This is a first for the website, a drop in by a poet published by the fabulous Emma Press! Welcome, Valerie Bence.

Thank you Nigel for this opportunity to reflect on my writing and to look at Press me in peat from my latest Emma Press pamphlet Overlap.

After a career as a librarian and researcher, I finished a very dry PhD in my late 50’s and wanted to see if I had a creative thought in my head – so I undertook a couple of online creative writing courses. After the second the tutor (a poet) told me to forget fiction and move to poetry. This was a revelation and six months later I was on a poetry MA at MMU. A year’s mentoring resulted in my first pamphlet published by Cinnamon Press Falling in love with a dead man (2019) rooted in my MA final…