My first poem selected for publication

I've been posting a lot more of my creative writing on my blog in the last few months. Mainly poems but also this short story I wrote for Halloween. Then earlier this month I submitted  this poem  to the online (and print) Exceptions journal  and it was accepted. I was over the moon. It is my first poem chosen for publication, on their online journal for now but I have asked for it to be considered for the print publication as well, so fingers crossed.

So I thought it might be interesting to write a bit about writing. When I was growing up I had two dream careers, one was to be an actor the other a writer. I ended up teaching drama and English! Woody Allen's droll line "Those who can't, teach. Those who can't teach, teach Phys Ed" was always at the back of mind. But I didn't stay long in teaching.

I started writing regularly for pleasure (not just school assignments) at age 12. I wrote poems (back then they resembled pop lyrics) and I wrote romances which I would share with my friends at school. One lunch time when I was busy writing the next instalment to my Emi-Sue romance, in a class room which still had old fashioned wooden desks with lift up lids and holes for ink wells, a boy caught hold of my story. He read bits of it out loud to the others in the class who fell about laughing. In a fit of pique I snatched the pages off him and threw them in the bin. Something I have regretted ever since. My confidence was well and truly dented. I carried on writing though just not in school.

As a teenager I started to write "protest poetry" one rather memorable example, for all the wrong reasons, was written about climate change where I criticised George Bush Snr; I described him as a "hater of broccoli" and then realised I couldn't find anything to rhyme with broccoli. It wasn't long after that that I gave up on rhyme. I was also studying different poets at school like Philip Larkin, Wilfred Owen, Gerard Manly Hopkins and Sylvia Plath. My poetry as a result became more gothic in description and more streamlined in style.

I was still writing stories as well but now they were about the super natural or sic-fi. I didn't share my stories with anyone but I did share my poetry with my friend Lorraine and through out my late teens and early 20s Lorraine and I would have regular poetry writing sessions together over tea or beer, brilliant bursts of creativity.

I never shared my writing with anyone other than Lorraine and a couple of other close friends though.

I stopped writing almost completely for about 10 years. I was always very busy at work and actually writing a lot of reports and guidance for my job. It was something that troubled me a lot, as I had always found writing creatively a cathartic experience. I also started blogging in 2008 and took up photography which seemed the fill that creative gap somewhat.

Then in 2010, I attended a mental health recovery group, which encouraged me to use creative writing as a way to understand and manage my mental health. It was life changing. Within months of taking the course Jase and I had moved from London and I was running my own business, working part time. I started writing again. At first just story ideas and fragments of poetry. Then in 2013, I joined a challenge to write a poem every day. I haven't looked back since.

It is true, I think that writing is viewed differently by society than other creative pursuits. I was very much involved with photography and received no end of encouragement. I had no intention of doing photography professionally. I had no desire to have my photographs published. Though in fact they have been in RNIB publications at work! Similarly I have plenty of friends who are musicians and artists who aren't aspiring to do either professionally. (I also have friends who do want to do this professionally.) But if I say I enjoy creative writing to people they always ask if I have anything published. It's like if someone says "I play the guitar a bit" and you immediately asked them if they have had a top 40 hit yet. Or if someone says "I paint a bit" and you ask when they last had an exhibition at the Tate.

It's harder to share creative writing with an audience as well I think. The internet has made sharing easier particularly in areas like fan fiction. But I've looked, and locally we have no writers groups. I'd need to travel to Cambridge or London to take part in a regular writers group. (To be fair Bedford might have something but that's far harder for me to travel to than either Cambridge or London and yet it's closer! Thanks to crappy public transport in Bedfordshire.)

Anyway all this made me realise that I needed to write for myself, then see if there were any journals or online groups that might be interested in publishing my work. But first and foremost I would write for fun, for me. So that's what I am doing.

I'm hoping to start attending a writers group and course for women in Camden later in the year and I am writing more and more in my spare time both poetry, short stories and I am working on a novel. I find writing lowers my blood pressure which is a plus. So expect more creative writing on here and hopefully a few more of my pieces will be chosen for publication. I'm also following a creative writing course book and trying to be more disciplined, diverse and experimental with what I write. I am filling up note books fast and to paraphrase Virginia Wolf I am searching for the pearls within all the writing within them!