Salt and Bones

Several summers ago, when life was a battle with lockdown, imminent bereavement, terrible isolation and constant fear, a walk on the beach with my daughter sparked the seed of a little bit of prose that I thought could amount to something 

The year that was cauterised my creativity. This got shelved, along with emerging poems. I also felt it couldn't be maintained in the first person. So, I'm writing more, in the third person. Or I might give each character their own voice. Who knows ...?

I can picture a photograph I took of a wrecked boat at Blakeney on the cover. It is working under the title of Salt and Bones. It is about landscape and passion and living...

'...Rachel often wishes she could paint. This coast draws painters up from inland like litmus paper, where they settle and try to capture the pure essence of the place in pigment, and love. Galleries flourish, and art trails. Every old cottage seems to have someone in a fisherman's slop standing at an easel. It is unrelentingly beautiful here.'

A little knowledge

Sometimes life gets in the way. The ease with which I used to channel words that came to me into halfway decent poems has been knocked by a particularly harsh few years. It's easy to blame circumstances rather than your own lack of application, but I've been doing this for enough years to know.

And sometimes, all you need is to find a little phrase, hidden in a pile of scribbles, to make a little spark catch. I'm hopeful this time, and regular poetry nights at the wonderful Belfry Centre in the little coastal village of Overstrand, give me deadlines.

We'll see...