As with buses, you can wait many months for a poem to be published, only to find that several publications come all at once. Suddenly, it looks as though you’ve become incredibly prolific, when the reality is that much of the writing and editing has been going on behind the scenes for several years! This summer has been particularly fruitful for me. I’ve also been lucky enough to be involved in a poetry-chain project organised by Gill Connors, and the launch of my poetry-film (which I began work on last summer) will take place at the end of October.

The biggest milestone this summer was having two short fiction texts published for the first time! This was not due to a sudden swerve away from poetry. Rather, I decided to put a little more time and effort into submitting fiction (as well as poems) including work that I’ve been tinkering with for many years now. ‘The Appointed Story’ was written around 20 years ago, though I have edited it several times since then. ‘In Queen Street’ was originally written 3 or 4 years ago, as part of a Secret Santa challenge! Both have been submitted to a few different magazines before, and I was very pleased to have these two finally published in Mugwort Magazine Season 2, Volume 2 and Volume 3.

I was also excited to have some more of my PhD poems published. My meta-ekphrastic poem ‘Multiple Choice’ appeared in the summer 2025 issue of Poetry Wales. The editor accepted it well over a year ago, when I submitted it for a previous issue: some publications plan a long way in advance! And my footnote-style ekphrastic poem ‘Enter’ was published in The Ekphrastic Review, which can be read online. Another ekphrastic poem, written in the form of a villanelle, was included in the Write Out Loud 20-year anniversary anthology on the theme of ‘echoes‘.

I’ve been submitting regularly to the Lighthouse Literary Journal for a long time, and was delighted to have a poem accepted. ‘All my poems are about sheep’ was published in their 29^th issue. This is a rather unusual poem (as you can probably tell from the title). It unravelled itself during the writing process, and grew into something entirely unexpected. This was also one of those rare (but extremely satisfying) occasions when a poem was accepted on the first go!

‘Kaleideneurodivergescope’ is another text that I’ve been playing around with for about five years. It took a while to find its true form, and then (after many abandoned titles) it occurred to me to merge two of the title words together, to form a rather long (but hopefully clear, and interesting) new title that is designed to mimic the way colours merge in a kaleidescope. I was excited to have it published in the experimental poetry magazine Streetcake, after it was rejected (in its previous forms) from four other magazines.

Since the beginning of July, I have submitted a total of seven batches of poems. That takes me to a total of 56 submissions this year so far (including a few fiction and non-fiction subs, but mostly poems), with ten acceptances, and many, many rejections.

A slightly more unusual mini-project this summer was my contribution to Gill Connors’ women’s poetry-chain anthology Safety in Numbers. She invited each contributor to respond to someone else’s poem, producing a chain of more than 200 poems that speak to each other in one long conversation. The anthology will be published by Yaffle Press in time for International Women’s Day next March, and I’m really looking forward to seeing how my little poem connects with those that come before and after. Each of us had just one week to compose our poem-response, and I was surprised that I managed to write a sonnet in that time, inspired by the intriguing poem that came before mine.

Looking ahead, this autumn I will be teaching a brand new online short course – Poetry Writing 1: Starting to Write, and there’s still time to sign up, if you’re interested. The course begins on 6th October. I’m also currently preparing materials for several other online creative writing courses.

I’ll be launching my new Poetry-Film at this free event in Cardiff, on 30^th October.