As a teacher, my wider reading had mainly consisted of children’s literature and educational resources. However, even with limited downtime, I always managed to stay engaged with music. Lyricists. Wordsmiths. They were my source of poetry. Relocating to Leominster, I had a wonderful library on my doorstep – and the chance to expand my reading again.

In 2023, I joined Ledbury Poetry’s ‘Creative Pathways in the Shire’, a volunteer programme which offered creative opportunities for those new to working in the arts, culture and heritage sectors. As well as training opportunities and work experience, I gained access to live poetry performances and workshops. Encouraged to explore this creative avenue for myself, I began daily free-writing. After a bit of an adjustment period, I found it helped me process, and then later reflect on, the things that I was experiencing day to day and soon the writing began to shift to a more poetic form.

My DYCP began in July 2024 and within a few weeks I managed to get onto an Arvon course. After 5 days immersed in reading and writing poetry, I realised two things: 1 - writing allowed me to explore ideas which I found difficult to voice, without censoring myself, 2 - the loss I felt as the course ended told me quite clearly that I needed to keep going.  I booked onto two further Masterclasses in August. The first was led by poet Holly Corfield Carr, titled ‘Ecopoetry: Wild Listening’. With a head full of words, I spent a hot, dry afternoon tucked under a walnut tree at Bodenham. I listened, I smelt, I let it seep into me. The three poems that came that day - Buzzard, Chiff chaff and Hayhunker – will always represent that time, those moments, where it was that my mind was drifting towards and coming back to. A few weeks later, Tim Liardet led ‘The Poetic Line: Dashes, Slashes and White Space’. This captured my interest as I am often drawn to the visual elements of poems; the way words sit on a page, the way a poet uses or refuses to use space, those intentional negatives, pauses and jarrings, that which is left unsaid. This workshop helped me rework some of the poems I had written and further consider the ‘poetic line’.

When I first thought about writing poetry in response to being at Bodenham Lake, I had assumed it would be very literal, a reflection of what I saw/heard – responding to my physical senses. But what came was much more personal. More a placement of my emotional responses within another living thing. It was as if I was taking something from within myself and imagining what it would be like for another to experience that, how that might present/manifest. I appreciate now that this was a way not only to understand, but to empathise, with myself. Writing this way, thinking this way, was intense. All at once, 38 years of ‘self’ wanted a voice. If I had not been at Bodenham each week, anchored in this place, the sanctuary of it, this may have been a very different experience. But as it was, as we had grown together, I simply felt held.

And this was all very new. I was not (am not) used to sharing my writing with others. Not used to discussing it, receiving feedback on it and certainly not reading it for other people. Which is why I could not be more grateful to my practice mentor …kruse. Listening to my concerns, they understood the challenge this would present for me, and almost without my knowing, led me carefully through it. I can’t remember exactly which of my poems I shared first, but I do remember feeling like I was handing over a delicate object, in the knowledge that it would be completely safe in their care. By the end of the project, we thumbed through a folder of printed poems together as I tried to take in the enormity of what that action represented.