I’m not really sure who I’m writing this for. People like me, I guess, who find it useful to see other people’s writing practices. I’ve just finished my first week of a writing sabbatical paid for with a small bursary from the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough. It is making so much difference to my work and my self esteem as a writer.

Right now, I genuinely feel like I am living the life that I want to live. Despite having to do some work in the afternoons, I have stuck to my original plan and I am in a good routine. Currently my day looks a little like this:

6.10 alarm goes off

6.20 at my desk ready to work while watching the sun come up from my office window

7.15 dog walk down the village and out into the countryside

8.00 coffee on, sort out my husband’s medications…

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Siegfried Baber • Margaret Beston •  Roger Bonner • Peter Burges •  Helen Calcutt •   Malcolm Carson •  Caroline Carver • Sheena Clover •  Oliver Dixon • John Duffy • Clodagh Beresford Dunne • Cathy Galvin • Arran James Grant •  Pete Green •  David Hamson  •  Alice Harrison • Diana Hendry • Andrew Hubbard  • Ross Jackson• Tess Jolly  •  Alex Josephy •  Lanny Ledeboer •  Iris Anne Lewis  • Millie Light • Kathryn Macdonald •  Audrey Molloy •  Tom Montag  • Katherine Parsons  • Michael Penny •  Anna Saunders •  Carla Scarano D’Antonio •  Myra Schneider •  Michael Simms • Sue Spiers • Patrick Wright

Previous Poetry

THW22: June 6, 2021  •  THW21: March 8, 2021 • THW20: December 4, 2020 •THW19: September 5, 2020 • THW18: May 4, 2020  • THW17:March 7, 2020  • THW 16: December…

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For many years  Sharon Kunde has been an English teacher in schools and universities in Albania, Mongolia, New York, and California. She recently completed her PhD in English at the University of California, Irvine, and is currently a teacher at the International School of Los Angeles. Her dissertation, for which she was awarded a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship, proposes a posthumanist and ecocritical reframing of the traditional canon of American Transcendentalist texts. Her poetry shares with herscholarly work an abiding concern with embodiment, relationality, nonhuman animals, and matter.

She has published writing  in The Harvard Review, The Colorado Review, Salt Front, Spoon River Poetry Review, Twentieth-Century Literature, Split Rock Review, The LA Review of Books,The LA Times, Midwestern Gothic, and other journals. Her chapbook Year of the Sasquatch is forthcoming with Dancing Girl Press, and her chapbook From Dark to Waking, was selected as a…

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Franca Mancinelli was born in Fano, Italy, in 1981. Ever since her first collection, Mala kruna (2007), she has been considered one of the most compelling voices in contemporary Italian poetry. Both Mala kruna and her subsequent collection, Pasta madre (2013), were awarded several prizes in Italy and later republished together as Mala Kruna and Mother Dough in a translation by John Taylor, under the overarching title At an Hour’s Sleep from Here (The Bitter Oleander Press, 2019). In 2018, The Bitter Oleander Press had already published her collection of prose poems in Taylor’s translation: The Little Book of Passage.

Mancinelli’s new collection of poems and poetic prose, Tutti gli occhi che ho aperto (All the Eyes that I have Opened), appeared in Italy in September 2020. Most of the pieces from this new book, as well as a substantial number of Mancinelli’s prose texts and…

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Claire Jefferson (who writes under the pseudonym Stella Wulf) was born in Lancashire, but grew up in North Wales. She moved to France in 2000 where she and her husband bought a large derelict property at the foot of the Pyrenees. Living on site and tackling one room at a time, she is now, more than twenty years on, banging in the last nail and working on plans for a new-build project.

Despite a lifelong love of poetry, Claire came to writing late in life in an epiphanic moment whilst painting doors. It became an obsession fuelled by Jo Bell’s 52 group, culminating in a Master’s Degree in Creative Writing, from Lancaster University.

Claire is a qualified interior designer, but it is only with the luxury of time that she has been able to pursue her passion for painting, exhibiting in several galleries and selling her paintings worldwide. She…