A Change of Appetites

This year so far has been introverted. My minor face surgery for my skin cancer didn't go as well as I and the docs would have liked so I've spent the past two weeks trying to heal from that, staying still and quiet. But even before that, I had escaped to a warm, dark space i had created in my head and curled up there. I have lacked the appetite for other activities, lacked hunger, lacked focus and my mind has just slowed down.

It doesn't feel like a bad thing. I tend to hibernate in the winter anyway as I can't garden and walking or riding my bike is difficult in the frozen Finnish landscape unless you are really keen. So, I just slow down and do indoor things. I'm still writing and reading, but less than usual. I don't want to do anything, really.

Maybe I'm waiting for spring, as I always am, but in a new way, to uncurl and find a new appetite to turn towards. A new sun. 

I sometimes tell myself I'm a fool, an old fool, that life is slipping by. But I know I have so much going on in the reality of my life, my kids' lives, that maybe I need this silence to conserve my energies. 

My writing has also changed. I'm writing love poems to no one, to an invisible someone. I've been single for about 6 years, there's no one on my horizon and until this year my 'love' poems have been angry or happy to be defiantly single. 

Now, what I write is overwhelmed with a different emotion, gazing with love into that dark stillness I've built in my head. I don't know what I see, but the lines that came to me today have that hope of spring in them. 

Maybe I love you

or maybe now

there is the potential in me

to love

Maybe I can find a love for myself, for where I am right now.

Even though my world is still frozen, I have to remind myself that the sun is returning. The world is no longer held by the winter darkness. The sun is there when I go to work and when I return. It holds no warmth but is occasionally bright enough to blind. The true thaw will be months in coming but it reminds you that something good is possible. 

Slow Motion

The end of summer is always difficult, even this year when it's hung on much longer than usual. Things have been hard lately, at home, at work, with the kids, with me. I have no motivation for anything besides getting through work and keeping things ticking over at home. My new job is going pretty well, but some days it's too much, a steep learning curve. 

As a result, I haven't written much, even though autumn is sneaking in, my favourite time of year. Usually, I'm writing tons connected with the change of season, but I'm just half-heartedly editing the poems I was working on over the summer. A few moments here and there towards my goals.

I've started a series of poems on Finnish animals, really animals in Finland as none of them are particularly Finnish, hares, cranes, elk, magpies. I haven't written about the norppa seal or reindeer, animals I connect with Finland, though I might. The creatures I've chosen take on a Finnish persona, though they are animals I know from elsewhere. I'm mixing my love of nature with my focus on belonging to a place. The animals are guides, gods or representations of myself, moving through Finland with the will to understand, if not accept, the world around them.

These new poems have made the Finnish collection change again which is intruiging. Its early incarnations were about me struggling to adapt to living here in connection with my family, hanging on to the remnants of my life in Scotland. As I said, these new poems are not necessarily about accepting my life here, but more just listening to the voices of Finland more intently. Stepping out of myself for brief wanders.

All this sounds like I'm writing a blurb for the book, but it's nice to sort out my thoughts on it. And who knows, it might be useful someday as a blurb.

I'm not submitting as much as I usually do either, focussing more on sending manuscripts to book publishers for the inevitable rejection or just radio silence. I can never tell if publisher

My poem 'Sisu and Jag' has been published by Sídhe Press in their collection Glisk and Glimmer. I can't wait to get a look at it.

It's a three-day weekend, the leaves are starting to fall and even though I have a 10-year-old sleepover happening tonight, I'm going to try and chill for the rest of the weekend. Maybe even do a bit of writing. 

Take care. 

Slowing Down into the Summer, Summer, Summertime

School is finally done and the sun is shining. The weather has been amazing, so hot and clear. Not great for the garden or the forests to go so long without rain, but the long days of light and heat are a relief. Beach weather, park weather, proper summer weather while we off to enjoy it. 

Appointments are winding down and most alarms are turned off. I'm trying to make the most of each day, doing a mix of things I want, things that need to be done and things I should do. So a little housework and repair, big cleaning, gardening and, of course, writing. I have a huge puzzle to finish from Christmas, a cardigan I started years ago, my genealogy research is never-ending. 

I had two weeks after school finished to do what I wanted, but now I have a visitor here and then summer school in Scotland to teach English for ten days. After that's done, I'll be able to focus on having a more relaxed summer. I'm not writing much while my guest is here, but I still get a few minutes here and there. 

I'm enjoying what I'm writing now. My style has changed a bit over the past year. My poetic style is always changing, but I sometimes get caught in a loop of subjects or styles, writing very similar poems for a period and when something comes along to shake me up, I find it refreshing. 

I use prompts to push me out of my rut. Writing from different points of view, occasionally trying a structured form (I'm currently trying to write a palindrome) and looking into unusual events for inspiration. I've even managed to put a bit of humour, sometimes black humour in my poems, playing with ideas that often aren't found together. 

I hope while I'm on my course I'll have time in the evenings to write and continue with this new mood. 

A wee book review of a new Scottish title: I recently read Angus Peter Campbell's Electricity. I'd heard a lot about it and had hoped to be blown away by it. But it's not that kind of book, it doesn't make you want to steam through it, to see how it ends. It's a slow read, a wander through a world that barely exists now and you don't want to rush through it. It sneaks up on you. 

It's a reminiscence of a grandmother, writing to her Australian grandchild about her Hebridean upbringing on an unnamed Scottish island. The people still speak Gaelic and cling to traditional ways in the wake of electricity and an airport coming to the island. 

It's not a novel, in a traditional sense. There are beautifully drawn characters, the speaker Annie, her family, a local shepherd who resists all change, her friends and neighbours. There's not much of a plot other than change is coming to the island. Annie writes what starts out as a letter, but it soon meanders beyond that, skipping through time and theme to draw a warm, comforting picture of a community steeped in traditions and memories. 

I don't believe the book is set on any particular island but seems to connect closest to North and South Uist and Benbecula with its tiny airport. It looks at subjects important to the history of the Hebrides; migration, language, the culture of ceilidhs and farming. Annie's parents and some of her neighbours cling to the traditions of paraffin lamps and peat fires as electricity tempts others with the simplicity of electric fires, refrigeration and lights. But we know how the story ends and from the beginning, there is a sense of loss that too much of this way of life has been lost. 

Campbell's Electricity does a beautiful job of capturing island life and Gaelic culture. It is a reminder to slow down and take note of what is going on around you, right now. 

Enjoy your summer. 

GloPoWriMo and Spring Cleaning

The holiday weekend has been bliss. I put aside anything I had to do except a first aid online course and just focussed on what I wanted. I tidied toy boxes with the kids, I worked on my puzzle, crocheted, did yoga, some shopping and loads of writing. I should have spent more time outside as it finally feels like spring is here, but I'm not going to beat myself up because I didn't. There were things that I wanted to do inside, so I did them. There's still snow on the ground here, so I can't get into the digging the garden mode yet, so I'm happy to wait. 

Week 1 of GloPoWriMo, the Global Poetry Writing Month, and I've managed something every day. Sometimes a whole poem comes, sometimes just notes. Some of the notes have been used in other poems. some will just decay as compost. I've used a mixture of the NaPoWriMo website's daily prompts and ideas from other places. One poem was inspired by a 6th-grade maths lesson I was in. I hope I didn't look like I was fangirling while taking notes. 

Today I have an online write-along booked with Jen Hadfield. It seems strange to write silently with other writers on a Zoom call. We don't interact except at the check-ins at the beginning and end. We don't share what we've written, and many turn off their camera and mic while writing. It's the booking time with other writers, with the muse to write and the shared activity. Others are with me, struggling to put words on the page, finding the gentle pressure to produce. It does inspire me somehow. 

I just hope something will pop into my mind when I sit down to write as at the moment even with a bunch of prompts in my head I'm drawing a blank. That's often how it works, everything percolates in my skull until I start randomly writing and then somehow it comes together. I see a thread and start tugging on it until the beginning of a poem unravels beneath my hand. Other times I write complete crap, but that's the risk. 

I'm feeling the need to go through my big electronic pile of poems and take out the stuff I really don't like. I could work on fixing them, but some might just be binned. Maybe my style has changed so that I can't see what I like about them before. I've never been one for binning or burning my old poems, my notebooks, my childhood scribbles, but I do put them aside and stop working on them. 

Maybe I need to do a radical version of that. Create a new file of just the poems I currently love, that I want to find a home for, that fit in a collection. Maybe more than one file then, as some I love have already been published. Some have collections where they fit, while others don't. 

This seems to be a symptom of my current spring cleaning fit, not guddling in toyboxes for the broken toys, those who aren't played with anymore, but in poetry files. That's my day planned.  

The Struggle to Return

The snow and cold have come back as I worried they would. February was snow free until the last week when we got dumped on. My kids are finally getting a chance to go cross-country skiing with their schools. That and ice skating are part of the curriculum here in winter, but they are past the point of enjoying winter activities. The light is back and we're all ready for winter to be over, but we'll spend this month crawling ourselves away from it towards spring. Everything is so gray and frozen here, it's hard to summon up much enthusiasm. 

Now my uni course is finished, I'm trying to get back into some writing routine. I can carve time in the weekends to write, but I'm unfocused. One of the paid projects I applied for didn't happen, so I'm waiting on the other and have several unpaid opportunities coming up, but instead of writing something towards them, I spent most of yesterday morning chiselling away at one poem.

I'd written a poem with a slight scientific, theme and I had been looking at the Fibonacci sequence and trying to incorporate it somehow. I discovered yesterday that there is a poetic form based around it, the Fib poem. It's a simple, non-rhyming form which appeals to me. I'm trying it with word count instead of syllables as I'm lazy and am having enough trouble making it fit without having to break it down into further complications. It's coming together, but I haven't written anything new.

I've often taken writing courses as a way of boosting inspiration and getting back to writing daily. I might look into my regular ones and see what's happening there. Until then I just need to pick up my pen and get scribbling. 

I had three poems appear in Issue 7 of Flights, an e-journal back in December that I'm not sure if I shared. It's great to be included with such impressive writers. And also in December, I had three poems published in the Sunday Mornings at the River anthology. 

This is available also as an e-book which I've never been fond of, but I'm seeing them as an affordable way to buy books I would struggle to afford or to have posted due to Brexit nonsense, so it's allowing me to read more recent books which is always a good thing. Though I've discovered that poetry doesn't always work on a phone screen, the lines get enjambed wrong at least not at the magnification I need, so will need to read poetry texts on my computer.

Back to the grind. Enjoy. 

A State of Doing

I came back to Helsinki in the middle of a heat wave. There's too much going on, my heart is pulled in so many different directions: Finland joining NATO, the reversal of Roe v Wade, Scotland calling for another independence referendum. Not including the multitude of events happening outside my three 'homes'. An avalanche of emotions and worries and wondering what stance I should take, what I can do.

The summer is flying by, there is so much I want to do, so much I should be doing for myself and my family. I'm trying to balance the art of getting things done while leaving time to do nothing, to do the jobs that have to be done alongside the little activities I do just for myself. 

To do. That verb seems to rule my life. Lists to tick off, the pressure of time slipping through the hourglass. Much of the pressure is self-inflicted, but I am the person in the family who does things, and makes sure they get done. It never lets up and I never get a break from the demands of things to be done. Even on holiday on my own, I was on the computer in the morning and evening, sorting things for my children or myself. I couldn't really relax on the trip either as I felt I had to do things, and see places as there was limited time and soon I'd be gone without those possibilities. 

I needed that holiday on my own as the things I wanted to do, needed to tick off my list wouldn't appeal to the kids. I needed to go to Callanish, I've been waiting 30 years, but I also wanted to wade through the boggy sheep fields to the Callanish II and III sites and the Tursachan site further away. I wanted to sit in the wind and write in the shelter of the stone, to take innumerable photos of stones. I went at my own speed, took detours to empty spaces, had hours in the evening curled up in bed with a notebook or computer, so I could come back and do things for other people: the laundry, sort school places, take the kids from one activity to another.

Writing is another thing to do, but it rarely has the pressure of being done for other people. Few would notice if I stopped writing, and no one would notice if I stopped submitting. There are no requirements that I publish, that I produce yet another poem. It is basically free of external demands and is easily pushed down the to-do list. Yet given time and space, it's the thing I want to do the most. In the summer, I make sure I leave time in the morning to write. My child-free weekends are dedicated to it, though I do need to finish taking down the old guttering, weed and water my allotment and a myriad of other things before the kids come back tomorrow. 

I accept that I need to do things. I cannot sit still for long and am always doing something else while watching TV or sitting in a waiting room. I'm better at getting on with things myself rather than waiting for someone else to prioritise jobs the same way as I do. I've learned to ensure my needs fit in somewhere along the line, pushing them higher and higher as the kids become more capable. 

Amidst all that's going on in the world, I just put my head down and plough on with life. I will do it all, somehow: what I need to, what I want to, what I have to. In my own time and way, it will all get done.

Write blog: √

I am an iambapoet

Strange to say that, but I am. And totally chuffed, but . . . 

there is an art to self-promotion and part of it is timing. I'm still learning the ropes, it's knowing what to say, where to say it and when and how often to say it. I don't want to flog my stuff to death, but I do want it out there. Hopefully, people are interested and will check out what I've linked or added. 

I headed off on a holiday to Scotland just as iamb poetry launched Wave Ten with three of my poems last week and I've been so caught up with my trip, a health scare and worries about one of my kids that I haven't been promoting myself or iamb. But here it is and it's not going anywhere, so check it out.

Fifteen poets with three poems each, in text and recordings. I'm included with such bright lights as Penelope Shuttle, Annick Yerem, Elizabeth Castillo and eleven other amazing writers. 

Please take the time to listen to my work as well as the other poets'. The editor Mark Antony Owen has worked tirelessly, fighting with the tech and the texts to put together another great production and I'm pleased to be a small part of it. So please, take some time to check out my work and the other Wave Ten authors as well as perusing some of the earlier Waves. 

Other publication updates: another one of my Wolfpack Contributor poems has just come out for Fevers of the Mind and Scrawl Place, a great location-based poetry zine, has published two of my poems about places in Helsinki, Suomenlinna and Cafe Regatta. Black Nore Review is also publishing my poem 'Obscured' on their website. 

Once I'm back from my holiday I can get back to blogging properly for a month or two before school starts up again. Lots of wee things in the pipeline that I hope come to fruition. 

Enjoy the sun, if it's round your way. 

May Days: On Strike, Out of Breath

The schools in Helsinki are on strike, so the kids and I are at home. It feels strange to be in a union and on strike after 30 plus years of working freelance or low wage jobs. Schools in Finland only had the first 6-week lockdown due to Covid, but have stayed open since, so it feels weird to shut them for this. But necessary. 

I'm not sure how long the strike will last, a week at most at least to begin with. I can't do school work and can't do much of my research project beside go through literature, but I have so much I want to do, I need to read for my course tomorrow, plant potatoes and onions, tidy the garden after cutting down a tree, clean the house (ok, I don't want to do that, but it needs doing) and write, of course. 

Vappu (May Day or Beltane) was cold as usual. We tried a picnic with our Scottish Society friends, but it was short-lived. 

The birch trees are massing to kill me with their pollen. My eyes itch so much, so the outside work I need to do will have its negative outcomes, but I need to get on. But the days are long, it's 9.30pm and the sun is just thinking about setting, so I feel invigorated, even if I don't really have the energy. A few new poems are trickling out as well, partially due to this, but also due to the kick of Global Poetry Writing Month in April.

I'll try to use this time the best I can between also having the kids home and loads of uni work to do. 

Publication update: I've had a poem 'Lokakuu, Mud-Month' published in Poetry Scotland. I've also been chosen to be part of the Fevers of the Mind's Wolfpack, a special month feature spot on the site. I'm very grateful for having this opportunity. Last Leaves has published my poem 'Finding Family' for the latest issue. Thanks to all the magazines and websites for including my work, it's lovely to feel a part of the writing community. 

A post-script: It has felt non-stop with worries these days. Climate change, Covid, Brexit, Ukraine and Finland wondering whether to join NATO and now the possible repeal of Roe vs Wade. I tend to keep away from the political here as it's so overwhelming and I need a respite, but it feels like we're sliding towards something dark and omnipresent that's slowly consuming us.

I started a list poem about the time the Amazon and Australian fires were happening, a list of 'I can't breathe' lines, each a body blow of breath-stopping events from across the world, from George Floyd to the streets of Bucha. It keeps growing, saddeningly. I see no signs of being able to stop writing it, but I need to speak up in my small way.

A Way to Help Ukraine: Poetry Anthology

One of my poems has been included in the Hope Rage Sunflowers anthology to raise money for Ukraine. Like many I am shocked and saddened and have been doom scrolling the past two weeks, so it feels good to have a way to help, even in a small way. 

From the editor: Hope Rage Sunflowers, the FFS Fundraiser bookje (PDF) is out now! Please donate directly at https://ukraine-hilfe-berlin.de/spende Send a screenshot of your donation to annickyerem@gmail.com or in my DMs with your email and you will receive this beautiful anthology of poems and artwork.

Please RT and share wide and far, we are looking to make as much money for this Berlin based charity as possible.Donations are pay-as-you-can, every donation helps. You’re helping and you get an amazing bookje of poems and artwork at the same time. What’s not to love?

Take One: Recording Poetry

Autumn has hit Finland hard. I love it in the now, but it's always the upcoming season that dampens my enthusiasm for windfall apples and cool mornings. However, we're glutting on crumble, spices, the changing colours while we have a chance. 

Yesterday, I recorded a new autumn poem with my writers group, Helsinki Writers this weekend as part of a Superwood Festival project a local university has organised. It's one of a series of poems my group is providing as audio for a forest walk. I was nervous about professionally recording. It's almost ok in my quiet house with no one watching, but reading in front of my friends and a handful of students was a bit nerve-wracking. But it's a well-paid gig, so I jumped at the chance. It was a lot of fun to work with the other writers and come up with separate poems on a similar theme that worked with each other. I'm excited to hear the final project. 

Even though it was a bit strange to hear my voice played back to me, they made it sound pretty good, even in the raw form. And the experience wasn't that scary. My poem was one of the longer ones, but I managed to get through it twice and had one small mistake early on for each of those versions, so it wasn't too bad. They managed to take one line out of one version that was said with better emphasis and put it in the other take which was better overall. So I'm happy with my end.

It was interesting to write a poem that I knew would primarily exist in audio form, to think about what I could say easily and what could be understood from sound alone rather than the words on the page. I made a lot of changes once I started to practice reading it aloud, words and phrases that became tongue-twisters next to each other, images that would be lost unless given space to breathe. Hopefully, it will work, but it's hard to know until hear the poems next to each other, cleaned up.  

My writing group is brilliant, we've been sharing our drafts, conferring on proofs, offering advice, working out running order. We're all from different backgrounds, so we had one person with more experience in performance, myself and another writer have a bit of experience in reading work (though I'm not good or comfortable with it) and some complete beginners, but we all managed to do a great job and have fun. I've been talking for ages about having a workshop on reading your work, so hopefully this will happen so we can take advantage of more chances like this. I'll hopefully be able to link to the recording once the event is over. 

Other positive notes, one of my poems is appearing in the new edition of the The North magazine. The North is one of those established magazines I've been trying for years to get into, so I was chuffed when they accepted one of my recent poems. There are so many established and new names to check out in each issue, I can't wait to dip in.  

I'm equally pleased to appear in a newer magazines like issue 2 of the new Glasgow-based magazine Wet Grain. Smaller magazines offer less well-established writers a chance to shine, so I never rule them out. I like being involved at the beginning of what may turn out to be a big name later on and to follow writers from early stages in their career, but I've been around long enough to do that. lol. 

I've also had a poem published in the university-themed anthology The Worst Best Years published by Acid Bath Publishing. Fun to remember those distant times, good and bad though it's somewhat a relief that they are over and I can write about them without the stress of living them.

I'm excited to see what else this season brings. Enjoy September in its colourful glory. 

Breath and the Poet

I've been thinking about the poetic breath this week, how poets use punctuation and line breaks to direct the reader. I've been reading my own collection out-loud, listening for mistakes and difficult phrasing, but also how the speed of the poem is directed by these little internal controls. I've also recorded a couple of poems recently which requires you to slow them down even more for clarity. 

A poet in my writing group said he uses line breaks like punctuation, but then we noticed he used both randomly in his poem we were discussing and when he didn't pay attention to it, it lead to confusion for me. I'm not sure if he'll change it, but it was good to discuss.

Some poets are hyper-aware of how they use punctuation and line breaks to add emphasis and control how the poem is read. I enjoy this, read their work out-loud, measuring how I read to their layout. Short or long lines, big pauses and smaller intakes of breath, commas, full stops, line ends, it lends life to the poem that isn't always felt on the page.

I'm wary when reading other poets' work of placing my values on how they create pauses for breath in a poem. I read a poem this week that seemed so badly broken up for no reason that it made it painful to follow, sentences broken repeatedly across stanzas it seemed just to keep the two stanza format going. It made me wish to hear the poet read his own poem, so I could understand how he envisioned the poem. 

It's worse when editing, so if I query a comma or line break in a poem, I have to stand back and look at it without my own poet's lenses on. Usually, I discuss it with the author just to make sure it's not my voice I'm imposing on their poem. 

I often tell my writing students to use their layout and punctuation wisely, keep line endings strong so the image or sound carries to the next line, unless you're making a point by breaking it on a less poignant word or mid-sentence. But I realise that this is a personal thing, not every poet follows the same rules, just like some poet like to capitalise each line of a poem, mid-sentence or not. 

And I'm aware I'm not always great at it myself, sometimes I get caught up in the image or how the format is working that I forget to listen to how my poem sounds when it's read. Sharing my work out at my group is often most helpful just because I hear where it's going wrong with the line breaks and rhythm. Having a dramatist in the group is also beneficial for this as he is quick not notice stumbles as well.

It's something to play with, to ponder, to challenge oneself with as a poet.

For a GloPoWriMo challenge, focus on the breath in a poem. Pick a moment where breath is essential or obvious and write about it for 15 minutes. You could try and reproduce that feeling of breathlessness after a run or the faltering proposal of a shy teenage asking for a date or the adrenaline-fueled excitement of a rave. 

Then take some time reshaping the poem, so you direct the reader's breath as they move through your sentences. How can changing the line length, adding pauses through punctuation or line breaks affect the reading of your poem? Can you control how it's read or where the emphasis is placed? 

In GloPoWriMo news, I've started a few poems this week, but not every day as expected. Some days it was just scribbled notes, other times I've managed to sketch a rough draft of a poem. 

I've taken to using poetry as my 'pause. be.' time. Our school counsellor runs a lesson where she teaches the kids breathing and calming techniques. I take myself into a corner a write poetry as a way to decompress. I've never been able to meditate as my brain is always firing at full blast, so this seems a good compromise. 

How's your GloPoWriMo going?

April is the . . . Month - #GloPoWriMo

It's Global Poetry Writing Month again and while I probably won't be able to write a poem a day this year, because of work, but I'm going to give it a try. I've only written a few new poems this year so far, though I have a huge pile of rough drafts from previous years I've been working on. I'll be happy with any new poems started. There's no pressure to be creative daily, so I'm going to see how each day goes. The snow melting and the air scenting of spring is enough to make me want to try.  

So here's a prompt for the week to begin with, inspired by Kelli Russell Agodon's (@KelliAgodon) tweet about T S Eliot's early drafts of The Waste Land. The final draft started his cycle with 'April is the cruelest month . . . ' but is it? 

Use this line as a jumping off point for a writing exercise. What does April mean to you? Is it the cruelest month or does some other emotion overrule April? What month is the cruelest, if not April? What do the months' names evoke to you, their etymology or just your personal relationship with them. Look at each month individually or just focus on just one. 

There are more prompts available on NaPoWriMo website. You can also use the online collection of the The Metropolitan Museum in New York as inspiration. Get scribbling. 

I'm also going to be doing more editing in April. I'm working with poet Willie Gowans on his new poetry collection Glimpses which includes evocative illustrations by Ann Terris. It's been nice getting back into book design and editing. Strange and fun also to be working with Zoom to go over corrections as Ann is in Scotland and Willie in England, but it's becoming kind of second nature now after a year of virtual lockdowns. Hopefully the bursting of spring will give me more energy to bring it to fruition. 

I also hope to get back to doing a few book reviews in the spring as well. The sun always fills me with high hopes. We'll see how it goes. Enjoy the brighter weather.  

The Light is Starting to Return

I seem to only be able to find the energy and focus to write my blog when I'm on holiday. Day to day life with the kids and a full-time job is exhausting. I've also taken on a small editing job which requires focus when I just want to relax, but we're getting there. I'm waiting on my final grades for my course and considering starting a new one in the autumn, but at the moment that feels like a big ask. But my job is only until the end of this school year, so I might have more time on my hands next year. Or maybe not. 

I'm writing, here and there, editing pieces that have been hanging around 'in progress' for the last year or longer. My Scottish collection is up in the air. The publisher is struggling with the changes Brexit has brought to the publishing industry as well as personal issues and everything has been delayed and delayed again. I'm just trying not to think about it because I'm sure my living in the EU is going to throw up new problems when my book is considered. 

My writing group went through a rough patch and has re-emerged a bit bruised, but hopefully stronger. I am grateful that we're managing to reshape the group into something of which we can be proud. They have been a lifeline over the past year, even if only virtual and I would have hated if it broke apart.

Spring is coming, I'm sure. I can see it, patches of dead grass reappearing in the garden, but find it hard to put much faith in it's promise. Covid is getting a stronger foothold here in Finland and while we're trying to get the vaccine out, it's a slow, painful wait. There is that chink of light slowing expanding.

I've had a few poems published while I've been dormant here. I'm very grateful to all the time and hard work all these editors and their staff have put in to produce these issues. I know it's not easy. I've been wallowing in memories of my experiences in publishing in Edinburgh and though it's very rose-coloured at the moment, I do remember it being very difficult and rarely rewarding from the day-to-day perspective.

Severine has published my poem 'Fever'. 

Poetry and Covid have published three of my poems that resonate my feelings about, you guessed it, Covid. 

Literati Magazine has published three of my American poems. 

I appeared in the inaugural issue of Tír na nÓg and joined in with an online launch which was a lot of fun. 

Sideways Magazine has also shared one of my poems. 

Writer's Block Magazine published two of my poems and were a great help in bringing one to fruition. 

Mooky Chick published my piece 'The Cailleach Wakes in Finland' and it has found the perfect home. 

And Porridge has published one of the poems closest to my heart 'To Be Six in Your First Italian Gelateria'.

I've dipped in and out of most of these issues and am amazed to see so many people still writing, still working away amidst all this uncertainty, myself included. It reminds me that though the present is exhausting and time-consuming it will bring fruit, maybe not not, but soon. 

I'm Still Here - 2020 Review

I'm still here, winter is here. It's been nice to have some breathing room after such a busy and in some ways difficult year. The snow arrived and then melted. We usually get a good amount after the holidays, but last year we had no snow that stuck at all, so we're all waiting to see what this year brings. On so many levels.

Things have changed again and I'm still trying to figure it all out because it will probably change all over again soon enough. I was working full-time at a school until the Christmas break, so between that, my course and regular life, I was busy. I really enjoyed the role, half-teaching assistant, half- one-to-one assistant, so I'm starting to lean more that direction work-wise. I am actually beginning to enjoy my studies a bit, now that I kind of understand how to find the research material I need without access to real books and articles. I'll get through this course, but it is an absolute haul with everything else. 

I'm not going to try and rehash 2020. It's over, it wasn't good, it wasn't too bad for me, but I'm tired. I'm struggling to keep an even keel emotionally with all the stress the holidays usually bring, my Gran's recent death of Covid and just being so isolated here. The thought of starting anything new seems overwhelming.

I'm trying to not put too much pressure or expectation onto 2021. Crossing over its threshold doesn't make everything new, bright or easier. I have small goals I'm aiming for, but I just want to keep moving forward and see what happens. 

I don't know what work holds for me in the New Year. I'm hoping to be invited back to the same role as I've been in, but it's not permanent and it very much depends on the school's needs and finances. I've accepted an editing job for the new year for when my current course finishes and can pick up some substitute work if the other job falls through, so I'll still be busy. More on the editing job later. I'm looking at another course, but maybe later in the year.

I haven't been able to spend much time on my writing in 2020. A bit of writing in at the weekend, trying to finish a poem or two and submitting to various mags. 

Over the holiday, I hoped to read a bit and maybe do some reviews of recent books, but the days slide away so quickly. I'm trying to write, of course. I'm in the process of pulling down my other blog. I just don't have the time to keep it up. I'm copying it all onto my computer. It's like having a yearbook for our early years. There's too much to print, but I love to go back over them.

I've been gathering up the details for my end of year review of publications, submissions, rejections and so on. 

2020

55 new poems

131 submissions to magazines, 3 to book publishers

106 magazine rejections, 4 book rejections

29 acceptances

50 poems were published in 28 magazines or other venues, 33 online

33 blog posts

It's not a lot when compared to my best year, last year:

2019

155 new poems

221 submissions to magazines, 7 to book publishers

170 magazine rejections, 6 book rejections

27 acceptances, 1 win pamphlet competition

41 poems were published in 25 magazines or other venues, 21 online
45 blog posts, 1 guest blog post 

The only thing that's improved is the number of acceptances and number of poems published, but that's important. I have more work accepted with fewer submissions. If I've done the math right, it's a 22% acceptance rate compared to a 13% for 2019. That feels huge.

I would have liked to see my Scottish collection published, but that's been pushed to later in 2021. It's still happening and hopefully I'll be able to get out there and promote it, rather than do it all online. So silver linings.

Overall, I'm happy with what I've accomplished in 2020, in my writing, in my jumbled life and I'm looking forward to 2021. I'm moving forward. I'm still here. 

Samhain - Happy New Year

Halloween, part of my favourite time of the year. Finland doesn't really celebrate it, but a few places put up decorations, a few houses have pumpkins out and offer treats. My children, of course, didn't understand that it wasn't a big deal here and were still over-excited. So I invited some extra kids over (we don't have any restrictions here) for a Halloween playdate and then took one along with us on a quick trick-or-treating to a couple of friends' house. They still managed a decent haul. 

Samhain, the Celtic holiday which Halloween is based on, is celebration of the year's end. The moment between the old and the new year where the veil between life and death thins. I've long considered Oct 31 my New Year's Eve, a point where my life has often changed. I celebrate the end of old and the potential of the beginning. I turned 50 this week as well, a good time for a change. 

A few opportunities have popped up this week and while they're not perfect or long-lasting, I've decided to go with them. One is teaching creative writing at after-school clubs. It's only for one term and will possibly mess up other potential work as it's a set time. As it's later than regular school hours, it will also make dinner-time a bit stressful. I really miss this sort of work and it will be fun as it's mainly keeping the kids engaged for an hour, no stress to really produce anything, so we can just play about with word games and writing silly poems. We'll see how it goes, if it's too much trouble I won't offer to do it again. Or it might lead to something else.

Is it best to stumble into something and continue to follow that momentum or to strive to find a strict path? I'm torn, I've bumbled the past year or so and occasionally good things happen, but it's not enough to support a family, to feel secure. 

But I'm feeling positive, a new start, hopefully something good will develop. 

Scrambling

I poured myself a glass of pear juice from the box in the fridge, took a big drink and thought it must have fermented as it tasted odd. It was wine from a similar looking carton. So I'm enjoying the relaxing buzz of that first drink of wine at lunch time, a strange, but welcome feeling. It won't last. 

I've been wanting to curl up for a nap all morning and this isn't helping. The dark mornings aren't helping. I've switched on the SAD lamp, it's not helping. The recent cold snap that reminds me that winter is too close also isn't helping. 

I'm trying to help myself. Booked an evening off to go to a friend's open mic event, met a fellow editor for a coffee to chat about advice to get my business going, I'm sending my CV off everywhere. I've had some days teaching which have broken my dry spell with subbing. I've raked 8 bags of leaves. I spent hours yesterday trying to sort out my poems that are scattered over several files, so they're all together and all the latest version. Life ticks on. 

I've worked on a single poem for ages over the past week. This morning I put it in a word mixer and totally dismantled it to start again. I've never thought to do that before, but I might go back to some other half-written pieces and try it. There was something freeing with removing myself from the previous idea and just focusing on what the words say when they were scrambled together. Wish I could do that with other half-sorted problems littering my life. 

Another poem that I've started anew is 'Duolingo' which has recently appeared in the first issue of Drawn to the Light. I started writing the poem for a Scottish Gaelic writing competition. I badly translated it. When it was declined, with lovely comments from the judges about my attempt, I removed most of the Scottish Gaelic and expanded the poem. Writing it was a sentimental journey, so it was lovely it could find a home. 

I hope you find a bit of light in these dark days. 

Little Steps Through the Mire

It's been raining on and off for weeks. My back garden is a bog, studded with windfall apples that I need to pick up before the birds, hares and insects hollow them out. I bought a fruit dryer to keep up with them. The kids eat each batch immediately, so there's no keeping up. With anything, the unmown grass, the fallen leaves, the red pile of apples beneath the tree, the kids and their hunger. 

Last week the scary, big question was 'what do I want to be when I grow up?'. Again. I feel like I did 23 years ago when I finished my last degree. It doesn't help that my course has set an assignment of basically 'what's next?' in terms of professional development and I don't have an answer. So I've had a fretful couple of weeks of worry and stress and questioning what my priorities are. 

I am unfortunately a Jill of all literary trades, but master of none. I've taught literature, creative writing, English as a second language, some media classes, but don't have a teaching certificate. I have worked as an editor with a small publishing company and for my own company for a variety of clients, but I have no specialty besides creative texts which is very niche in a country where I am not fluent in the native language. I am a writer and poet, but not top tier, so getting work, partially because of the language, is not easy. I have no confidence in anything I could offer just now.  

Most anything I am able to do, I don't have the right credentials or contacts or language skills. If I need to spend more time training, I want it to be in something I'll be happy to do for long term. I also need to take into account that I have a family to help support.

I've spoken to my course supervisor and to another teacher at my school for advice about staying in teaching. I'm hoping to meet up with another editor here in town this week for advice there. I've also had an off-the-wall idea I need to be brave enough to approach some people about for a future project. 

I have to not get bogged down in it all. I'm taking little steps forward and have to remind myself that for now that is good enough. It's not something I can decide or sort overnight. I've had a nice holiday week with my kids, trying not to fret too much. I'll get back to it Monday. 

This morning there was frost, a reminder I need to finish my winter digging, to pick the last apples, to rake more leaves. I need to take more long walks with the kids to enjoy the last of the decent weather and sunlight. We're heading into the dark season, there will be enough time for contemplation and planning then. 

And in writing news, my work has appeared in The Broken Spine Artist Collective anthology, 2nd Edition. They have a call out for submissions for their 3rd edition, so get your work in. 

I'm still writing, still working away at editing, submitting. Like the apples, some things don't wait. 

Seasonal Changes

My garden is a gold splash of autumn, my favourite season. Apples thudding onto the unmowed grass, the buttery sun catching the red leaves of the maples. I have an urge to tidy and gather in supplies, inside and out, to finish harvesting my allotment and ready it for winter, to clear the flower beds of debris, to pack away tools for my winter hibernation. 

With words, I've been kicking through my poems like fallen leaves, noticing a gem here, a spoiled windfall there. I edit a line, I submit a few poems, slowly. There is no urgency with my work, though I know time is running short there as well. My course starts up again tomorrow, I have a book review due in a few days, but I layer words a few at a time, waiting for them to build up into some rich mélange. 

My writing group is planning to go back to face-to-face meetings next week. I can't attend the first one, but with our second wave starting, I have to admit I'm nervous of jumping back into that part of normal life. Not all of it has to do with the virus. I've enjoyed having an online side of my writing life. I've joined mentoring, virtual book launches and workshops in the UK along with my local writing group from the comfort of my home. Being in Finland I wouldn't be able to take advantage of many of these opportunities without the impetus driven by the various lockdowns around the world. 

It's less stressful being online when you have kids and unreliable support, but I also find the social side easier. Seeing everyone in front of me, having to unmute to take my turn makes it easier for me to read social cues. I'm probably still awkward and too vocal, but somehow it's easier to step back and take a moment than when I'm caught up in the pressure of being surrounded by people, trying to find the right time to speak up.

It's a toss-up. I'm afraid online events will dwindle again and I'll be isolated here in my corner of Europe, but it will be good to try and make more local events, now that I've made some connections.  

We'll see what the next few weeks bring, infections are ramping up here, more restrictions coming along. I may not get the chance to see my friends for long, so should maybe jump at it, even masked up. 

Enjoy your week.  

Autumn Scramble

I'm not used to this working full-time thing. OK, almost full-time, as I had Thursday off from school as it was a half day and it's cheaper to get someone already on site to cover for a couple of hours, but otherwise I slogged it out with preschoolers all week. They are exhausting. 

Then the weekend slips by too fast, even with one day child free. I sat and worked on catch-up for my course and poetry all day yesterday and I still feel like I haven't accomplished enough. I've ignored all my housework, so there's that guilt too. There's really no winning. 

I'm trying to write a few new poems to finish my newest proposed collection and editing a poem I've found some new research on. I've never tried to fill in gaps in a collection with poems about specific ideas. It's hard as I usually write more organically, but this collection has a theme of 'strong women' as an over-riding arc and I realised that I need more that follow it and examine it from different angles where other poems I want to include are more loosely connected. 

I don't want these poems I'm writing now to feel forced and I haven't quite got an organic spark for this latest one. So I'm tip-toeing around it, writing notes about images and a few lines, but at the moment it feels very telling and unfocused. I have a deadline for the end of the month I'd like to meet, so need to get it finished. 

The sun is finally shining after a rough, rainy week, so I hope to go out to the allotment today. The girls have been selling my excess courgettes this week and want to see if any others are ready. I have had a serious glut of them this year. They grow to marrows so quickly. The kids are tired of courgette bread and the veg in pasta sauces. I have a freezer full of grated courgette as well. I was surprised anyone bought them as they aren't a traditional Finnish veg and most people I've given them away to haven't known what to do with them, but they shifted over a dozen of them at fifty cents each. I'll try and get as much in as I can before the wet gets to them, but I think the plot is winding down. I still have a lot of winter digging to get started on. 

So much to do, but I'd rather have that problem than the opposite. Make the most of this harvest time. 

The Nitty Gritty

School was over-whelming this week, so challenging and fun. I worked as a classroom assistant, specifically with two kids who barely spoke English and who were struggling to settle into their new class. We had some bumpy moments, but by Friday they had both smiled a few times and engaged with me. I had a Harry Potter magic battle with one and cooed over puppy pictures with another. We also managed to do some work connected with what the class was doing. I left school elated, exhausted and somewhat disappointed that this is just a temporary gig. But after my frustration with teaching last year, I'm looking forward to the next challenge this school throws at me. 

So I had no chance to write during the week, but I took a lot of time this weekend to focus on editing, submitting and general organising of my poems and collections. I put a joking comment on Twitter about my horror at finding an old poem that used a word three times. It wasn't an important word or done for any particular reason, I just never noticed that I used 'clean' in three different ways. 

I'm sure it seems a minor issue, but my writing group knows it's one of my pet peeves for my own work. I want my words to have some power in their use and I feel overuse weakens that. Three times shows to me that I haven't really pushed my linguistic skills and feels redundant. Was 'clean' a theme of the poem I hadn't noticed, was I trying to express something through my word choice or was I just being lazy? I decided the latter. The poems wasn't affected when I found different ways of saying 'clean' in two of the three spots. 

It made me wonder how many other unintentional 'mistakes' I've missed in my proof-reading over the years. I'm aware I sometimes reuse words or images as themes throughout a set of poems, Do we, as writers, sometimes get stuck on a riff and not notice? 

A mentor I once had wrote a book with an uncommon, but not unused, word in the title. Our group spent over a year working with her, sharing our work and almost all of us somehow managed to put the word in one of our texts, often without realising it. She was hyper-aware of the word, of course, so eventually pointed it out to the class, so I'm sure most of us edited it out. I think her editor eventually changed the title, but it showed how we were sponges at her feet.

Today, I found I used the word 'mossy' in two poems that I would probably later consider placing together. Again, it's no big deal until they are actually sitting in a collection together. They were written about the same time, so I wonder if I had that idea on my mind. One was a mossy carpet and one was mossy light, so different images, but with both were used to suggest overgrown abandoned areas, one from above and one from below. Not sure how or which to replace or if I need to at all, but I love this level of getting down to the nitty gritty of language when editing. 

I didn't get that Editorial Manager job I applied for. We all realised I'm a word person, not a people and process person and they really wanted someone with the knowledge to streamline those rather than edit texts. So I wasn't too disappointed and they said they hope to hire some plain old editors in the future, so my CV is being kept aside. In the meantime, I will continue to play with my own words.