Light at the end ...

Winter sunrise in Sintra

The last few months of this year have been fairly higgledy piggledy and my postings on my blog, as you can see, failed completely. I spent a month in London when my mother was ill, and my pc there refused to recognise the device for this blog. A great excuse to be lazy, but I couldn't access my blog at all, or my emails. Help! I thought, what about all those poetry competitions I'm winning and can't accept because I'm not getting the emails. Dream on ... and dream on I will. I spent a month with bronchitis, made worse by reacting very badly to the antibiotics. I felt so sick I had to stay at home instead of reading a poem at a conference at Lisbon University with my Stanza group. I hope there will be more chances. 

I've just been making a list of the poems I've written this year. There are many fewer than previous years. Every year I print out all the poems I've written that year, just in case my pc dies on me. 

I'm taking part in one of Bill Greenwell's poetry clinics in January which I'm looking forward to. I've done a couple of his clinics before and his red (blue) pen is honest and brilliantly helpful. I feel a bit at sea with my writing and hope he'll help me sort myself out. I'm also doing another online course with The Poetry School (when don't I?) on European poetry. I think their courses are wonderful and I also enjoy the people I 'meet' on the courses. 

I did manage to make it to the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival and went to the Poetry School breakfast where I met most of the team. I was also able to have a poem critiqued by Kathryn Maris which was great. I've done an online course with her and she is really encouraging without mincing her words. I went to some fantastic readings and fell in love with Miriam Nash's poetry, never having read/heard her before. Edward Doegar was another find for me and I loved the readings by Rebecca Goss and Ramona Herdman. 

So now I gather energy for a new year. I'm not sure where it's going to lead me but the first stop is to the cloud forests of Costa Rica in search of a Quetzal. It's got to be better than going to the Sales!