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: Poetry
When reading a great book you will always come across a few lines or paragraphs that will make you pause for a moment, they will make you laugh, cry, gasp, look inwardly at yourself, and say ‘wow’. These parts of the book are often quoted again and again by other readers in book reviews and […]
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 […]
I’ve seen a lot of bloggers and writers on YouTube talk about their goals and reflect on them, so I thought I would give it a try. You may be wondering why I’m talking about my goals for 2018, as opposed to 2019/2020. Picture this: the year is 2017. I’m a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed baby poet […]
For me, some silver linings of this terrible year have been that I‘ve had quite a few poems published in magazines and anthologies. One of my flash fictions was placed on a long list for the first time and my debut chapbook, Keep On Spinning, was published with small Scottish publisher Dreich Publishing. It came […]
You may be wondering; Haiku? What the heck is a haiku? A haiku is a very, very, short poem. So short in fact, that it only has three lines in English and a total of 17 syllables. The haiku originates from Japan and was previously called hokku, the name haiku came from the Japanese writer […]
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 […]
I’ll usually tell my audience that I write poetry to make sense of the things that happen to me in my life, and then proceed to read poems about terrible art exhibitions and shows I’ve attended, but it’s really not that far from the actual truth. My poems are often inspired by real events, people, […]
The opportunity ambushed me, in a way. A dear poet friend of mine, Gayle Smith, needed another member for her team in the Greater Glasgow slam, and I had offered myself. Three days before the slam was to start, I thought ‘might as well’. You could read from a sheet of paper, notebook or folder, […]