Mind the Gaps

Horrible week. Ok, maybe not horrible, but frustrating and difficult and too, too real. Going back to work after a teacher's summer is tough. Going back no longer a teacher but a teaching assistant is tougher. I hoped things had improved in my 3 years away, but I was handed busy-work that needed to be redone or undone because no one planned or liaised for our return 2 days before the teachers and I was allotted 7 duties a week when the teachers have 2, so not much has changed. Things will ease and working with the kids is always the best part, but coming back was a big bump into reality.

To poetry . . . I didn't write any this week, I was too exhausted each evening. I only lasted an hour at my writing group last night, as I was falling asleep during discussion. 

I did start listening to Poetry Unbound again, since I didn't have my daughter in the car to complain. Such a intentional way to begin and end, to ease the mind in and out of difficult days. Though I wish there was a way to know which episodes I've listened to.  I don't listen regularly enough to keep up, so I often listen to a season over a week like this one.  I don't mind hearing them a second time (sometimes more if I really like the poem) but I can't tell which ones I haven't heard at all and it's too hard to choose or change at stoplights. I did enjoy the recent conversation with Fady Joudah.

I started a poem last weekend before the crazy began, about Ithaka. Yes, I saw The Odyssey with my kids during my last week of summer holiday. It was enjoyable, for a Hollywood, modern adaptation, though I am leaning towards Emily Wilson's take. I need to look at her translation. I'm not going to join the debate though. At least, I wasn't angry with it like the recent Frankenstein adaptation. 

What I liked about it that I could talk to my older kids about it in terms of the original story. My older daughter is obsessed with Greek myths and Epic: The Musical which she shared with me afterwards. I'm not a musical person, but again it is a fun entry point into the story. My younger son hasn't read the poem but he has seen Epic and knows the original story pretty well from his own research. So we could discuss and debate; the lack of gods and sex, the choice of actors, the role of women in the film and other things. I remember loving Bulfinch's Mythology when I was a kid (another book for the rereading list) and having long discussions with my mother about different myths, so it is nice to be able to continue the tradition. 

It also got me thinking back to my time living in Greece, back in 1995-6. I remember being told as I sat on a beachside cafe somewhere near Messalonghi that the smear of island in the distance was Ithaka, (Ιθάκη) Odysseus' home. And that a poet, Byron, had died on a beach nearby. I have recently scanned some old photos from my time there and they are few and far between due to only having a basic, cheap camera. So I wasn't sure about the reliability of my memory which is always patchy.

I had been driving around the countryside all day with my then partner and one of my student's father as his daughter took an English language exam that I had been prepping her for all year. He didn't speak English and I hadn't been able to pick up much Greek. The alphabet didn't confuse my partner as it had me, so he was able to chat a bit while I rattled along in the truck beside them. 

I didn't know the word for it then, but this trip was an example of xenia (ξενία), Zeus' law as Nolan annoyingly calls it, offering hospitality to strangers. I didn't need to be there as there was nothing I could really do after the father dropped his daughter off at the exam, my partner even less so. But the father had decided we needed to see the area, stopping at little farms in the middle of the countryside where an old woman gave us a mystery soup that we spent ages trying to find the translation for. It didn't taste very nice to us, but we ate it all with lots of thank yous. Eventually, the father said stomachi (στομάχι) and we realised the strange things floating in it was tripe. My stomach burbled and was unhappy the rest of the trip, but other people gave us eggs to take home and cherries as we stopped and were shown off as foreign teachers. 

Eventually, we ended up at this cafe, eating tiny fried fish. I remember looking at Ithaka, thinking of poets, English exams and strange kindnesses, feeling just on the edge of something. 

I was young, but at 25 I felt I should have my life's plan sorted. I had spent the year teaching English and writing my master's thesis in a cold, beachside flat with no books or any support for my research. My visa was in a Greek bureaucracy limbo and I was certain we would have to leave soon. I didn't know where I was going next and was deeply frightened by the emptiness in front of me. Ithaka seemed another dream I couldn't reach.

I went back to my journal from this time and the trip was barely mentioned. The tripe soup was there and became an important anecdote for years, my worries about a jobless future were there, but Ithaka and Byron were absent. 

It sometimes feels I wrote about so little back then or missed important events, even though I've kept journals since I was 11. But it's only with hindsight I know where the turning points were. I had to look at maps and Wiki to prove to myself it could have been possible. 

It's there off the coast, just visible and Byron did die there, but maybe the connection and importance is more firmly grounded in my own mythology that I have built over the decades than in actuality. Navigating the gaps between memory and reality. 

Something to explore in my poem, I guess, which I hope to give a bit of energy to this weekend. I have another recent piece that also explores this uncertainty between whether a memory is real, a mishmash of several experiences or just a cool idea. Benefits of a dodgy memory, interesting poetry fodder. 

Enjoy the weekend. 

Do I Continue to Feed the Beast?

Aghh, I've lost two days of my holiday because I've had to change roles at work. This year I get to look forward to more hours, more busy work, less pay and a multitude of hoops to jump through to prove I can do the job I had been doing for the past three years because I didn't take a straight forward path to teaching. I have a day and a half to not think about all that, tomorrow evening will be scooping together everything I need to go back to work and prepare for my course, so today I'm going elsewhere with my thoughts.

Last weekend I went on a writers' retreat with some friends my writing group. Well, writers' retreat is a loose label. We went to a summer cottage in the Turku archipelago, in the west of Finland. This was our fourth year of having a Helsinki Writers Group retreat since Covid, though we missed the last two years, I think, due to low numbers. It's hard to organise 6 or more people to do anything together, but totally worth it when we manage. 

We did a few writing things, had writing related talks and did writing prompts. I did a lot of journaling, but mostly we just hung out and did Finnish summer cottage things: picked berries and mushrooms, walked in the woods, sauna'd and jumped in the sea, drank a bit, played some games and ate a lot of food. All in all, a lovely relaxing weekend, except for the long drive. 

Forest walk. 

One of the presentations from a lovely writer that works in IT was on AI witch hunts for writers: how to recognise AI writing (most of which they have already found ways around) and avoid our writing being mistaken for AI. How is this even a problem?! 

But I know it is, it's a debate that has popped up around the edges of this blog. I have started posting this blog on Substack as well as Blogger and Substack has recently introduced an AI checker for posts, via Pangram. I don't think posters can opt out of this as it's supposedly to protect the reader from believing AI slosh is human-generated. (Maybe you can, I'm still trying to read the instructions.) I'm not sure how often it happens with writing, but I do see a lot of AI-generated images everywhere. It's sad that on a site for writers and creatives, posters are so hungry for likes and subscribers that they would use AI at all, but I guess they do. 

I've been trying to ignore it, but it's making me reconsider whether I want to post this also on Substack because I fear this checker will be feeding my work directly into Pangram's LLM AI. I don't want to help train AI to write more like a person. (Checking this before posting - Substack says it doesn't use the detector to train AI and that it offers a block from external training models. Why do I not feel reassured?)

When I voiced this concern, my friend pointed out that my writing was probably being gobbled up in other ways. They are finding countless ways at consuming as much raw data as they can, possibly even scanning copies of last available hardcopies of books and then shredding them. Maybe this is just scaremongering, but with AI nothing feels implausible, just a warning.

This is where we are at, in my lifetime we've gone from the excitement of Pong and writing simple 001 code commands to AI writing our stories and poems and faking photographs of sunsets to make someone money through little digital hearts. We have to prove that we are writing our thoughts ourselves, that we were the one behind the camera or the pen.

The easy answer is don't post online and again I'm left to wonder why I do. Why do I like seeing the finished post, why do I check my stats to see if anyone is reading? I couldn't tell you how many subscribers I have (hello out there, if there are any), I don't charge to read my posts, but I'm not immune to the dopamine rush from being published, from being read. 

So for that moment of chemical pride, do I have to just accept that AI is reading this and eating it up in its greedy digital maw to regurgitate my meandering human style at some later date, that bots are most of my visits rather than real eyes? In 2026, I guess I do. 

How long will I hesitate before I hit Publish?

. . . 

Not even an hour and some of that time was spent looking for Blogger's AI policy (doesn't seem to have one) and reading Substack's AI detector instructions and info. Sad, but here I am. 

Slow Summer Urgency

It's been a long summer of contrasts, weeks where it rains like a judgement, weeks where the heat clings and drags us down. I have course work, jobs around the house, the allotment that I'm doing. I swim in the river occasionally, write at my desk that has remained clear so far. 

The kids are on their own schedules, moving late and without urgency. Only my eldest is working at his internship. I wake with him and watch him sort his own routine. He's often back home before the others really surface. Their father says he'll take them, but rarely does, so we're just occupying ourselves. I still have a couple of weeks before I go back to work and am just meandering through the days.

I'm working on a few poems for submissions: a couple of anthologies for groups I'm in. I have joined a few free writing sessions where we sit on a silent Zoom call for an hour to write together. It's weird but effective. It's an anchor within the current of the summer and I usually write something. I still go on Sundays to the café to write.

I've started having dreams about school. The first one was a sort of nightmare, I woke at 6am in a panic that I had missed orientation and didn't know what I should be doing in my new/old role. Last night's was quieter, but still with that sense of anxiety. I was there with other teachers and couldn't type some information on my phone with my awkward thumbs. 

My technology dreams are always a sure sign of stress. I've had them my whole life, from not being able to dial old rotary phones to emails going awry on computers to struggling to find info on smart phones. Always with a sense of inadequacy. Something simple I should be able to do but just can't.

There is this edge of my awareness that time is slipping by, that I should make more of the long days. My computer sends me 'On this day' collections of my photos over the years, reminding me when I had to keep the kids busy with visits to museums, parks, zoos and the beach. 

I kind of miss filling our days with fun, forced or otherwise, but also none of us want to dive into that effort, that heat, dealing with other people. We tried camping once earlier this summer and the site was overrun with people camping for a party and I left in a strop rather than be kept awake all night again.

School will start up and I know there will be a flicker of regret for not doing more, on my own or with the kids. Friends will talk of holidays and camping, days on the beach, share photos of adventures and we've had another slow summer at home. Which I know isn't a bad thing, but the world tells us to hurry up, to do more, to seize the day and make the most of each moment, to document it and share it. 

So here it is. 

I've found myself missing fireflies this summer. I grew up in the Midwestern America and they were part of the summer ritual that I've never been able to capture again in Scotland or Finland. Sitting on the porch, just talking and watching fireflies. As kids we chased them, tried to put them in bottles, but the adults just watched them. The stories and cigarettes in the darkness, the slow unwinding at the end of the day.

Fireflies don't flicker or rush, they just float about, appearing and then going dark again, moving to their own urgency that we don't understand. And the summers seemed to last forever, lulls and sparks of excitement clumsily mixed together until we were ready to go back to the ordered world.

There's a poem in there. 

Collecting the Collections

Another long day summer and another attempt to clear the desk I bought to do my writing. It overlooks the back of the house, a stretch of lilacs and a tree that leans too close. My girls regularly take it over with their art supplies and projects. I get driven away and it becomes unusable until I clear it off again. I scraped the blobs of paint, dumped their work on their beds for them to clear, brought back my trinkets; a bog cat, a couple of Lewis chessmen, though the queen is missing. 

There is a pile of books I didn't get around reading from last summer that I probably won't make it through this summer. A bright blue canvas that demands to be finished, but I'm no artist so it stands as inspiration. It's all tidy and organised now, but it won't last. I have this weekend before the girls return and realise what a nice spot it is to work at. 

Now that I've given up (temporarily?) the thought of getting a collection published, I'm going through my 'collections' and adding back all the poems I edited out. Poems that were removed because they weren't 'good' enough, there wasn't enough space for them to be included in a realistically publishable book, they retold a story or touched on a similar theme already established or they just didn't quite make the cut. Poems I love, that tell the story I want to tell, capture the time the collection is about. Poems that deserve to be read, if only by me again. 

I've found poems in my first collection, poems in my Retired Poems and Spare Poems folders and in old versions of the collection that were lost over time and brought them together. I've printed the first set out, 160 pages. Crazy, I've forgotten so many of them. Rereading, stepping back into those moments is a wonderful way to waste a rainy afternoon. The pubs that I visited, people I've lost touch with or just lost, solo journeys I took, times before I was a partner, a mother, my youth, my inexperience. My glory days merging into real life. 

I'm boring so at the moment I just have them separated into the Scotland poems, the Finnish poems, the love poems. There are probably other exciting themes I haven't delved into yet like My Childhood. The themes are so loose which allows me to collect more poems together. I'm not looking for something sellable, just a version of how I see my life and my work. It feels like a biography or another diary. Between my journals, my writing notebooks, my poems and their drafts I write so much. I've been writing obsessively for 30+ years, and it piles up.

Oh, how I want to edit some of the ones published in my first collection. My style has changed a lot. I used to love piling on the adjectives. I probably still do, I just hope I'm more subtle. I'm making notes on the print-outs, but I'm unsure if I'll change much. I love to edit, but these feel like they should stay in my old voice. There's nothing wrong with her, she's just not me anymore. 

So I have a pile of printouts on my newly cleared desk I'm not sure what I'll do with and I'm sitting back on the couch, writing under a blanket because the temps have dropped. Best laid plans . . .

Writing for No Reward

Summer is finally here and we've finally got a decent burst of rain, so everything is greening up. 

School has been finished for a week and it's such a relief. With a summer school course I'm teaching at the end of the month and two qualification programmes I'm starting I still feel like I have so much to do, but without structure of having to get up super early and work for someone else. I set my own schedule, work at my own pace and in my own home, even in my jammies if I feel like it. Every day slows down and stretches out, but still slips by too fast. 

One week down, I try not to think about it, but it ticks deceptively quiet in my head, just below the surface of thought. What can I complete in a week? My washing machine was finally fixed after several weeks of being broken, so I've accomplished a mountain of laundry and I'm still at it. Bedding today.

I've mowed the grass, filled the veg boxes at the plot and planted out some strawberries, corn and courgettes. I've written my course contact day reflection, read the study circle article and written some notes, started writing my school backgrounds for my programmes. I've updated my course material for the summer school, had the pre-meeting with the students. I've washed a big rug which took too many tools and too much time. Two to go. Life in the fast lane.

I've written poetry; scribbled notes, half lines. I always think I need more time to write and when I have it, it suddenly seems hard to focus. But this week I sketched a poem about students finding my poetry on the internet. They've googled me which seems a waste, but  there's definitely worse things out there. The fact that they chanted lines of my poetry back at me on the last day of school as some kind of taunt just tickled me. I had to write about it. They read poetry willingly, even memorised it. That has to be something to be proud of. 

There is so little to talk about with my writing just now. My desire to write doesn't match my motivation. I've only submitted 9 times this year, halfway through the year. That is a big turnaround from when I used to try and make at least 100 submissions in a year, so I could get 100 rejections and hopefully a decent amount of acceptances. See previous post here. It worked, but required a lot of effort and time. 

Now I just fill pages, in my notebook, electronically. It's where I get the most enjoyment, but I can't help feeling I should keep trying to get published more in journals and work to get a collection out. It was my goal for decades, but now I have so much else going on and I just don't find it rewarding. I don't write to be published, don't need to be read, so why do I keep trying? 

Habit, I guess, or the vague hope that it will happen. To be honest, I barely believe that any more. I know I can get into journals, but my collections are going nowhere. Waiting for years while the publisher who accepted my collection published all his regulars and dozens of other people and just made excuses to keep me on the bottom his to-be-published list killed my hope. And the 37 rejections for my collections I've racked up in the past 5 years.

My desire to try and get published may be almost gone, but not my love of writing. So in between lesson planning, coursework, piles of laundry, mowing, feeding and negotiating with my kids, I try to write poetry. I play with words and images, I attempt to capture my moments in this world on the page. 

And I don't press publish on this blog to reach the masses or even a trickle of readers, but for myself. To see the entries sketch my thoughts across the years, to document my highs and lows, my random thoughts, my cycling through the seasons. 

I write to find my way through.

I guess that is enough for now. 

Wallowing in nostalgia is better than red tape.

I used to write letters to family, friends, lovers and pen-pals. I've kept a lot of the letters I received, but have rarely been tempted to reread them over the decades. I have lost touch with many of the people who I used to write to, others I send an occasional email or see them on social media without comment. 

I miss writing pages and pages on special stationary and then waiting for the return, seeing stamps from abroad, wondering what's changed in the weeks since I sent my letter. The wait for the postman to arrive and the disappointment when he didn't stop or left only bills. I still check the postbox daily, but I rarely get more than one thing a week. 

I'm not even sure if there is more than one delivery a week anymore in our neighbourhood. My grandfather walked his route, knew the streets, the families, their dogs. The regular postman is no longer part of the community, zipping by in a little scooter-car. Even neighbours barely talk, just a wave as we drive past. 

Not sure where I'm going with this. I'm feeling nostalgic, I guess. I've been digging through boxes of paperwork looking for my high school diploma from 35+ years ago, reading old University course catalogues, calling my old high school for copies of my transcript and speaking the the same secretary that was there all those years ago. I think she's the Registrar now, though it doesn't matter because she's still the person who knows where everything is and how it works. 

I've been digging through old essays and my dissertation, remembering how I thought, who I was then and how I got to here. In Finland, trying to remember which country I left my diploma in. A certification agency is asking if I did my GCSEs in English and Maths. I'm not sure if I can prove it, but I've done 4 degrees since then in the 1990s and now in the 2020s, two of them in English/Scottish Literature. Pretty sure I passed high school. It doesn't help that I've studied in three different countries and not in Finland which is one of the countries I'm trying to be recognised in. I'm being asked to prove what I studied, where I worked, what subjects I was a substitute teacher for. Death by jumping through paperwork hoops.

So I have these boxes of postcards and letters I've received decades ago, ticket stubs, hard copy photographs that are so badly out of focus or dark, but there was no option but to keep them as they may have been the only record of an event. My analog past I can't bear to throw out. I've been scanning some of them to print in photobooks. I love the accidental finger, the overexposed blanch. That's who I was, I barely remember her. 

In the midst of this paperwork bog, I'm trying to write poetry about happiness and where I find it. Finland has been voted happiest country again and my writing group has decided the theme for our next anthology will be 'happy places'. So with war everywhere, job insecurity, my kids growing up and a lack of happiness where I am, I'm looking backwards, trying to remember what happiness looks like. 

Why is Finland so happy? They certainly don't show it. Is it low expectations, contentment, feeling safe, having what they need? Do they inwardly hold their joy and elation until the surveyor comes around? No one has ever asked me in the nearly 16 years I've been here. 

I'm sure I could look up the questions they ask for the survey on the interweb, but I'd rather not know. I like to think under their stoic surface, the Finns are dancing with joy, not just surety. That it bubbles up and leaks out when they least expect it. Not when they're drunk at Vappu or jumping into a freezing lake, but when someone asks on a busy street on a dark mid-winter day as they're trudging off to work on their life-sucking screens. 

I'm hoping I can unearth it myself again. Coming out of winter helps, the return of the sun and the earth warming for growth. 

Happy vernal equinox. Happy spring!

Sweeping Away the Last Clutter of 2025

I've just been sorting through my mess of admin, how I keep track of submissions, what poems I've written, where they've been published. This mostly consists of trying to organise and rearrange a file full of columns and poem and magazine names. It's not even a proper spreadsheet as that would make too much sense to my cluttered mind. I've hurt my knee again so sorting through this and the rugby are a good excuse to sit on the couch and rest it.

In the midst of copying and pasting, moving things around, I realised I never posted my stats for 2025. Not that anyone but me cares. 

This year I even have been wondering why I keep trying. I've lost my enthusiasm for all things writing, except the actual writing. I've barely tried to get published, picking publications and press that I have a connection with or that I really want to get into, mostly through sheer bloody-mindedness of getting rejections year after year. I'm determined that eventually I'll find one they like. 

My poetry collection that was accepted in 2019, and delayed and delayed, will never be published, at least by that press as it is closing this year. The editor had long gone silent to my queries, so I stopped trying. I continue to occasionally send out that collection and my others to different editors, more out of habit than with any hope. 

Mostly now, I think of my collections as a record of my life and thoughts that will never really be shared until I'm gone, like my writing notebooks and my diaries, just a bit more thematically organised. And the thought of not publishing them doesn't really bother me. 

So to my stats: in 2025 I submitted to 24 journals and 5 book publishers last year, much lower than previously. I used to have a goal of 100 submissions in a year, but that has been steadily dropping the past few years. I had 8 acceptances in magazines only and was declined by 27 magazine and 4 book publishers. Some of these were submitted in 2024 which explains the discrepancy in numbers. So if I've done my maths right that's a 28% acceptance rate. Not bad for such a small amount of submissions. 

I've also had 12 journals or anthologies publish my work in 2025, totaling in 27 poems. Again some roll-over from previous years' acceptances. This and my acceptance rate are about average for the past few years, even though I've submitted less.

Thanks to Hillfire Press, City of Poets, Helsinki Writers, Sixty Odd Poets, Hame-ish, The Brussels Review, Clarion Poetry, The Storms, Pushing Out the Boat, The Belfast Review and Broken Spine for publishing my work. I really appreciate all the hard work the editors, staff and volunteers put in to create their anthologies and journals. 

On the non-submission front: I wrote or finished 73 poems in 2025 which is higher than average for me, as most were written for a specific collection that will probably never be published. I've had an urge to write unusual love poems, so I've just gone with it. I think it's complete, but as is my way, I will continue to tinker with it for a long while yet.

My new writing practice routines means I'm writing regularly, even if only just a few notes or scribbles. I try and draft out at least one poem a week, not necessarily a good one, but it's a nice feeling on Sunday to have something typed into my drafts file. 

I was recently in Scotland to get out of the snow and cold and this was my view every morning to write. A slow start as my kids slept in was perfect. I think it matches my acceptance of not being focused on publishing so much. I've gone back to the process, what I love about writing, the slow accumulation of ideas, words on the page. 

I don't even really share much of my work with my writing group anymore. My poems this year have felt more personal, a bit exposed, so not submitting them to scrutiny of my writing group and editors seems right. I'm not sure if they're suffering for it, being too caught up in my head as my poems often are, but that's where I'm living currently, so again, it seems right. 

Maybe it's the menopausal, Gen X not-giving-a-fuck attitude that has seeped into my writing life, but here I am, just writing. There's so much else to focus and stress over that I'm content with having just that be simple and for me.

I hope spring is coming to you soon. We're still buried in a half-meter of snow here.