Yes, yes. I am in hyper-promotional mode. I’ve been spending my days setting up events, scheduling talks and workshops, pitching articles.  All the stuff a writer has to do these days to get her stuff up and out.  Don’t get me wrong – I’m more than happy to do it.  More than happy to have a book to promote in the first place.  But it is pretty full on and it’s easy to forget why I’m doing this at all.  Then I get a day like yesterday and it all blissfully comes back to me.

So let’s talk poetry.  I know I’ve been talking mostly lately about writing prose. But a teacher once said to me – and I have liberally repeated it over the years as if it was my own thought – that everything is poetry. I do believe that.  Anything I write aims to be poetry, in one fashion or another.  So although it may seem as if I sometimes stray far from the poet’s path, I’m never really far away.  But even so, yesterday did feel like a coming home.  For the first time in a long time I spent the day at a Poetry Workshop, led by the wonderful and most generous Ruth O’Callaghan, and attended by four other talented and sensitive poets. We spent the day studying and writing poems of all sorts, all around the theme of loss.  Despite the difficult theme and some very personal moments, there was a great deal of fun and laughter and we all turned out great work.  Imagine being told “Okay, you have 10 minutes. Write a poem.” Sure, I’ve done that sort of thing to kids I’ve taught over the years, but hey – they were just kids. This was us, adults, and man, it was hard.  Hard, but exciting.  So now I know I have at least three new poems that I want to work on some more, that may actually get to a point at sometime when they can be released out into the public to find their own ways in the world.  It feels like a new beginning for me and my poetry, and this leads me to some great news that I hinted at a while back.

    Ward Wood has recently agreed to bring out my poetry collection, Her Life Collected.  To be honest, I knew I could count on them to consider it – after all, that’s what Ward Wood is all about, namely providing a home for the work of its authors.  But they would actually publish it, of course, only if it is up to a high enough standard.  And with Ward Wood’s first poets being the talented and award-winning poets Ann Alexander and Mike Horwood, I was not at all sure my collection was up to snuff.  But I’m thrilled to say it has passed that high barrier, and we hope to have it out in February 2011.  A novel and a poetry collection both out within six months of each other.  It’s all too wonderful to believe and a bit embarrassing to have so much to boast about.  But I also know that I’m no overnight wonder, and although it all seems to be coming together for me at the same time, it was indeed a long time coming.

    More information about the collection will be coming soon, but I can see this post is already getting too long, so I’ll leave you, this Remembrance Day, with a heartfelt hurray for poetry, and a heartfelt thank you to those who have gone before us.