Newsflash!

I was very lucky to find out that Ruth O'Callaghan has started coming to Lisbon to give residential workshops. She has (brilliantly!) accepted to come and spend a day workshopping with our Stanza group. I'm also going to join in with one of her residential weeks and I'm looking forward to an interesting beginning to the New Year.

Last night I got back from a weekend in Barcelona which was a fun start to Christmas as the streets and squares were full of Christmas markets. It is a fabulous city but I never have enough time. This time I managed to get to the Picasso museum and the never-to-be-finished Sagrada Familia. I've been there before, but it's like a magnet over the city, and draws me in. Next time the Miro Foundation will be top of my list.

It's a quick change of suitcases before we set off for family in France tomorrow. I think it's meant to be a skiing holiday but there seems to be no snow. Portugal is basking in sunshine.

So Happy Christmas and a Peaceful New Year with lots of Poetry.

La Sagrada Familia

Making Friends!

Yet again I haven't managed to keep up with my blog but I wanted to introduce you to my new best friend from Moniack Mhor. Isn't she a beauty! We had such great weather and such a wonderful group of people that it was a good tonic before the start of winter. But where is winter? It certainly hasn't come to Portugal as we are still having temperatures of 17º in the daytime.

I've just finished a wonderful online poetry course with the Poetry School. This time it was a feedback course with Professor Andy Brown and I got the most honest feedback that I've ever had. He took a lot of trouble with all of our poems and his comments were very constructive. I wish he'd do another course as I'd be first to enrol. Critiquing is a very tricky business; if you're too tough you can put someone off writing for life, but if you're too kind, it just isn't helpful or constructive. The whole idea is to help some-one to improve their writing.

I went to Ireland in October and spent a few days in Dublin which was fascinating. I had only been once before when I was about 17 and only for about 5 minutes. I fell in love with The Book of Kells at Trinity and made a load of notes. I tried to visit as many bookshops as possible and ran all over the place looking for them. The Winding Stair was a treasure trove of books, a lovely place to spent time rummaging around. I was lucky enough to catch a poetry reading (Katie Donovan & Peggy O'Brien) at Books Upstairs, a wonderful shop in an old house with a narrow staircase, beautiful stained glass windows and lots of poetry books and magazines.

I can see that my list of books and magazines needs updating and I promise to get round to it soon. Meanwhile I have an assignment to do for my online course with Helen Ivory and lots of reading to do for the fabulous reading group on Alice Oswald, led by Kathryn Maris. Alice Oswald has been a revelation for me and I think her poem 'Dunt' is one of the most fascinating and beautiful poems I've ever read.

I'm nearly forgetting my most exciting news which is that my poem 'The Lost Art of Speaking Spanish' has just been published in the latest issue (63) of Magma. Yippee!