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. 

AI Trigger Warning

A member of my writing group asked last night what we would think about them bringing a story that AI had translated for them. I have to admit my gut clenched and I immediately voiced my negative opinion. 

But I get it. As an international group, most of our writers have English as a second or third language, but we ask that everything shared with the group be mainly written in English. It is difficult to write comfortably in a language that is not your mother tongue. I use translation software regularly just to get through my daily life in a country where I don't speak the language well. I use spell check in my own writing as a backup for my own skills. I have however tried to turn off all the AI add-ons with my word processing software, emails and other apps, regularly write -ai when doing a search on the internet. I am very aware it still invades every part of my online life.

The thought of AI working its way into a group that is focused on the craft of writing scared and upset me a bit. 

I work with middle-school students and the reliance on AI to help them learn from both the students, teachers and administrators scares me. I constantly have kids asking me why they need to learn Maths or other subjects when they can just ask their phones to do it for them. I'm running out of answers. 

While our admin is telling us to use AI to do lesson planning, the school has banned phones and have had to find various ways to lock down the tablets the lower and middle school students use from going to sites that gather data. GDPR is the law in Europe. Teachers are having to find ways around kids using AI to do their work for them, going back to paper and pencil in many cases. I see the results of children growing up with the internet and AI, students without learning needs being unable to tell time on an analog clock, remember basic times tables and maths skills, unable to spell or to trust their own abilities to write a paragraph, to analyse a poem. 

Non-native speakers are taking longer to learn English because they rely on translation software for both reading and writing. I've seen student write a whole paragraph or more in their mother tongue and then paste the translation into an assignment and insist they had written it themselves. They no longer see the line between themselves and the software. 

But this is about creation and crafting. The writer had written the story themselves in their mother tongue, but wanted to share an English version for the group's feedback. As the conversation advanced they said they had translated the story first themselves, then asked AI to translate it too and then compared them. They said they were very similar. They then asked the AI to mark areas where it didn't appear in native English and then merged the two versions to improve the English. The line gets blurrier and blurrier. Did they write the English version, did they translate it?

I said I'd rather see the writer's original translation and we could support them in terms of highlighting areas that could be improved to native English usage. I said ideally I'd prefer what I say to my English learner students, use software to translate the occasional word or phrase, but try to write/translate it yourself. Use the language you have. That's learning the craft of writing; sculpting the story, the poem from the writer's own imagination and skills.  

It opened an interesting discussion. We have a lot of tech people in the group who had various opinions on AI. We discussed how using AI feeds the big LLMs, how companies had used writers' work to teach AI without permission and ways we use AI to support our writing. We also wondered about the future. Is this like the Industrial Revolution where we just find a way to implement a version of AI into our lives to improve them or would there be a backlash as we see it is harmful or will we welcome our robot overlords with open arms? I know I will be one of the first up against the wall. 

The group probably needs to come up with a policy of whether we would be open to reading work that had a large input from AI, in terms of creation, editing, translation or refining, but it felt too big a task last night. I asked, jokingly but not joking, for a trigger warning if AI is used, like we ask for difficult topics. The group has always been open to reading all things, but ask to know if a piece has the potential to upset people. To be honest, AI has the same affect on me. 

Do you have an opinion on AI and creative writing or translation?

Part of my students' class poem, no AI was used in its creation, though Snoopy helped a bit. 

Scottish Book Tour 2025

Every summer when I go to Scotland to work, I order an obscene amount of books from a small independent bookseller in the Scottish Borders. I try to catch up on recent Scottish book publications, but also pick a few that I've heard about over the winter. I try to focus on Scottish authors and publishes, but this year I branched out a little. Thanks you Mainstreet Books for feeding my addiction. 

I usually try to review some of the books I've bought and read, though this year I seem to be reading quite slowly so it's already 2026 and I'm just touching the bottom of the pile. So yes, this is another 2025 book round up.

Kirsten MacQuarrie's book Remember the Rowan published by Red Squirrel Press was unexpected. I'd heard of the book Ring of Bright Water, but knew nothing about its author Gavin Maxwell and I knew of the poet Kathleen Raine and had read a few poems, but her life was not something I had heard about. The book charts their volatile relationship. Raine was in love with Maxwell who was a homosexual. He became her muse for much of her poetry and she was involved with the Maxwell's first otter which was the focus of his most famous book. Remember the Rowan is a big read, well-researched and covering decades of their inspiration and arguments. I enjoyed it, it's very well written. 

The book is a real insight into the life of a woman who plays a midwife to an artist, not a muse, similar to Sylvia Beach and James Joyce, a woman who makes it possible for a man to succeed, even to the detriment of her own work and well-being. For that reason, I couldn't feel good about the story. I felt caught up in Raine's life and turmoil, so much so I wanted to take her for a drink to tell her to get out of the toxic relationship. It shows how intimate and believable a writer MacQuarrie is. 

James by Percival Everett was a book I wanted to enjoy, but I just didn't and I can't put my finger on why. It follows the character of Jim from Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. We follow Jim as his escapes from slavery and goes on the run, meeting Huck. The two books overlap and Everett manages it well, creating a strong character and backstory for him, but I just didn't gel with James or his story. The story sometimes pushes at the reader to shout its message and the ending felt rushed, so I walked away feeling unsatisfied.

On the Calculation of Volume by Solvej Balle, on the other hand, blew my socks off. If I was one of those readers who underlines my favourite lines or sections, the book would be covered with ink. Though not an original idea, a character that is stuck in a loop to repeat one day over and over, it handles it in a totally unexpected way. It is a quiet study, a character who unravels herself over and over within this day and within her relationship with her husband. The language is poetic and soft, a slow dive into the character's mind, and I was hooked from the very beginning. There are currently six books in the series, four of which have been translated into English, the first shortlisted for the Booker last year. Our next trip to Scotland will include a visit to pick up the available volumes. Absolutely breathtaking. 

The Details by Ia Genberg was another Booker Prize shortlisted books by a Scandinavian female author I read last year. A stream of consciousness, a fevered telling, it unravels the character's relationships with various friends and loves over the decades. While the book is well-crafted, I just couldn't find a way into the character. We follow her through her life in intimate detail, yet I felt distanced from her. Sometimes knowing a character's every thought is too much.

Muckle Flugga by Michael Pedersen was a book I considered buying in the summer, but decided to postpone as it was too big and I already had too many. I was given it later unexpectedly and dived in. Set on an isolated lighthouse far north of mainland Scotland, it tells the story of an artist who comes to stay and gets caught up in the life of the lighthouse keeper and his son. The book rollicks and rambles over the sea and island, delighting in its nature and unpredictability. The characters deal with their own storms, young Ouse on the brink of adulthood and all the choices it offers and The Father, the lighthouse keeper, who watches all he has built start to be pulled away by the outsider Firth, an Edinburgh artist who arrives with plenty of baggage. The language is unpredictable and delightful, full of humour and bright poetry and the characters are well-crafted and engaging. The use of Scots is unobtrusive but essential to the atmosphere, bringing all the details together. A fun and engaging read.

Poyums Annaw by Len Pennie is the second poetry collection by the Scots Word of the Day internet sensation. I first stumbled upon her during our Covid lockdown where she shared a new Scots word with a hint of humour and honesty. I love her poem 'I'm not having children' and her poem about the Daft Days, but I hadn't read her first collection or her other works. Len Pennie is now an Scots language advocate, but she also has become a voice for survivors of gender-based violence after facing a lengthy court case of her own and constantly facing internet trolls on her various social media platforms. Her poems cover her own situation and fighting the patriarchy in general, mostly in Scots.  They are honest and acerbic, sometimes tinged with humour. They do not bury the punchline in metaphor, instead they often pack a mean punch. While the rhyming sometimes gets to me, I'm a free verse kind-of-gal, the poems carry the reader along without feeling they are reading literature with a capital L. They are the kind of thing you'd share with your non-poetry pals and the two poems above have been passed on to me from unexpected places. Len often shares recordings of her poetry on social media and her genuine joy of Scots and poetry are infectious. Her poems are really meant to be heard, so if you can get the audio book read by Len herself, I'm sure it's worth hearing them in the author's own voice. 

The Ghost Lake by Wendy Pratt is another memoir-type book written by someone I vaguely know. Wendy Pratt is a poet who runs workshops, offers mentoring and ran the magazine Spelt. I won a mentoring session with her a decade ago and she was a great second set of eyes on my writing. Since then she's had several collections published and now has written a memoir about her journey through grief based around a paleo-lake where she has lived her whole life, a lake that has long disappeared, but left it's mark on the landscape and her life. The history and archaeology within the book are really captivating and are used to peel back the layers of stories. Her journey to find her way in her writing career, through the grief of infertility and the loss of her daughter during her birth and her father's recent death is interwoven with the landscape and the people who have lived there. 

It's not the kind of book I would normally read as it feels a bit like voyeurism, but here the reader is being invited closer to actually walk amongst the story, picking up a shell or stone with the author to connect. Wendy has always been very open about her struggles, on her blog and in her writing. The book touches on a lot of topics close to her heart: rural life, working class struggles, neurodiversity and grief. It shares the overwhelming weight she carries and the chinks of light she has followed to stand above it all, if only for moments. It's a touching tribute to the area and the people who have helped her on her way. 

Fower Pessoas by Colin Bramwell is a book I've just started but already I want to scribble down so many lines. It is a Scots 'translation' of Fernando Pessoa, the Portuguese poet known for his heteronyms, alternative personalities that he took on to write his poems. There are so many layers upon layers within this book, Bramwell to Pessoa to his heteronyms, Scots to English to Portuguese, that I imagined it would be a difficult read. However, the poems have a friendly feel like sitting with a slightly drunk Glaswegian poet hearing their thoughts about the world. There's philosophy swirled with humour and sarcasm, insight below the mocking. I'm really enjoying it, so far. 

Though he doesn't say it in his acknowledgments, I think this is a version of subversive translations as in the poetry collection I reviewed by Taylor Strickland. Bramwell admits he doesn't speak Portuguese well and these poems are moved in time and place to modern Glasgow, the heteronyms taking on a Scots personality and language. They are responses to Pessoa and our own restless times and to Scotland's own identity, all wrapped up in its own antisyzygy. I read some Pessoa after I came back from Lisbon a few years ago, I'll have to dig them out again and remind myself of their own voices, but I'm already enjoying the use of Scots, the sense of movement and freedom of the poems. There a sense that there's no pinning them down. 

Finally a publication note for myself, first of 2026, my poetry has been included in Helsinki Writers Group's 2025 anthology. Go here to check it out. 

So goodbye 2025 and welcome 2026. I have no plans or resolutions, just keeping my eyes open to see what the year holds for me. Best of luck to us all. 

St Andrew's Day 2025

Things have been rattling on. Winter is upon us, but luckily it's been mostly rain which I can cope with. I don't mind the darkness if I'm not shovelling snow three times a day just to be able to get out my front door. 

With returning to school, I just haven't had the energy to write this blog. To be honest, I haven't felt like I've done much on the writing front to write about. I still write as regularly as I can, mostly on the weekends, but I haven't really been submitting or trying to get published. I've lost my enthusiasm for that. I can't seem to get a book published, so I just cherry-pick the magazines I want to try for and even that I barely look into. 

I missed Scotstober where I usually try to use a Scots word a day to write some poetry. I have the list of words on a post-it, but haven't even tried to use them. I need to on days when I pull them out on days when can't think of how to start my writing practice. 

The highlight of my writing year has been this week and has nothing to do with my own writing. I was invited to the St Andrew's Day Ceilidh hosted by the Scottish Government's Nordic Office, a well-kept little secret. I was invited through my connection with the Finnish Scottish Society who I help out every year with their annual Burns Supper and a ceilidh. We had no idea of what to expect, but it was the most amazing night. The guest stars were former Scotland Makar Jackie Kay and current Edinburgh Makar Michael Pedersen and the presenter and cultural commentator Ally Heather. I thought it might be a formal affair but it was far from that. 

It was introduced as a Highland lock-in with music and poetry and tons and tons of whisky which is exactly what it felt like. Ally welcomed us in and spent the evening wandering around topping up everyone's glasses. All three were delightful to talk to. The musicians and poets on stage kept it casual and fun and joined in with the drinking and chat off. My mate even had to eject a too-drunk Finn during the first session by Scotland's 2025 Young Traditional Musician Ellie Beaton. Had to happen at a Scottish event. Michael and Jackie's performance were fun and full of energy. I've read books by them both this year including Michael's amazing Muckle Flugga which is a rollercoaster of a read. And listening to him perform you understand why. I wish I had taken photos, but to be honest, I was a bit star-struck. Luckily, my friend was thinking on his feet. 

Unfortunately, the lock-in didn't happen, but we decanted to another pub down the road. I couldn't stay as long as I'd like as I had work in the morning and kids waiting at home, but it was an absolute blast. It really made me miss the Scottish literary scene I used to dip my toes into. The mild hangover I took to school the next morning was totally worth it.

The Finnish Scottish Society are my Scottish lifeline here and I was so happy to be able to actually spend some time in a drunken blether with them rather than running around peeling neeps and making pies during an event that we never get to enjoy. We need more events like this that we aren't organising.

On the publication side I've only a few publications since the summer. My poem 'Explode the Monstrous' has been published in The Storms and I read the poem for the accompanying poetry podcast Eat the Storms with many of the other talented contributors. And I'm very excited to have my poems included on Sixty Odd Poets which is such a fun site to explore. 

I can't promise to be any more regular with keeping this blog up during term time, but hopefully I'll manage a new post during the Christmas break. I just need to do something interesting again. 

I hope your winter isn't too dark and cold. 

A Summer Ending

Today is the last day of my holidays and I'm still in my jammies, writing with tea, playing solitaire until my head quiets. I'm blessed with a teacher's holidays in Finland, nine weeks and I have to admit I've done very little. I'll probably feel guilty when I go back to the staff room tomorrow and colleagues ask me what my kids and I did over the break, but there's no changing anything now.

I was selfish and needed to do nothing, couldn't really afford big trips, but didn't even make small ones around the area as I always plan to. Take a boat to Tallinn or Stockholm or go to Turku where I've never been. We didn't even go camping. We stayed at home, visited a couple of beaches, went to a few museums. They spent time with friends who were still around.

Yesterday though, we went to one of the few places in Finland I feel at ease. Just a river and a lake it feeds into. Neither very spectacular or busy, no cafe nearby for ice cream. Just an outhouse toilet and a changing room at the sauna. We can't light fires, nothing interesting, but I didn't even have to fight the kids to get them there. Ususally there's the back lash at turning off the screens, breaking the lack of routine. But they have good memories of the place as well, so we willing to just pack up and go. 

My daughter took her portable paint kit, I took my notebook. We took snacks and lots of towels. The car doesn't have air conditioning, so the windows were open the whole trip. We arrived windblown and sweaty, but everyone was smiling within minutes. The kids forgot whatever niggles they have with each other and threw themselves into the river, talked about music, painted and splashed. We went too late and the sun rolled behind the trees, but we jumped off the diving board and stayed long enough. It's what I needed to finish the summer. 

Today I'm doing laundry and charging my school laptop, chasing up last emails. The kids are back on their devices though I woke them that bit earlier in preparation for next week. I'm sure they'll feel jealous of their friends trips abroad, but I hope they remember the days where we splashed in the woods, ate ice cream, saw snakes and tortoises, cooked sausages and realise it wasn't such a bad summer.

Diving off that board into the lake is a reoccurring image in my poems, like watching the barnacle geese leave in autumn or the first anemones that appear in the forest. I write about them over and over in different variations, trying to capture something that can't quite be put in words. Moments that mean more than just the passing of the seasons, though they carry that weight as well, the years sliding by much too fast. 

Stepping off that creaking board with no glasses and a fear of heights always feels momentous. I don't really like swimming. I feel wobbly and uncertain high above the deep, black water, but desperately want to jump in. Water that changes around me, cold to cool to warm, golden to green to clear as I surface. Water that changes me somehow, every summer. So I keep going back, revisiting it in poems and pictures, expecting nothing new, but finding it as I step off that edge and resurface. 

I enjoy my job and will get back into the swing of things soon enough, but now I don't want summer to end. 

The Blank Page

Less than a month left of my summer holidays and I've been thinking about the blank page . . .

I don't fear it, I fill it with nonsense mostly. Words I collect as I walk and scroll through my day: heavy-hitter verbs, pretty images, notes to myself of where I am and what I need to focus on. 

I write in cafes, on buses, on my couch, sometimes in my phone but mostly on my laptop or notebook. I have files on both the computer and phone that I add notes to, so I don't lose them while doing other things. I've even tried voice notes on my phone when I'm driving alone, but I don't like that medium as well. 

I borrow words or phrases from articles I'm reading, what's going on out the window, the things my kids say:

The ice cream I ate drunk in the rain, being woken by ravens, solstice, imprecision, fears that I'm stuck, losing time, erasure, the poem locked in my brain, a firm handshake, ripe to rotten, runes of birch, flirt in the corner, inherit. 

When nothing clicks I wander again through the pages to find phrases that spark. I restitch them, take the out-of-context further removed. Find connections between my days, the words that caught my eyes. Someday all I do is note and reorganise, but nothing comes together. The next day I start again. 

It's reassuringly simple, no expectation to write a poem or say anything coherent. I can just write and when something starts to gel I'm able to work with it because I'm present, I'm already there at the page. 

I've taken a week to write this post, wandered away for a while. Of the lines I lifted from my notebook above flirt in the corner has become part of a poem. As soon as I wrote it here I saw its potential, the direction is was leaning towards and I followed it. The rest have moved about or become compost on the page, layers that might eventually produce something useful. 

In that week I've written a little every day, maybe a page or just half a dozen lines, but I've only written one poem. And that feels about right. My inspiration of earlier in the year is fading, still there, but it feels gone over too often, I'm too aware of its curves, its voice. I still find comfort in it, but it isn't bursting over me with feelings and ideas, phrases that speak for me. So slowing down with my writing and changing focus is to be expected. 

As the summer break winds down, I'm trying to make the most of the quiet days so I don't feel like I've wasted the writing time I've been gifted. I'm enjoying my play with small details even if I have little to show for it.

Take care.

Midsummer

It's midsummer, when Finnish people turn away from the cities and towards the water and the forest, relax and be themselves. As much as I don't usually like summer, the heat, the beaches, etc, it's the season I like in Finland most of all. Mainly because the rest of the time is the long winter or the lead up to it.  

The weather has finally started to warm up to summer level, over 20C, which makes going to the water bearable. The river is still cold, but it's warm enough to manage a dip. Lakes are better. I won't even attempt the sea this early on. The kids are struggling to get into summer mode, all their friends having left for holidays. We don't have a summer cottage so we're just hanging about the city, doing small things just to slowly immerse ourselves. 

I'm still on my go-slow summer, writing in the morning, working on the house or garden or doing something with the kids in the afternoon. Summer is fresh fruit and thunderstorms, always having dirt under my fingernails no matter how hard I scrub and the window open at night. It's ice cream and sleeping in, museums and cafes, it's writing when I want. Long days, nights without boundaries. I don't want it to end, but I have my summer course in Scotland soon which follows midsummer and starts the descent back into the real world. 

Just like my poems are seasonal, my pictures are. Right now I have lots of poppies and irises from my garden. A Finnish midsummer poem previously published in the Helsinki Writers Group and in Porridge. 

Yötön Yö*

The fluttering ribbon of blue
outwith my window deepens
but holds fast to the birches. 

I welcome a thirst for black cherries
bursting over my hands,
blooded with the waiting abundance.

Beyond, in a rhythm I can’t understand
bonfires blaze on the shores,
fed by a dancing wind of flowers.
The country eases back.
beneath the slow-whirl of the sky.

 

*Finnish ‘nightless night’, Juhannus, mmidsummer.

I'm still writing a bit everyday, poems and fragments. When I go to Scotland I'll do more journaling than creative writing though I hope to keep up the practice of writing everyday. I'll take a new notebook with me as my current one is almost full (the joy of notebooks!!) and write everything there, rather than take my writing notebook and my journal. 

I have ordered a pile of books from the local independent bookstore so will make a short trip there to collect them and hopefully we'll look around some when the group goes to Edinburgh, so I'm looking forward to that. I'm trying not to pack to much so I can fill my suitcase with books on the way back. I'll try to do a review of my purchases when I come back - my Scottish Book Tour review. I always try to buy some Scottish books, though I end up with a very full mixed bag. 

It's been raining quite heavily the past few days (it always takes me a while to write these blogs). Getting me ready for Scotland, I guess. I can't wait. Though it's pretty intense to take a bunch of kids to another country, they are old enough to be pretty responsible and I get to teach about Scottish culture, history and literature, so I always enjoy it. So it's not quite my regular teaching job. There's still a bit of time before I have to think about that. 

Make the most of the summer, rain or shine. Enjoy.