels/ options
features, columns, blogs
huge readerships
run by large media outlets or individuals
low overheads
use freelancers & often welcome submissions

Some on-line mags. do pay contributors. In particular, the US market for on-line mags. is huge and more lucrative. It's possible to identify possible UK sites through the comprehensive listings offered by Mslexia or The Poetry Library sites. The beauty of this is you can access a wide range of publications to sample for free at the press of a button. As with submissions elsewhere, you want to check guidelines, identify a named editor, research the readership and content and show you understand on-line media in any copy you send in.

Is it wise to write for free? It might be that such pieces could build a relationship with editors that leads to paid commissions. But understand you won't usually be able to sell published material elsewhere. But if that sounds harsh, take a peek at the Guest Writer's slot on The View from Here. This is regularly read by 7,000 visitors. Does your work usually reach that many readers in one go? It can't hurt to press that 'enter' button and take a trawl through the hyperspace of new media magazines. Just as soon as I stop attending writing courses, I intend to find time to do so!

Mutterings from the Wall

2009-11-19T16:03:00.025Z

On a train through the flatlands
tunnelling east into skies
that crush the land with light;
crows flung windward from dark fields,
telegraph wires that slacken
and loop towards luminous ditches;
I am reading about men
counting bricks on a wall, longing
for moons and listening all night
to a sick bulb humming.

My reading material on my way to the Suffolk poetry weekend, (see below) was a compelling collection of poems. Brian Daldorph's Jail Time (published by Original Plus Press) is a clamour of voices, sorrowing, sly, sardonic, of men awaiting trial or serving sentences in the Douglas County Jail, Kansas. And on that first night inside, 'the moans, the moans, the moans'. The American idiom of these voices comes right at you out of the pages:

'… and I'm not comin' back here, I hate the way
they treat me here and I thank Jesus they treat me like that,
you know what I'm sayin'?'

I like the way Daldorph has paid attention, caught not only these inflections but the twists and turns of attitude and the everyday anguish of lives both inside and outside. The poet, a Yorkshire man, has served more than seven years himself, as a writer in residence. And time is an inevitable theme; doing it, dodging it, weighing it out:

'I'm trying to remember every moment
of my life: this should take me the first part
of eternity. Then I'll find something else to do.'

Walls is another, a concrete image, solid and tactile, but also figurative: 'in this cell/ there are four walls/ 492 bricks.' One man makes a big deal of the visit his woman has promised, is envied by others. She's coming because 'she has to tell it to his face/ and he ain't stupid' but still, 'she's coming to visit next week', he keeps saying.

Forms vary in this collection. There are short, wry stanzas. And there are tight packed sonnets that hammer out uneven rhythms and rhymes with a metallic clang:

'Last night the guy in the next cell
kept yelling, I hate jail, I hate jail …
He'd give up three meals to see the moon.
Alone he sits in his room.'

I love that this con has very precisely identified the worth of a moon in jail values. Sometimes the rhymes seem to be borrowed from inmates in Daldorph's writing class but he honours their freshness:

'the one about dying like a skunk
under car wheels
each time he quits junk.'

When the train pulled into Ipswich, I was thumbing the book a second time. 74 fine poems. And did I mention the haunting charcoal drawings, intimate mugshots of the men, by Kerry Niemann? For an hour or two I walked in their orange suits and velcroed slippers and touched those clammy walls. I listened in to murmured confessions. It felt a privilege to get inside these stories and a relief not to be living them. I was out in 'the big time' again but I suspect I'll be back.

Word Stitching in Suffolk

2009-11-16T07:00:00.040Z

So a birthday blog! My present to myself this year was a weekend workshop in Suffolk. On Friday 13th, at Belstead House, 13 poets gathered. As a furore of winds and rain broke outside, we settled into the library for a warm welcome from the weekend's hosts, Michael Laskey and Joanna Cutts, editors of the Smiths Knoll magazine. We shared the well-equipped Conference Centre, a Tudor Hall in lovely gardens, with a group of quilters. As the weekend went on, it was clear the quilters were engaged in some huge and colourful undertaking, patches being laid out on the sitting-room carpet. We were similarly engrossed but never worked as late as those quilters.

Saturday opened with some free writing - two 7 mins. poems - to stretch our versifying muscles. Outside, a tree flamed orange against a wall of dark firs before a sheet of rain and hail drowned everything. Then it was the main business of the day, workshopping one poem by each poet. The group worked closely with each poem, sifted detail and asked useful questions. 13 is enough to hear a range of readings, some unexpected, of your poem. And experienced poets can not only sense a false note or a misplaced line but offer alternative ways in. You get as much out of doing the same for others, honing skills of snipping and sounding out and rejigging.

In the afternoon, Joanna and Michael gave individual 15mins. consultations. As a writer, you're always trying to develop your internal editor so it's a great opportunity to sit with two professionals who handle your work with care and insight. And these two enjoy poems and are good company. The rest of the time, we were free to walk, sleep, write, whatever. For Saturday evening's 'editorial meeting', Michael and Joanna brought a real sample of this week's submissions to select for publication. Joanna said they often end up placing a poem after 'a dialogue' with the poet i.e. they go through a process of drafts first. That's typical of the care taken with Smiths Knoll submissions - you get your work back quickly, sometimes even with a helpful comment.

The quilters were up at the crack of dawn on Sunday for the final push, stitching before breakfast. We continued with a successful format of free writing, workshopping and readarounds of favourite poems. When not busy with our 'poetry bee', it was great to share experiences and information with writers who really know the contemporary poetry scene. If you're looking for a good poetry workshop, I can really recommend the Smiths Knoll annual event. I liked very much the painstaking attention to craft, the encouragement to raise my game. And scores of poems by writers present and beyond, in every mood and form, stitched into the weekend's cloth. My thanks go especially to Michael and Joanna but also to my fellow poets who made it such a pleasurable 3 days. A good birthday treat.

Small-Press Sums for Shelf-Life

2009-11-10T07:25:00.064Z

Another Monday evening at the Writing School's course on New Ways with Writing. When I arrive, the room is already buzzing with the tense energy of Ross Bradshaw pacing the room and gathering his thoughts. Ross is the force behind Five Leaves Press, an small press based in Nottingham, as well as organiser of the Lowdham Book Festival. He was here to open our eyes to the somewhat harsh realities of Independent Publishing but also the unique opportunities it offers to writers.

He began with sums. If a book has the cover price of £10, how much goes to the author? Who else has to get paid out of that? How much to the bookshop? What about distribution? We squirmed and struggled to pluck figures out of the air, making half-informed guesses with no option to phone a friend. 75p is the answer to the author's share - some of which might go to an agent. A whopping 50% to the bookshop. And if they're lucky, a measly 50p to the publisher, out of which they have to pay all their staff, premises, running costs etc. Although the maths made my head hurt, his lesson on the brutal economics of publishing today was unforgettable.

So Ross's talk renewed my respect for the hard slog and dedication of the small publisher, running on knife-edge margins. This includes my own publisher, Original Press - which like 49% of independent publishers is a one-person company. It's snippets like this that came thick and fast from Ross. And it's why getting to hear somebody with so much industry knowledge is invaluable for writers learning their trade. For trade it is. Published writers can go out of print very quickly if their books aren't shifting enough copies. Why? Because 'land is expensive' so keeping stock sitting in warehouses isn't an option.

The good news is 'Independents care what happens to writers'. They can revive careers with reissues - bringing a writer 'back to shelf-life' . They can discover new writers who go on to launch careers with the mainstream press. Small Press publishers are consistently more prepared to take risks on material they believe in. This is why publishers like Tindal Street Press or Canongate end up with authors on the Booker lists, for instance. The Independents also have more commitment to communities of readers. So the list of Five Leaves' celebrates the literature of Nottinghamshire, both past and present.

We moved on to new developments such as the arrival of Print on Demand. This is great news for writers as it becomes economical to bring back books that went out of print or to produce small print runs for books that won't sell like Jordan's latest autobiography. E-readers were also discussed. I was amazed to learn that Amazon US already makes more money from e-books than paper books. Ross predicted that the future for bookselling lay with the Grey Pound, especially women. We are the generation with a culture of buying and reading books.

It was a very wide-ranging survey of the publishing landscape from a real insider. You might like to dip into Ross' blogs on the Literature Network or Five Leaves websites. I particularly enjoyed the editorial meeting on swearing ...

Text Bites and Blogspeak

2009-11-04T08:28:00.014Z

Our seminar on Writers and the Internet the other evening (see below)was so thought-provoking, I want to come back to it this morning. Still puzzling over some things:

How is the Internet changing my practice as a writer?

Definitely this has become a much more publicly engaged role. We blog/ tweet/ facebook - all suddenly become verbs - and our interaction with our audience or readers goes far beyond the occasional event or publication. When I first thought of becoming a writer, I thought of the solitary life in the study producing a text. But it turns out to an existence full of performance, attending events, networking,e-mailing, interactions both face-to-face and virtual.

Is the Internet changing my brain?

Harder to say. Will suggested we're getting used to shorter, more episodic forms of communication - the blog, for instance. Rather than the hours-at-a-time reading or writing. We switch around, we hyperlink, we multi-task with windows on our screen. But the core writing for me is still the long, silent, interior conversation with my imagination. Though if I was novel-writing at present, I'm sure I'd be wanting to bring in some of that texture of modern communication into the work. I'm sure it will change the novel form.

Is blogging writing?

Well, obviously, I'm typing and shaping prose. But it's also talking. I'm in first person addressing you and you feel present to me, it's got an immediacy about it. And I'm improvising as we do in speech with barely a spell-check in sight. But the thing that I've discovered in blogging, is that it also has the PLEASURE of writing in it. That it's a kind of free-writing - no end in sight, no deadlines, no evaluation of the text produced. Just the pleasure in words, in shaping thought into them. Sometimes - in a Facebook snippet or text bite - it's even poetry.

I am therefore I tweet?

2009-11-03T07:36:00.032Z

Last night I went to a fascinating talk about Writers and the Internet, given by Will Buckingham of De Montfort University. This was hosted by the Writing School, Leicester, as part of their New Ways with Writing course. This excellent course, running for another 3 weeks, features talks and discussion about how writers situate themselves in a world of virtual technologies and upheaval in the publishing world.

The evening had a practical side with writers sharing resources and strategies. We carried out a Web Presence Audit to see how people actually find us on-line. What happens when you Google your name? I've discovered on a Google Image search, 13 out of 21 images are of me or my work but there other Siobhan Logans out there. We had discussions about why some writers might need multiple identities if they have common names or write in different genres. Within the group, we were all at different stages of tweeting, blogging, Facebooking etc. The elusive question of WHAT IS TWITTER FOR? was never quite settled - except it is a moving feast and one writer is scoring canny PR points by tweeting their next novel, 130 characters at a time ...

But what stayed with me most was the intriguing introduction by Will Buckingham on how the Internet is reshaping our world. He raised the idea that the web is not only changing how we send messages or produce texts but creating different ways of EXISTING IN THE WORLD. So as we click onto Facebook or tap out an impromptu blog or e-mail that short story, we are shifting into 'other ways of thinking that are not private and enclosed'. Writers are no longer locked into their studies in splendid isolation - it only looks that way to long-suffering partners. And as 'silent reading' gives way to tweeting and MSN chats, the status of the BOOK is also in flux.

Will's talk raised profound questions about self and identity and mass culture as much as practical issues of how we negotiate this new terrain as writers. I'm still wondering. Do I think differently now? Do you?

Lutterworth Writers' Group

2009-10-30T11:09:00.033Z

I spent a delightful evening on Monday with a writers' group based in Lutterworth. This small group of local writing enthusiasts was boosted by some visitors from both Leicester Writers' Club and the Grace Dieu group from Coalville. Which just goes to show you that stories are written into the hills of Leicestershire.

I'd been invited to give a talk on the Northern Lights. And being as this was a group of writers, I reflected on how this project has developed over the last 4 years. It was November 2005 when a fellow writer and artist Jackie Stanley first asked me to write some poems about the Northern Lights for a film she wanted to make. It's rare to stumble on a subject that proves so rich in inspiration. Since then, I've visited the Arctic to see the lights for myself and performed my poems in places as diverse as the Science Museum in London and a primary school hall in Leicester.

Audiences never fail to be fascinated by the mystery and spectacle of the Aurora Borealis and Lutterworth Writers were no exception. We had no powerpoint facilities this time but we managed with a map of the Arctic, a handout of pictures and our imaginations. (see more of these fabulous pictures by Bjorn Jorgensen on his website.) My talk ranged through the stories created by indigenous peoples of the Arctic over many centuries and then on to the modern narrative that science offers of the origins of the aurora. We took a break for tea and fig rolls and book signings and then a busy question/answer session. It's great when audiences are so engaged. A lot of the questions were about how I came to get my book, Firebridge to Skyshore: A Northern lights Journey, published - always a topic of interest to writers!

There was a lovely atmosphere in the little Church Hall and I was surprised with a gorgeous bouquet of flowers as we finished. Many thanks to Frank for chairing and Cathy and Michael for chauffering me. I'm very happy that my first gig since the summer was such a pleasurable one.

Sitting Down to History

2009-10-16T11:56:00.021+01:00

Unfortunately, I missed National Poetry Day through an outbreak of something like flu that my sickly 2nd years passed on to me. But here is my contribution belatedly. This year's theme was Heroes & Heroines and I dug out a poem I wrote in a workshop with the fabulous Caribbean poet, Jean Binta Breeze. She invited us to write a letter to someone famous that we admired. My subject was the late Rosa Parks, Civil Rights protester from the 60s, a woman of considerable courage and dignity. This poem about the Montgomery Bus Boycott also sits well with Black History Month - which I'm not too late for, after all.

So tell me, Rosa

what were the bus journeys like
after that one? After the man at the station
snapping your picture with his headlamp camera
and the man stubbing your prints into dirty stains,
pulling your fingers like you didn’t own your hand,
- after the jostling and mutters, all eyes watching,
I mean long after the pitched battles -
when you shifted the weight
of a day’s long hours
into the padded seat by the window,
were your bags loaded full of history,
or did you put on ordinariness
like a buttoned-up coat,
lean back against the thrust of brakes,
sitting in a world of your own
only a little straighter?

Plans, Gigs, News

2009-10-05T06:59:00.019+01:00

Since I've not managed to update my 'events' page yet on the website, here's some of the news that is soon to appear. Now that I've got my Writer's Hat firmly back on - after the mayhem of a new teaching term in September - I'm pursuing new projects and bookings. I was delighted the other day to get an invitation in my Inbox to put on my Northern Lights show at the Ledbury Poetry Festival in July 2010. We hope this may include me appearing with an auroral scientist again, as at the gig we did at London's Science Museum. According to The Guardian, “This celebration of verse is the largest of its kind in the UK and also the most energised, giving a real sense of poetry as an important living, contemporary literary form.” Having caught the festival bug this summer, I'm really looking forward to that.

Closer to home, I'm doing a talk for Lutterworth Writers on the evening of Tuesday 27th October. It's always interesting to visit other writers' groups and see how they collaborate on their writing. My own group, Leicester Writers' Club, has been invaluable to me. I'm also keen to take the 'Firebridge' book and show out across the region now. Recently, I visited the new Writing East Midlands office in Nottingham to discuss how to do that. And the possibility of a gig in the Peaks has opened up - which is one of my favourite places. We'll be heading over there for a week walking the hills at half-term.

And now before a day of teaching kickstarts at nine, I want to get back to some research I'm doing for a new project around migration. I'm reading a book by Dr. Alice Roberts based on her excellent TV series, 'The Incredible Human Journey'. It tells the story of human evolution and the gradual colonisation of all five continents by the modern human species. I'm just up to a chapter on the spread from arctic Europe into the Americas - which ties in the research I did into indigenous arctic groups for my 'Firebridge to Skyshore' book. Roberts is a wonderful storyteller and she brings to life her own journey to these far-flung outposts of archaeology,learning from surviving indigenous groups along the way.

Arctic Hunger

2009-10-04T15:19:00.013+01:00

It's a perfect sun-fired day. Every leaf and brick gleams and out on the street, the whole neighbourhood is gearing up for the Divali lights switch-on. And on this crisp, autumn day I am thinking of ice. I'm re-reading Susan Richardson's beautiful collection of poetry, Creatures of the Intertidal Zone (published Cinnamon Press). I was lucky enough to hear Susan read at the summer's Polyverse Poetry Festival and was envious of her account of visiting Iceland, Greenland and Newfoundland – all places on my travel wish-list. Because like the penguin that recurs in this collection, I feel :

'… a force that's attracted to the north in her,
the thunder of summer light,
the blood of explorers in the tundra,
the tilting cap of ice.'

Susan undertook this trek to trace the footsteps of a Viking woman and the first sequence of poems, Gudrun the Rare, follows her on a life of sea-voyages. From the first line, it is utterly spellbinding: 'I know the gasp this grass gives/ when it's first touched by snow.' I was also very moved by the following poem, which relates the 'Resettlement' of an old woman from a remote, fishing island. As the men are lifting her wooden home into the water, she reflects on:

'… the lives of its five generations,
the twenty-eight births,
the labour pains ingrained in the wood of its walls,
and all those oil-skinned hours of waiting
while the men were at sea in a storm.'

No less engaging is her account of the evolutionary journey of a penguin, from migratory bird to ice-locked creature of the pole: 'Her need now beats its wings… propels her against/ the speckled shell of the sky …' The language is all lucid and unfussy like this, images arising naturally from the environment of her stories. The rhythms are also seductive, pausing sometimes to let you take that ice-tanged breath:

'So now, with tender eyes,
I must hunt for a hole in the white

and wait

patient

at the rim
for the whiskered nose of inspiration …'

This poem is about the act of writing and it is indeed 'tender eyes' Richardson turns on the Arctic world and its creatures, both animal and human. In a clever structure, the collection begins with sequences about 2 Viking women and ends with a section about the male Arctic explorers of the early twentieth-century. Here is the voice of Edgar Evans, the first of Scott's men to die:

'My hand is quite okay, sir.
Yes, I'm quite okay.

I just feel such crimson hunger.
My ribs are what's left of that rotting ship,
wrecked in Rhossili Bay, stuck
in the sand for dogs to piss on.'

I hope to get the chance to meet up with Susan again and share our mutual arctic fascination. Meanwhile, if you're another ice lover, I can't recommend this book highly enough. And even if you're not, there's much to relish in these stories of human wanderings and foibles.

The Ghosts of Eden

2009-10-02T17:29:00.045+01:00

So let's break the silence that was September on my blog with a throwback to one of my best summer reads. The Ghosts of Eden by Andrew JH Sharp was the kind of good thick book I like to nestle into during the holidays. This is a wonderfully lyrical novel set in Africa. The early sections depict two worlds that overlap in the lush landscape of colonial Uganda; the childhood of Stanley, an 8 year-old cattle-herder, and the childhood of Michael Lacey, son of missionaries.

There is a sense of each being a closed world vividly experienced - yet each is doomed by modernity pressing on its edges. The boys are both engaging heroes, similarly shy, loyal, deeply sensitive. For me the depiction of Bahima nomadic culture as the herd boys follow out the rituals of their daily lives was utterly enchanting and convincing. We see through their eyes the strangeness of Bazungu (European) behaviour as they encounter white people for the first time. We feel the jolt of that meeting and fear for them as they face exile from their own people with the prospect of boarding school.

The author, like his characters, then takes a rather brave step. We jump forward some 30 years to find Michael as an adult on a plane to Uganda for a 3 day conference. Another jolt. The adult is entirely disassociated from his past, the child's vulnerability buried in the clinical efficiency of a gifted surgeon (here Sharpe draws on his own experience as a medical practitioner.) Uganda is still raw from the trauma of Idi Amin's rule and its legacy. But the past griefs that threaten to engulf Michael take more time to surface. Inevitably, the paths of the Bahima and the Bazungu now cross.

But it is very much Michael's story and I missed the chance to explore Stanley's point of view in this second half. I was too emotionally invested in the Bahima characters by then to see them only from the outside. So it is Michael who negotiates the minefields of cultural difference and personal loss and alienation. There are big themes here but always firmly grounded in this individual story. I'm glad the author resisted too neat a resolution but the rhythm of the novel is towards a much-needed redemption for Michael and his Bahima counterpart. Overall, this was a very satisfying read and an impressive debut for Sharp in his first novel.

Underfoot Poems

2009-10-02T16:53:00.019+01:00

Well, here we are edging into October and the faded glories of a Whitby summer are long past. I've been thinking about the rhythm of the year and the way that my teaching work and writing get twined into the seasons. Come the end of August, everything goes crazy as students stream into college for enrolment. My garden wilts and the blog falters. What I call the 'day-job' takes over for a while. In this last month, it's been hard to get my Writers' hat on at all - except in the early mornings. Before sun-up, I'm jotting in the purple notebook. And I'm pleased to say a string of new prose-poems - snippets shall we say? - are beading together in the margins of my days.

But suddenly leaves are crackling underfoot and half-term is only a spit away. October could well be my favourite time of year. Because as the new classes bed down - as the nights get darker and clocks change over - I come into my best writing season. Outside the reddening trees and early sunsets make me giddy with anticipation. On the front street, they're hanging the Divali lights and Halloween and Bonfire Night will tumble after. Inside, it's dark and cocoon-like and the hibernation seems to stir something in that place the writing comes from. So bring on the conkers and firecrackers and frost, I say.

But before the summer gets forgotten altogether, I'm hoping to do some catch-up blogs after my long silence and tell you about some of the wonderful books I read on those long, lazy days by the sea.

Sand-marked Paperbacks

2009-08-11T14:24:00.053+01:00

Zandvoort aan Zee takes beach-lounging to an industrial level with rows upon row of plastic sun-loungers and tractors that go out to 'clean the sand' in the morning. But if you get down there early, before the sun-worshippers have stirred, the silver-blue sea and honeyed sand are stunning; the shale underfoot of broken shells pleasingly crunchy. You can sit under the dunes and listen to a storm of tidal detonations that are pestle to the mortar of this shore. And after a mesmerising morning walk, treat yourself to a croissant breakfast at Cafe Neuf.

In between house-sitting a menagerie of pets this week, I enjoyed the cool of the garden and finished off a delicious collection of poems by Mark Goodwin, called Else. Goodwin's poems transport you into places you will never find on a map. They leave the reader land-wrecked in wordscapes, tangled in an undergrowth of sounds, senses, images. On the first page, I am already arrested:

'Silas Tarn's willow-agile feet pick
out a code of stones to step on; he moves
with the slime-ribbony
mood of a river ...'

Goodwin is in love with language and its many registers. The river's stones are 'synovially smooth as a newborn's joints' and Silas 'sweats hints of sea zawns'.
I find this word 'zawn' in a glossary of Climbers' terms, meaning: 'Small steep-sided channel of sea ...' It's a West Cornwall dialect word and so its usage reflects not only one of Goodwin's favourite locations but also his own passion for climbing. And the poet is very present here, his hurt knuckles, his 'puzzler boots', his father with the dead dog, his chef brother who loves fireworks, his own children from the womb onwards. I particularly liked 'Three Men, a Boy, & a Four Pound Trout' which takes us through the rhythm of a day's fishing;

'The bloodknot is neat and tightly tied
to a little grappling hook with barbs like

prongs from a shattered star.
And the spinner is the way a boy smiles

years as sunlight swirls through ...'

It's hard to pick out a clutch of lines that do this 8-part poem justice, as it is hard to single out poems in this rich hoard. But I am still entranced by certain images in the early poem, 'Summer Conundrums of Happiness', which tells us that 'happiness hides in ditches'. It evokes the sinister smells and 'spear-beaks' of the 'slow-hot uncoil of blurred summers' before delivering a killer line:

'how our wounds
are frilled with
fibres of being
glad.'

The gorgeous blue-moon cover with the gold birch leaf gives just the right hint of treasure excavated from the border of human and natural worlds.

And then, on an overnight visit to the beautiful city of Haarlem - but let me digress. I have to mention the Indonesian rijsstaffel we had at Wisma Hilda. We go there every year and without fail, this is died-and-gone-to-heaven food. In the morning we revisited other favourite haunts; the market in the medieval square, the spell-binding shafts of light and stained-glass colours in St Bavo's, the cobbled trails of side-streets. And in the bookshop, I snapped up a copy of Kate Atkinson's 'When Will there Be Good News?'. Atkinson made her name with literary fiction such as 'Behind the Scenes at the Museum' and her fiction became ever more playful with novels like 'Human Croquet'. But where I felt her characters got a little lost in the experimentation with form, in her latest series of detective novels, they are the beating heart of the story. And strong, page-turning stories these are. I devoured this one almost overnight, the perfect summer read for a long train journey or hotel room.

Most pleasing of all, on a five-day jaunt to the Low Lands, were the notes I jotted in the new lilac notebook. I got three short pieces written - they might be prose poems, or the raw material for poems. I'm just calling them 'snippets'. All being well, I'll have something to read at my next Leicester Writers' Club meeting. But first, there's a trip to York and then on to that magical seaside town, Whitby, on the North Yorkshire coast. There will be day-trippers and Cod + Chips; there will be Guided Ghost Walks and Dracula trails; there might be plastic rain hoods but there'll be no sun loungers, I'm sure of that.

The Seduction of Elsewhere

2009-08-04T07:56:00.046+01:00

Ah, the literary life ... posting e-mails, chasing bookings, filing receipts, paying the printers, looking aghast at tax forms. This stuff can and does take up whole weeks. What I need now is a few quiet hours to find my way back to some new writing. A blank page and a world of possibilities. Hopefully, some long hours in terminals and on trains will do the job. John Hegley said he does a lot of his writing on trains and I can see why. The steady hum of the engine, an endless moving screen of landscape and people - and most of all, the lure of elsewhere. Someone asked me recently why so much of my writing seemed to be about other places like the Arctic. My answer was 'I like writing that take me into other people's stories and lives. That has been very liberating ... not to be confined to the 'me story'.'

For inspiration, I shall also take a pile of reading. Today is packing day and I'll be sifting through the pile by my bed. Will it be Susan Richardson's delicious arctic collection 'Creatures of the Intertidal Zone', Mark Goodwin's 'Else' or Brian Daldorph's 'Jail Time' - a collection that certainly reaches into other people's stories? For novels, I have Andrew Sharpe's exquisite African tale, 'The Ghost of Eden'. You can see the titles all speak of 'elsewhere'. I also have a choice of notebooks - my arctic one with the hide cover, a shiny hardback one with the 'Blue Cats & Butterflies' design or the plain but sturdy Sainsbury's hardback with a smoky lilac cover. Sometimes colour can seduce the mind into the 'write mood' ...

And for setting, we have the seaside which is a special treat for a landlocked Midlander. First, Zandvoort in the Netherlands where we get to housesit for friends - Trev (aka Smashy de Clown) and his lovely family. Another chance to inhabit someone else's life - and language even. Then it's Whitby on the North Yorkshire coast - a place which I have a special fondness for. The town that inspired that literary masterpiece, Dracula. We first stayed there in 1995 so it's part of our history too. I have the jet and amber earrings to prove it, the jars full of fossils and a 6,000 word short story.

So back to a morning of e-mails before the excitement begins. I'll be away for most of August and then I'll let you know what the tides washed in.

Filling a Lounge-shaped Silence

2009-08-01T15:53:00.020+01:00

The Yellow evening at the stupendous Lyric Lounge did not disappoint as a finale. Lydia was a black and gold star in lace and tulle. John Hegley was a revelation. Just about all his poems were SUNG or spoken to a very groovy soundtrack of live music from 'the Megend Keith Moore' on bass cello - or was it Ken? That's the problem with a 'megend'. There was also his nephew on acoustic guitar. John sang in a wild spoof-bluesy sort of way and the poems were a joy - witty, whimsical but often with an emotional punch too. I think my favourite was about his father - formerly Renee Robert who became 'Bob' to fit in at his English office and never spoke French except when 'Grandmere' suddenly visited after 20 years. Do take a look at some of them on his website.

In addition to the fabulous John Hegley, there was a live band, 4 'talented older men' from Lyric Lounge who dished their own brand of comic poetry and a rousing chorus of Hegley's poem/song dedicated to his native 'Luton bungalow'. The audience was required to sing along, translate French and tap our spectacles in rhythm like an answering morse code. It's impossible to convey how much we laughed and why. Like the whole week, it was generous, fun and in love with versifying. When the circus packed up, what was left was a Lounge-shaped silence.

Green Lyrics Singing

2009-07-30T15:44:00.024+01:00

Oh the lushness of green at Lyric Lounge. As I arrive, everyone's in a corner creating something. Pillars are filling up with brand new poems and drawings. Some of them make their way into our lunchtime open mic session. Graham has brought green laurel leaves (from his neighbour's garden) to garland our offerings. He improvises a reading of 'Auroral Football' with me, playing with those green Northern Lights. Ishi Khan-Jackson runs through a gentle comedy set about her Punjabi grandmother. At one point, John Hegley strolls in. He's asked if he'd like to throw something in and he plucks a poem off the wall that's caught his eye. It's by a young man called Josh who absolutely doesn't want to read it himself. So John reads it for him and it's a blinder - the lyrical rush of 'The Hungry Moon' blows us away. John bows out. Jean Binta Breeze moves in, hurls in poems about tropical sunshine and tropical rain while the weather outside is lashing windows. She does a wonderful poem called 'Lyric Lounge' which I must track down for you. And then it's the music.

What can I say about the music - Aly and Milk? Aly - aka Alysson Stoneman - is a gifted poet who's set her words to the sweet acoustic guitar sound of Milk, her mate. I've said before that I think of poetry as singing with words, with the voice, and her phrasing is just on the edge of singing. It's sublime. And when she's not busy doing gigs and writing, she is also a co-ordinator for Nottingham Writers' Studio - another happening place for words.

And that's the great thing about Lyric Lounge - the buzz of the place and the people you meet. More tomorrow when we part in yellow and round off with John Hegley's evening show. Not to be missed.

Dolls' House Blue at Lyric Lounge

2009-07-29T15:47:00.029+01:00

Blue day at the Lyric Lounge. Rain streams the windows but inside is sunny as ever. Tables are littered with fascinating, rust-bitten objects from Leicestershire Museums. In the corner, the Book Doctor has her stethoscope out for a surgery with two writers. People begin to pull chairs around and I find myself kicking off the open mic lunchtime set with 2 poems in blue. At the last minute, a bus-load of children arrive and I am weaving between them as I unfurl this arctic story:

'... like a ribbon of blue
green or violet
your breath will
untwist
loose in the sky ...'
(Last Breath Singing)

Mark Goodwin reads a series of poems from the Behind the Scenes workshops inspired by museum objects. As he does so, the curator Nikki Clayton opens a mysterious box-case and sets out 6 Victorian dolls' house chairs. I lay a porcelain dolls' head amongst them and Mark moves on to a spooky poem about a doll dressed in Red Riding Hood clothes. The children are snapping pictures on their mobile and digital cameras. Some of the young Lyric Lounge attendants read their own poems, fresh from this morning's workshop. Jean Binta Breeze drifts across to throw in her 'Third World Blues' poem and a musician takes up his guitar, sings us through to the end of the set.

Lydia rushes off to take some young people to a Truvan film project that is part of the Lyric Lounge festival. It transpires that the children who were snapping were part of a press pack that now descends with forms to sign away permission for those pictures and requests for an interview. My mini-interview is written onto a speech bubble card and I'm photographed beside it. A creative chaos emanates from the Lounge. As I pack up my things to go, people of all ages are crouched with crayons and pencils for the afternoon's Drawing workshop. I'm half reluctant to leave but I'll be back for the Write Way Up evening performance. Seven poets inspired by museum artifacts ...

And a quick evening post: Home from Write Way Up - a fabulous show at Lyric Lounge putting really original work by young writers together with film and music - why isn't poetry presented like this more often? Kevin & Pam did a great job with these performers - cheers all round ...

Purple Poetry at Lyric Lounge

2009-07-28T20:09:00.057+01:00

Today I drifted into the sunlit Lyric Lounge for 'Bridging the Gap', a discussion on the relationship between the Page verses Stage. This is a phrase I've been hearing more and more frequently with poets often announcing themselves to be 'a page poet' or a 'performance poet' or some hybrid of the two. Page poets write for literary magazines, with a readership of subscribers, and work to get a chapbook or collection published. Performance poets play at live spoken word events on a growing scene of slams, open mic sessions and gigs. Here the twain met in the pleasant no-man's-land of the Y-theatre lounge to shake hands and swap challenges.

The panel intros. were very good natured with much agreement but the discussion was wide-ranging and threw up all sorts of questions. Is poetry on the page seen as better, 'proper poetry', more complex, more 'academic'? Is there an Establishment of the poetry world, a class divide between page and stage? They certainly have very different audiences. How has performance poetry been rooted in music and the rhythms of an Afro-Caribbean or Black American culture? What part does non-verbal communication, movement and personality play in performance poetry? Why do many page poets 'murder their own work' in reading it aloud? Are some performance poets lacking in writing 'craft' or 'morality'? Can performance poets get published? Can and should page poets learn the skills of communicating with an audience of listeners? What can either 'side' learn from the other?

Inevitably, this discussion challenges us all to see where we fit in. I write for both page and stage and one reshapes the other in a fluid process with no clear boundary, though some poems obviously work better with listeners than others. The label 'performance poet' might lead an audience to expect a different style than mine, I'm not sure. But I have learnt a great deal from the performance poets I've seen at Leicester's WORD events. I love their theatricality, how they use movement and claim the whole space of the stage, how they cradle the audience within their performance. And I try to do all those things in my shows. But the same poems do their stuff on the page in my new book - the white space they originated on.

I very much enjoyed not only the interplay of ideas but the generous vibe between panel speakers and audience in today's Lounge. Graham Norman of Leicester Poetry Society, conveyed his love of words on the page but also his growing awareness of the power of live, spoken poetry. Sureshot, aka Michael Brome, revealed the same love of reading song lyrics on vinyl records and the importance to him of crafting the poem on the page first. Lydia Towsey and Alison Dunne shared their own experience of both forms. And Jean Binta Breeze strolled in, gorgeous in purple (today's Lyric Lounge colour) to share some final words from a poetry mistress: 'A love of language is everything - without that, you don't have a poem.' 'Your voice is your instrument - your sound should seduce your audience and create that space where your poem can live.' 'The performance is a conversation between artist and audience - it begins even before you get on stage.'

The Lyric Lounge is part of the cultural program for the Special Olympics and as such is a vibrant and inclusive affair with all sorts of workshops, performances, open mic sessions - you name it. If you want to experience a passionate engagement with live literature wrapped up in lots of fun, head down there. Jean is doing her stuff every lunchtime. And they have John Hegley on Friday. Tomorrow, the colour theme is blue for those who like to chime with the time. I'll be dreamy in turquoise.

Icebergs and Dark Flames at Polyverse

2009-07-27T10:26:00.075+01:00

I feel my recent silence in the blogosphere needs some explaining. For the past fortnight, I've been nursing a bad neck strain, negotiating the world at eye-level gaze. Even neck swathed in scarves, peering at my keyboard aggravated it so blogging was out.

Luckily, I was able to rehearse my revived show STORIES DRUMMED TO POLAR SKIES. I was thrilled to be appearing this weekend as one of the headlining acts at the Polyverse festival. On Friday evening, I played to a very responsive audience in the Martin Hall theatre at Loughborough University. It was great to be doing this show in a theatre space again, with Saami music drifting over the PA and dramatic lighting to capture the mood of these arctic stories. At the end, one audience member said she wanted me to rerun the PowerPoint images and replay the whole thing; poems, music, auroral physics and all. Now that's what a poet loves to hear.

Polyverse was my first ever poetry festival and I was completely smitten. I heard some stunning poetry, bought a heap of books and chatted with editors and jobbing poets from across the country and beyond. It was especially good to finally meet my lovely editor from Original Plus, Sam Smith, down all the way from Cumbria. The festival lived up to its name with an astonishing range of styles and voices and subjects. I particularly enjoyed the other 'arctic poet', Susan Richardson, whose vivid performance was a revelation. I am so envious of her journeys to Iceland, Greenland and Newfoundland and her poetry found a magnetic resonance in my bones:

'It's a force that's attracted to the North in her,
the thunder of summer light,
the blood of explorers in the tundra,
the tilting cap of ice.'

There were many other very engaging readers, including some startlingly talented young poets, and of course, Carol Ann Duffy was sublime. A consummate storyteller, here is no declaiming. Her delivery is sly and taut and draws us in to collude in her mischief. The hair is all dark flames. She has a way of holding back on the last line, leaning into the mike and loosing that killer phrase with a glint in her eye. Her wicked narrative poem, 'The Laughter of Stafford Girls High' , rang a real bell with me from my own Catholic girls' schooling. This was delivered in separate slices to keep us begging for more. And then the moving sonnets of Rapture to finish. Here in the lover's 'Row', Duffy's images are so astonishing and right and conjured for me that stomach-pit feeling:

'But when we rowed,
the room swayed and sank down on its knees,
the air hurt and purpled like a bruise,
the sun banged the gate in the sky and fled.'

On Sunday I attended 2 really useful workshops on 'what to write' with Pam Thompson and 'who to ask' with Damien Walters of the Literature Network re. resources, funding, publishing etc. So I feel I got a glimpse of the whole poetry landscape. We were incredibly lucky to have this festival on our doorstep and let's hope this is the first of what will become a long tradition. I'm indebted to Radcliff Gregory for his vision of it and also Kerry Featherstone who steered this rambling herd of poets in the right direction all weekend. Fabulous!

Now I would mention Lyric Lounge, that other great spoken word event in Leicester, running all this week - but my neck is starting to do that twisty, creaking thing. More later ...

Map-poems and Bar-codes

2009-06-22T16:48:00.042+01:00

I love poetry workshops where you do quirky little exercises and allow writing to be as free as play once was. I was completely hooked today from the moment where Jean Binta Breeze asked us to draw around our hand on a page. The workshop was on 'Identity' and there we were - with an emblem of something so uniquely and solidly ourselves. This hand became our 'island' and we began to name its oceans and straits, its bays and inlets, its peaks and cliffs and the long meandering 'life-line' road that straddled its palm. In no time, we had our maps and marking a cross, began to trace a journey around this island-self. By the end of the first hour, we were sharing a dozen 'map-poems', negotiating the Cliffs of No-Eating, the Troubled Straits, the Inside-Out Road. I was astonished by the variety of images, witty, dark and surreal, from our varied Pilgrims' Progresses. My map-poem began:

'Backstreet Point has walls black as the berries
that hang-over from the elder tree,
rooted and glittering in the field where things
get lost and forbidden ...'

And then we were down to the main business - to let ourselves be inspired by the multiple pieces making up The NHS Open Art Show in Leicester's City Gallery. Jean invited to find one face amongst the many and let it speak to us. I chose a montage piece called 'Identity 9615 13395165'. This played on ideas of identity-tagging with snippets of forms pasted over family photographs and a black mounting cut to suggest an overlaid bar-code. It was a clever and suggestive piece and this is one verse it inspired:

'Barred face
lifted bravely to the light;
lamplight in the parlour
cut by the bar-code,
spliced by faltering
neuronal narratives ...'

It's hoped that some of the poems we produced in this workshop will appear with the exhibition as it tours The Hinckley Ten 2 Gallery, Victoria Hall (Oakham) and Charnwood Museum (Loughborough). So you might look out for this striking piece amongst others. The workshop was free, organised by the lovely Lydia Towsey of BrightSparks , and Jean did a great job of steering us through. And now I'm away to edit up my two brand new poems!

WRITERS ON THE ROAD

2009-06-20T17:59:00.017+01:00

Blogs, poems, even meals – were scattered to the winds this week in the headlong rush to get the show on the road. And I have to confess, I love the frenzy of rehearsals almost as much as the greasepaint and lights of the performance itself. The show was WRITERS ON THE ROAD – as the photo suggests, an attempt by Leicester Writers Club to get out of our comfort zone and take our work to new audiences. On Thursday night we gathered 18 writers into the Richard Attenborough Centre and slogged through 4 hours of dress rehearsal. The pace was manic because we'd had so little rehearsal time together and now there was set, lights and sound to add to the mix. But the ensemble camaraderie was in full swing and we knocked things into shape. A night later, we were back for the real thing before a lively and responsive audience of over 60 people.

Suffice to say it was a roaring success because each performer had put in hours before the mirror or mouthing scripts in the Green Room. And our technical crew somehow delivered sound effects or powerpoint magic bang on time. The programme ranged from children's fiction to poems to several plays and some edgy and powerful literary fiction. Everything from the heart-breaking to the laugh-out-loud. It effectively displayed the diversity of writing in the club – the thrill of good storytelling in every genre. The gasps and giggles from our audience more than repaid the hours of fine-tuning that it took to put the show together. And in a week that took in the excellent Short Fuse spoken work event, it got me thinking again about the pull of live literature.

As writers, we spend so much time struggling to get our work into print, to get the permanence and kudos of that. And indeed, turning pages of your own words in a real book is a pleasure hard to beat. But I also find myself drawn to the very different excitement of communicating story and emotion to a live audience. And the challenge of events like Writers on the Road or Short Fuse is to find new ways of presenting material and bringing it to life for an audience of listeners who have no page to revisit or linger over. Short Fuse do a brilliant job with a set of about 6 writers reading on a spot-lit stage with breaks to digest what you've heard. We also had powerful solo readings from writers experienced at standing in front of a mike. To that we added the dynamics of a play with several actors – or two voices sharing a poem. There was live music from Julian Wright. There was a truly bizarre and ingenious depiction of a Dalek, complete with plunger, from Chris de Lacey. There was a shimmering sari to evoke the Northern Lights – my own contribution. Given the chance, I will always veer for that element of theatre.

Personally, I think every writer gains from this exposure to live literature, to developing the skills of doing more than reading from the page. And it's wonderful to be part of a whole team sometimes, not just you and the keyboard. As we packed up props at the Attenborough Centre last night, I was already missing it. Don't be too surprised if you hear that I've chucked everything to run off and join the circus ...

Rhyme Storms & Line Breaks

2009-06-13T17:30:00.043+01:00

Something about the BBC's Poetry Season must be catching. I've been to a blitz of poetry dos this week, starting with my own Northern Lights event at the Space Centre.

Then on Thursday, I was lucky enough to attend a workshop with poet Mimi Khalvati on 'Line Endings'. 'Really? said my partner. 'The time must have just FLOWN!' Well, it did actually. I tried to explain that it was like he'd attended a session on using html for websites or something but I couldn't sound technical enough and he'd already wandered away to his on-line geeks-with-no-graphics game.

Getting down to the nuts and bolts of how a poem is put together is immensely satisfying. As Mimi showed us, without dividing verse into lines, you have no poetry. And since modern poetry tends towards free verse rather than those regular blocks, there are far more decisions to make about where to end a line and which word to draw attention to. She had a very clever exercise where she showed us different shapes of poems on the page from a distance and asked us to guess what kind of verse it was. 'Blank verse, male, pre-C20th, someone like Tennyson,' we said to a solid block of text. Others were spaced out verses or raggy, uneven shapes. It turned out each was the same bit of text transposed from a Virginia Woolf novel and set into verse lines. But how the lines were broken up made a huge difference to the tone and emotion of the piece as well as our expectations of it. In the blocked text, single images got lost in the mass of it, the narrative flow, but when it was set into couplets, we seemed to hold our breath and take in every beautifully described object in her scene. And words we end on or begin on take a much greater weight of significance - like a close-up in a film perhaps.

Anyway, I learned a huge amount from this very experienced poet and was grateful to local group Soundswrite for organising it. It's sent me back to my own poems with a fresh eye - 'Oh, that's why I do that! - and I see so many more possibilities.

And then, on Friday, I had the pleasure of hearing the poetry of Alison Flett who travelled all the way from the Orkneys to visit Leicester Poetry Society. Her early poems were quiet and fierce, conjuring voices from her native Edinburgh with their broad working-class Scots dialect. It was interesting to hear how much kids were penalised at school for speaking in this dialect but Flett was later inspired by the poet Tom Leonard to bring that voice into her writing, and with it a world of characters who rarely make it into poetry. I particularly loved 'Learning' but also the haunting new poems in her sequence about 'Veterans' of WW2.

And my 'poem a day' reading this week has been the 'Inferno' by Dante but that's another story and another blog ...

Star-Gazers at the Space Centre

2009-06-10T10:31:00.046+01:00

I'm still buzzing from a magnificent evening at the National Space Centre in Leicester. We were actually in the adjacent Challenger Learning Centre but what a perfect venue for an event about the Northern Lights! The room was packed to the rafters with enthusiastic star-gazers, thanks to an article the night before in the Mercury. I promised my audience a dizzy cocktail of auroral physics, poetry, arctic stories and stunning pictures, courtesy of the Norwegian photographer, Bjorn Jorgensen. And we began with an extract from my book, Firebridge to Skyshore, that relayed my own excitement at this 'Northern Lights Journey':

'Frost is riming the grass and the wet road already glistens with crystals ... Every sense is more distinct as we walk, wait, watch. We’re in the Arctic on an October night and we’re trawling for Northern Lights.'

And then we roamed around the Arctic Circle, exploring ancient stories from the indigenous peoples of the Far North. This was a very responsive audience. They oohed and aahed and clapped and laughed in a way that can only warm the heart of any performer. Together, we crossed:

'this no-man’s corridor where ravens fly ...
particles firing a frost-light mazurka'

I've been lucky enough to meet some top auroral scientists here and in Norway. Both the Radio & Space Plasma Physics Group at Leicester University, who sponsored my visit to the Arctic, and the EISCAT team at the Tromso research base were generous in their support of my work. So I performed a number of poems last night about the extraordinary story of the aurora science has pieced together and the inspiration of the professional 'Skywatchers'.

'Do Not Adjust Your Set
- if it’s sci-fi you’re channel bopping for
that auroral corona was only the trailer...'

It was also fascinating to hear local people share their experiences of witnessing the Northern Lights. Ann Bonell of the Leicester Astronomical Society, recalled the dramatic red aurora that erupted over Leicestershire skies during the great solar storms of March 1989. Another woman had seen the lights from the window of a plane, as in the poem:
'grazing an ionosphere ablaze
with burning colour, oxygen green,
nitrogen blue ...'

I'm very grateful to the Astronomical Society and especially Ann Bonell for the invitation to do this talk. It's been the most fun I've had since the gig at the Science Museum in London. And lovely to see there is just as much of a hunger for stories of the Northern Lights here in Leicester.

Book Blind and Blazing Trails

2009-05-29T07:56:00.024+01:00

Wow! The week that was is a blur of literary dazzle and razzamatazz.

Tuesday 26th Short Fuse

My first visit to the new short fiction showcase at the Y Theatre blew me away. The Y is a great theatre space and the performers, spotlit on a dark stage, were all riveting. Short Fuse selects the material and they were top notch stories. Alison Dunne kicked off with a beautifully crafted, wickedly humorous story; Yvonne Lake's story was a moving dramatic monologue. Nicholas Hogg milked the dramatic potential of his punk story by borrowing a friend, complete with nifty mohican, to deliver his sparky dialogue. We ripped along towards the headliner act, the inestimable Jean Binta Breeze. Jean's Caribbean mother brought us right into her yard kitchen, sharing the intimacy of her life over a pot of 'Saturday soup'. Voices, so many vibrant, emotion-charged voices, made for a wonderful evening. Look out for next month's theme: IDOL - False Gods & Superstars.

Wed. 27th The Muslim Writers Awards

It's hard to believe this started only 3 years ago as a small project initiated by Birmingham libraries. The event we attended at the Hilton Hotel in London could have rivalled the Booker awards and probably had far more panache and bling. Awards for all writing genres, both children and adults, were interspersed between superb acts. We opened with a breathtaking trio of performance poets on the theme of 'Mark my Words'. Music, theatre and film were all woven in. Figures from Bloomsbury, Puffin and Penguin appeared to call for the industry to deliver books and new talent reflecting the experiences of this significant community.

I was lucky enough to have been invited to be one of the judges, along with others from Leicester Writers' Club. I particularly want to mention the winner Shameam Akhtar and the three-times short-listed Zahid Hussain. Shameam had submitted 5 mysterious, beautifully cadenced poems that rambled between East and West and Zahid's was also a startling and original voice. Both deserve publication and hopefully this event will bring them closer to that. What I relished most that evening was the real joy and pride in a community so often misrepresented in our media.

Thursday 28th Picnic Book launch

And no sooner had I landed back in the multi-cultural heartland that is Leicester than I was off to another book launch, this time for the haunting African novel 'The Ghosts of Eden' by Andrew Sharp. Andrew, a local GP, has an uncanny ability to take us right into the lives and skin of his Ugandan herd boy. His extended family appeared last night to undertake a massive catering operation for the 120 guests. We joked he must have threatened his patients with being struck off to fill the hall but really it was the book and the warmth and wit of the man himself that did that job. We were also impressed with the passion and commitment of his publisher Corinne de Souza from the small independent press, Picnic Books. Corinne was blunt about the state of publishing today and the challenges facing the independent sector but the small number of writers on her list are lucky indeed to have this force for change behind them.

And so back to the day job and my second years awaiting mock exam results. I shall arrive still blinded by the bling.

Paper Ceremonies

2009-05-24T22:06:00.072+01:00

A book is launched. With warmth and cake, in a sunny hall echoing with chat, it is sent on its way. It's taken me, the author, three years and two trips to the Arctic, to get to this point. Now the book, Firebridge to Skyshore has its own journey to make.

Already it is en route to Bolton and Nottingham and Scunthorpe and Surrey. I was amazed and touched that family and friends came so far yesterday for the launch. We had a lovely gathering of 30 well-wishers – many of them fellow writers and poets – and when everybody was sweetened with Gloria's special Lincolnshire Plum Bread, I loosed some poems into the vaulted arch of the Friends' Meeting House hall. If I forgot my lines, readers jumped in as prompts. 'Eight,' said Audrey and I was away: 'Eight-nine hundred miles a second, a maelstrom of solar winds …'

I've also discovered a book launch, like a wedding or anniversary, is a good occasion for bringing family together. I was joined by by my brother Pat and my sister Dolores Logan with her partner, David. When the idea of the book was still an inkling, I had thought of getting Dolores to illustrate it. Because she is a talented artist specialising in print landscapes. I'm delighted she accepted the challenge of rendering the transparent beauty of the aurora into woodcuts. I've described these exquisite miniature blocks as 'Little ArcticWindows' that open onto the extraordinary world the book evokes.

Davina Prince and I were comparing notes about the process of manufacturing this object of paper and cardboard, the debates over ink colours, the tricky on-line proofreading. And in my litany of thank yous, I was singing the praises of small print presses like Original Plus Press, the first chance for most poets. Sam Smith, my editor, is running a cottage industry in his room at home, printing copies himself and sending them on to be bound. It is a labour of love. And if we find an extra blank page has crept in or the wrong ISBN appeared on the back, it only highlights how 'man-made' and satisfyingly concrete a book is.

My friend Rod Duncan was chatting about whether new breakthroughs in publishing – the digital download, print on demand, electronic 'books' – could mean more and more books appear in electronic form in the future. And would actual paper books, lovingly crafted as Sam's books are, become a niche market for those that can't resist the tangible object? When my own arrived, I sniffed it, listened to it, weighed it in my hand. And the pleasure of seeing the books yesterday fanned out on the table is beyond description. As good as Gloria's plum bread.

And that's one reason why, whatever the future holds, our book launches can never be virtual.

A Football Pass in Coal City

2009-05-11T10:22:00.003+01:00

Sam, my editor, passed on to me the kind words of a reviewer in the US. He says that reading Firebridge to Skyshore made him miss his soccer practice!

Which tickles me because of recurring stories about the Northern Lights being the sky spirits playing football. I even wrote a poem called 'Auroral Football'.
'They're stamping their feet, making breath hoots
in the freeezing air, sun-burst shouts ...'

This reader loved the mix of poetry, myth, science and travelogue in the book. And promises a review in the Coal City Review. When I google this, I discover it's in Kansas. So someone is already thumbing a copy of my book on a Sunday morning in the Coal City of the US. And we haven't even got to the book launch yet. The book has crossed an ocean, it's out there with people who've never met me and they're making their own thing of it. The magic of publication is happening.

Chocolate Gothic

2009-05-04T13:59:00.002+01:00

Imagine a house where every room has a writer tucked into a window seat with notebook or perched with laptop or a whole flock of them huddled in animated discussion. It's a 17th century farmhouse with flagstone floors and each Gothic window opens onto an expansive view of the rolling Cotswolds hills. The house itself is leaking stories – like the adjacent Thimble Cottage, built to house the mad mistress of a long-dead ancestor. Visitors sleep in the turret or rooms with gargoyles under the eaves.

It's the perfect setting for the annual Mayday gathering of the Leicester Writers Club. Here we plot murder and mayhem between communal feasts at the long dining-room table. 'How can we do a car crash on-stage?' one group debates. That's the 'Nuts and Bolts of Scriptwriting' workshop. In another room, someone edits an explosive scene about a Welsh mining community. Later we discuss Writers and Blogging. There are sessions on Writing Dialogue, Editing Your Poem and that writers' nightmare – How to tackle a Synopsis of your Novel.

Several brave souls volunteer to feed sixteen with their best recipes. Let me recall the home-made Polish barley soup, the sausage and pasta supper and the extravagant chocolate cheesecake... And we closed on Sunday with a 'Writing Feast' of the weekend's words. To my surprise, I'd managed a new poem and a monologue inspired by Middle Stanley's railway tunnel. Indeed the house fairly hummed with writing for three days. And in between dinners and redrafts and rambles round the lake – there was a community renewing itself in the shared pleasure of stories. Long may this May-time ritual continue.

number 9 dream

2009-04-27T10:22:00.002+01:00

For years I have had a recurring dream about the post. In the middle of some other, more elaborate dream narrative, there is a knock on the door or a thud on the door mat. Through the letterbox comes an envelope, then another, a shower of mail that spreads out over the mat. Envelopes in different colors and sizes. Some with typed addresses but plenty are handwritten - old-fashioned letters like nobody writes anymore, crammed into fragrant pastel-coloured envelopes. And parcels in intriguing shapes packaged in Manilla and cardboard, some marked 'FRAGILE' in large red letters.

I was in bed this morning when I heard the knock. From my window I watched the postie hand something over. The box is a hefty weight, completely swathed in brown tape and Parcel Force stickers. But my name is handwritten on the top. Inside, the snap of duck tape and pop of bubblewrap. Nestled below are the first 50 copies of my book; cream covers the colour of eggshell.

No sign of stitching. But the cardboard cover feels substantial and the pages crinkle pleasingly on opening. My sister's black and white woodcuts look wonderful inside. It has minor blemishes - an extra blank page, the wrong ISBN number on the back. Mistakes are par for the course on the first print run, I'm told. But I am mesmerised. All is just like a real book. Its realness is startling, the multiple copies a fullness beyond the dream. I want to lug around the box to take in the weight of it.

The push of blooms

2009-03-30T10:38:00.002+01:00

I've spent all weekend hopping between the garden/ allotment and this computer screen. In the garden I was planting 'last chances' with self-seeded foxgloves, poppies scattered into a packed summer bed and a honeysuckle that's been a pot for three years. You never know what will come up and what will succumb to the garden's longlist of disappearances. In my study, it was the design for my 'Northern Lights' book.

The hayfever's worse than ever but I'm giddy with joy and anticipation at seeing the final stage of my book come together. My sister has sent a stunning monoprint image to use for it. The skyscape is crackling with energy and in its shifting forms I see the pools of green light, the shafts and scrawls of auroral colour that I witnessed in Norway. So I've been playing with fonts and tints and different layouts to my heart's content.

I imagine someone putting this book into my hands three years ago when I started writing about the Northern Lights. How amazed and delighted I would have been to see it coming to this fruition! For so many months now, its been a project, a collection of files and recycled paper and e-mail discussions and endless drafts. A list of things to do. But suddenly, this shimmer of digital data makes the book real to me. I can almost sense the weight of it, its paper and card substantiality, in my hand. I am bewitched by its possibility.

I remember the way poppies opened in the early summer mornings. If you were still enough, you could just catch the push of bloom against a papery skin, its fistful of energy wanting the sun - a breaking through you could almost hear - and then the unfurling.

Little Arctic Windows

2009-02-13T07:14:00.003Z

So I set out on an ice-bound Monday morning to Bishop Ellis primary school for my Polar Poet gig. How perfectly the weather chimed in with our Arctic theme! The kids have been studying the arctic for a month now and have already heard from a mountaineer. Perhaps because of that, their questions to me were on the rugged side - 'What do you do if a polar bear runs at you?' - 'how do you pee?' 'have you suffered from malnutrition?' I had to confess I arrived in the Arctic in a plane and stayed in a nice comfy hotel.

But I showed them the reindeer that I got to feed and the Saami herder we spent a morning with and best of all - the magnificent Northern Lights. The kids were beautifully behaved and there was a sea of hands everytime I asked for volunteers to help me perform my arctic poems. So we played games with the Northern Lights and took our reindeer herd on a trek. They learnt to say hello in Saami and did the Reindeer quiz and read 'The News from the North' on climate change. At lunchtime as I packed up, there were giggly girls calling out 'Hello Miss Polar Poet!' - so I think a good time was had by all.

The other excitement of the week was seeing the illustrations added to my book. By good fortune, my sister is a talented print artist. She's been working away on these fiddly woodcuts and we now have 6 beautiful pictures for the section pages dividing the poetry and prose. They punctuate the story of the book, giving little windows into this arctic world. I particularly love the one of the starry moss and blueberries I found on a Norwegian mountain. And we're actually looking at a mock-up of the front cover now - which makes me want to pinch myself!

My blog at last!

2009-01-25T15:29:00.002Z

Well this is one of the New Year resolutions ticked off. I wanted to get my own blog because 2009 promises to be an exciting year on the writing front. And it'll unfold here ...

I'm working right now on putting the final touches to my book Firebridge to Skyshore, due to be published later in the spring by original press. It's been a fascinating process as this is my first book. I've spent 3 months finishing research for the articles about the science and mythology of the Northern Lights. In the middle of all that, we took another trip to Norway and got to see the Northern Lights at last - marvellous! - which added another final chapter to the book.

Recently, we've been gathering together all the bits and bobs like author's biography and acknowledgements and now I'm ready to start checking the 'proofs' - final mock-up of the pages that will go to the printers. And we've persuaded some published writers to sample the book and provide 'blurbs' for the back cover. Plus, my sister's been sending me piccies on the phone of the woodcut illustrations she's working on - very fiddly but they look wonderful.

And at the same time, I'm busy preparing for an unusual gig - I've been asked to go into a local primary school who are doing a project on the arctic. In a fortnight or so, I'll be appearing in a school hall full of 9-11 year olds as the 'Polar Poet'. We'll be exploring the arctic through performance of my poems together and lots of pictures too. My youngest audience yet - but I think it'll be great fun!

Anyway - if you've ever wondered what writers actually do - or how books get from their addled brains to a bookshop - watch this space. And it'd be lovely to hear your thoughts along the way.