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 […]
Tag: Jen Hughes
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 […]
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; […]
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, […]
In my 3rd year of my English Literature degree, I took a class about Renaissance/Early Modern literature and poetry. Part of the requirements for the latter half of the degree was that we take at least 1 subject that covered pre-1800s literature, so I decided to do mine in the first semester of that year. […]
As writers, we all have projects we decide to leave behind or put on the backburner. Sometimes an idea is just not quite there, or we’ve lost momentum or motivation to keep working on it. This time, last decade, I was in my first year of secondary school. I had moved from a small village […]
For those who don’t know, Camp NaNoWriMo is an offshoot event of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), which occurs in April and July. During NaNoWriMo, a writer aims to write a 50,000 word novel in the 30 days of November, the goals in Camp NaNoWriMo are much more flexible. You can write a short story […]
Outlet Publishing is a publisher that gives young writers the opportunity to have their novel published. They are looking for talented young novelists to publish and contributors to the Diary of a Young Writer blog. As a contributor of their blog I feel it is my duty to help young writers in any way I […]
Before I start my story, let me say that I have written scripts before. I started off with this awful screenplay-theatre-play hybrid format on Microsoft word, because I did all of my writing on Microsoft word. I copied the format that I had seen in playscripts in school, in particular the adaptation of Gillian Cross’s […]
I’ve been performing my poems for about three years. I started out performing at open mics in local pubs and as part of women’s poetry group Wummin’s Words, before performing at a festival on the Largs coast and in FreshAyr’s poetry events. Around this time, I found a treasure trove of spoken words events in […]