Words and Music at MILK Café is one of Scotland’s longest running open mic nights, which I co-host with fellow poet Gayle Smith. It was founded by writer and former reporter Pamela Duncan, poet Janet Paisley and poet Hughie Healy in 1990. They met every month in Sammy Dow’s pub in the south side of […]
Category: Jen
The dissertation is something that has been on the horizon for any student. I had wanted to do a creative writing dissertation since I knew it was an option and I was lucky that I managed to get in. I wanted to challenge myself. Instead of working on a project I had already started or […]
It was 2009. When I noticed some of the cool girls in my small primary school had made a Bebo account, I thought I’d give it a shot. I had fun with it, but I drifted from Bebo to Facebook when I started secondary school as more people were using it. In 2014, I became […]
I Submitted My Poems and Prose To 100 Different Places… Now What? For the past two years, I’ve taken part in a challenge I’ve named the 100 Rejections Challenge. I’ve explained a bit more about it and my reasons for undertaking such a challenge in another blog post, but for the purposes of this one, […]
It’s August 2018: the worst month of my life. My paternal grandparents died of cancer a week apart, and at each funeral I had to see my estranged father and his wife. I haven’t had a relationship with them since 2012. My love of karaoke was being strangled by the dismal pubs I was placed […]
My Favourite Novels I Studied As Part of My Degree (in no particular order) As part of reflecting on my experiences at university, it would be bizarre not to include discussions about the novels I studied as part of my English Literature degree. We studied a wide range of texts, including plays and poetry but […]
From 2017-2021, I have been mired in an English Literature and Film & TV Studies joint honours. I’ll be graduating next month. In my fourth year, I was lucky enough to secure a place doing a creative writing dissertation. I could write 10,000-12,000 words of prose, either a portfolio of short stories or a short novella; […]
I know that the last thing anyone wants to hear about right now is the pandemic. Regardless of how we are with vaccination rates and ability to keep up with new strains, we’re still sharing a world with coronavirus. I have this irrational dread that a new, vaccine resistant variant will choke slam us to […]
What You Can Learn from My Essay Writing Process/University Experiences After having my nose to the grindstone for four months, I have finally finished all of my assignments for university. Due to an episode of poor mental health in the run up to my May deadlines, I had to ask for an extension until August, […]
One of my last ever university courses was Working in the UK Screen Industries. The module was about the working practices and procedures involved, the unions and other organizations that advocated for workers’ rights and diversity. The subject material itself was pretty dry, and there were a whole bunch of studies and industry texts to […]