Success for Deb in the 2022 Buzzwords Poetry Competition

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When you’re working as a poetry facilitator, it’s always useful to get outside validation from time to time, so we were very pleased when Deb won runner-up prize in this year’s Buzzwords poetry competition.

Buzzwords is a great competition to enter, as it has a longer line limit than almost all other competitions – 70 instead of the more usual 40 – which means you can enter longer poems or sequences of poems that can be hard to home elsewhere. Deb has history with Buzzwords, having won the Gloucestershire prize in 2013, so it was good to take another step forward, and an honour to come second to so fine a poet as Jonathan Edwards.


ANTICIPATING ‘A CUSTOMISED SELECTION OF FIREWORKS’ BY DOMINIC FISHER

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Congratulations to Dominic Fisher, long-time Leaping Word poet, whose second collection, ‘A Customised Selection of Fireworks’ (Shoestring Press) is on the brink of publication.

Dominic will be launching his book at Bristol Folk House on Thursday 16th June at 7.30pm, with guest readings from fellow-IsamBards, Pameli Benham, David Johnson and Deborah Harvey. If you’re in the locality, do come along and help the evening go with a bang.

Introducing a specialist counselling service for writers and artists

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The Leaping Word is delighted to announce a specialist counselling service for writers and artists, delivered by our own Colin Brown.

This service is primarily intended for those engaging with personal experience through their work. Counselling support can be sought in relation to specific issues that are being explored, or the feelings engendered by such exploration. Or maybe you are struggling with issues of privacy – both yours and that of people who feature in your work. Perhaps you need to consider how to exercise self-care whilst turning your experiences into art.

And of course, Colin also offers more general counselling for anyone who seeks it, regardless of how they express their creativity. His areas of special interest include bereavement, domestic abuse, emotional regulation, estrangement, anxiety, identity issues, long-term health conditions, loss and grief, low self-esteem, narcissistic abuse, relationships, suicidal thoughts, trauma, victims of crime, and work and career issues.

For more details, please see Colin’s counselling website, Longships Counselling.



Anticipating ‘Fontanelle’ by Helen Sheppard

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We’re delighted that another Leaping Word poet, Helen Sheppard, is about to deliver ‘Fontanelle’, her debut collection of poems.

Helen is well-known in the Bristol poetry community and always keen to champion the work of others, which is why the prospect of reading a book of her poems is such a pleasure.

And what a book. You often hear people call poetry collections ‘important’ when they aren’t particularly, whatever other value they might have. However, ‘Fontanelle’, which compares and contrasts Helen’s experiences as a midwife working in the NHS during the 1980s and 90s, with that of her Aunt Doreen, who delivered babies in an earlier, more perilous yet less impersonal era, fully deserves this epithet.

‘Fontanelle’, which is published by Burning Eye Books, will be welcomed into the world this 23rd September, and its launch is taking place at Waterstones in Bristol the following day, Friday 24th September at 7pm.

Making something of the situation

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Poets are natural hoarders. They understand the importance of memories to the process of writing, and stockpile them for when a future poem might demand the inclusion of, say, a complicit glance, an unexpected gift, or the fall of sunlight through a woodland glade thirty years earlier.

The restrictions placed upon outdoor activity by COVID-19 means that everyone will now be ransacking their reserves, falling back on memories of loved ones, favourite walks and landscapes, past holidays in distant places, to get through these lean times.

And once we’ve exhausted the highlights, it will be the mundane that sustains us. The memory of a bottle of glue in a Christmas stocking, the luxury of using it for sticking pictures in your scrapbook. Carefully stabbing open the slit on the red rubber top with the sharp point of a pair of scissors. Turning it upside down and dabbing it hard on a bit of paper to get the glue flowing. And when it was all used up, the disappointment of going back to the gloop of your mother’s homemade flour and water paste – its squidginess between the stuck down picture and the page, the inevitable damp wrinkles, the speed with which it congealed in its jam jar.

We all have the wherewithal to get through this time. It starts between our ears. It turns into words on a page, a drawing filling a blank piece of paper, the rise and fall of notes on suddenly cleaner, quieter air. Don’t say you can’t make something of this situation. You can.

A Perfect Circle

A Perfect Circle is from Deborah’s fourth poetry collection, The Shadow Factory. More poems from this collection can be read here on the Indigo Dreams website.

This blog was first published on The Red Dress of Poetry.