This is the first time I’ve summed up my writing year and the thing I’ve most looked forward to is going back over my reading log. It’s been a good year for reading. I’ve discovered, delved, found friends, had my mind blown and my thinking grown.
READING: Having trailed a sum-up, it turns out I can’t sum up my year’s reading fairly, so here are just a few themes and highlights. In poetry I had just discovered Hollie McNish at the start of the year and she saw me through my brush with covid shouting out to the need to talk taboo. Cumbrian women poets Polly Atkin, Kim Moore and Clare Shaw have been fantastic this year – I’ve particularly enjoyed Kim Moore’s What the Trumpet Taught Me, a book of very short prose which got into my guts not only because it was good but because it was about how becoming a musician forms you. And it was amazing not only to read Joelle Taylor’s C+nto and Hannah Lowe’s The Kids but to see them at Newcastle Poetry Festival. What a double bill that was!
In fiction I’ve delved a bit more into Maggie O’Farrell, wondering why it’s taken me so long and some more Bernardine Evaristo, enjoying especially Mr Loverman and the novel in verse The Emperor’s Babe which has a quote at the start from Oscar Wilde which is sitting with me for my new writing project: the only duty we owe history is to rewrite it. I’ve also explored some more Lissa Evans, whose writing I enjoy enormously, and I love that she writes for adults and for children. I’ve read some brilliant children’s writing this year, often with historical elements, such as Onjali Q Rauf’s The Lion Above the Door and Lesley Parr’s When the War Came Home. I’ve particularly enjoyed verse novels this year, Sharon Creech’s Love That Dog a real highlight alongside Manjeet Mann’s Run, Rebel and Sarah Crossan’s Toffee .
Nonfiction has been wonderful this year. I have always been blessed or cursed – not sure which – with a sense of the connectedness of things, with noticing links between things that other people put in different categories. This can get complicated and overwhelming at times, but I can’t help it, and my reading this year has chimed with what seems at the moment to be called intersectionality. I have been especially interested in history, gender, environment and race, and my reading has linked these in a really helpful way. Big shout outs to: George Monbiot’s Feral, Keith Kahn-Harris’s The Babel Message and Aja Barber’s Consumed. All of this reading is going to be critical to next year’s big writing project.
Finally, journals and online spaces including Northern Gravy, Spelt, Tyger Tyger, The Dirigible Balloon and Butcher’s Dog have been great companions and supports.
WRITING: I intended to make no New Year’s Resolutions for 2022 and accidentally made 3 (long story):
This has turned out well. This year I have submitted to 15 journals and similar, with 4 publications – in The Dirigible Balloon, Dreich, Northern Gravy and The Maker. I entered 9 competitions of various kinds and won 3rd prize in the Borderlines Carlisle Poetry Competition, was shortlisted in the Rewriting the North Mentorship Scheme and longlisted in the Northern Writers Awards Hachette Children’s Novel Award. That sounds like a lot of rejections but if you’re a writer you’ll probably be thinking it’s quite a high success rate. There are 10 submissions of various kinds with the jury still out. Making subbing a manageable habit has been part of this year’s work; subbing to the right places for me and making sure it’s done well without eating too much writing time is the work of backing myself while being more me, and I’m getting the hang of it.
As for what I have written this year, I’ve redrafted the children’s time travel novel – the one that got longlisted – and it is out to agents now, getting rejected very nicely. I’ve written a fair bit of children’s poetry and short stories, one or two adult short stories and some adult poetry. I’ve enjoyed reading novels in verse so much that I’ve begun experimenting writing fiction in verse. The end of the year brought a surprise bonus. I’m training to teach English as a foreign language, which I plan to do part time to support the writing, and from that work has come a body of poems which I think may be my first pamphlet. I’m working with an editor on it now. I love it when the different bits of my life feed each other, and to be able to work creatively on the things about TEFL that make me think has been brilliant.
It is time now for my next long project, and it’s going to be a young adult novel set in a climate-ravaged future. I’ve begun researching and things are at that really exciting stage when there is a setting, a goal, two main characters and, as yet, no plot and no spreadsheet telling me when the first draft has to be finished. The spreadsheet is one of next week’s jobs!
CONVERSATIONS: One of the big reasons I am a writer is to be part of conversations, and the conversations have been great this year. It began in January with an investment in a guided retreat. There were six of us in snow-dusted Cumbria with author and mentor Stephanie Butland, all working on rather different things, and it was fantastic. The poster I made of my writing manifesto is still on my noticeboard and will remain there, and that group is a brilliant support. I have been performing my work at places including Words on the Wall at Hexham and Under the Arches in Tynemouth. Performing is a great way to share work and I love it. I’m also a member of Cambois Writing Group, part of Cambois Creates, a multi-arts project which produced a book of short stories this year and has exciting things coming up.
This year I bit the bullet and paid someone to help me with a new website, which you will know about if you’re reading this. I hope it will make it easier to find me and to work out who I am. This should become more important in 2023 as I revive my workshop programme, which took its first bookings for April 2020 and has been on hold since. I will be re-launching in January. I’m also partnering with a local craftswoman on a creative project exploring our local urban park, and looking forward to the first stages of that work very soon.
2023: I don’t really like the idea of a conclusion but this has to finish in some way and I think the main thing to say is that I am really looking forward to the reading, writing and conversations of 2023. They matter and I’m up for them.