Tuesday 16 May 2023
Readings Coming Up
Thursday 19 May 2022
Publication Nerves
This book means a lot to me for a number of reasons, not least because my late friend, Hannah, loved it so much. It's her artwork on the cover. We talked about publishing a limited edition of the poem illustrated by her prints, but she died before it could happen.
Friday 27 August 2021
Isabelle Kenyon - Promoting A Book
I do not find self promotion very easy. In fact I cringe and procrastinate everytime I have to do it. Yes, I'm on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, the first more so than the others, but it is not enough. And my publishers have a right to expect me to do some book promo, afterall they have invested time and money into making my book a success and so should I (time at least). So about six months ago I decided I would invest in some book promotion.
I turned to Isabelle Kenyon to act as publicist for me, on the recommendation on Anna Saunders. Over 3 months Isabelle got me 7 reviews with more hopefully on the way, a spoken word event, a blog interview, youtube feature, 2 radio appearances and a podcast appearance.
I was delighted with Isabelle's hard work. Of course Isabelle has a great list of contacts, which would take me ages to achieve and then I would need the temerity to approach them. But Isabelle also gave me the confidence to relax and focus on what I was good at - reading at open mics and giving readings.
If you are interested in using Isabelle's services, I recommend them - you can find out about them here: https://isabellekenyonpoetry.wordpress.com/author-services/
For people who are perhaps earlier in their writing journey and are experiencing financial difficulties there are still a few free places on a workshop Isabelle is leading for the Cheltenham Poetry Festival next Tuesday available here https://www.ticketsource.co.uk/cheltenhampoetryfestival/t-axarox
Sunday 1 November 2020
My Poetry Collection Owl Unbound
Now comes the business of selling it! You can buy a copy direct from me for £9.50 (postage is free in the UK) by emailing me on zoe.brooks@googlemail.com. If you want I can sign it for you. Alternatively it is available from my publishers Indigo Dreams or most online bookstores.
The launch reminded me how much I love reading to an audience and I actually quite enjoy reading on Zoom, so if there is anyone interested in my reading at a poetry event, please email me on the above email.
Friday 28 August 2020
Cover Reveal
Here it is - the cover of my collection Owl Unbound with Indigo Dreams Publishing. I am really pleased with it. The cover very cleverly references several poems in the collection.
The collection will be published on 1st October with my launch on 23rd October on Zoom (more info to follow). It can be preordered from the publishers here: https://www.indigodreams.co.uk/zoe-brooks/4595048690. or you can order a copy from me (signed if you wish) on zoe.brooks@googlemail.com .
Wednesday 12 August 2020
Update on My Forthcoming Collection
The idea that my poetry collection will be published is becoming more and more real. I have sent off the final copy to Indigo Dreams, together with an information sheet about me and the book, and a head and shoulders shot (how I hate photos of myself).
The launch date is set: 23rd October. It will be a zoom event hosted by Cheltenham Poetry Festival. I will miss the party feel of a physical launch, but as I said in my last post a zoom event has the advantage of allowing me to invite people, such as my friends overseas, who would never get to a physical event. A number of poet friends will be joining me in reading at the launch (details tba), so it won't be unadulterated Zoe! If you fancy coming, do drop me an email or post a comment below. Or just look out for my posts on twitter, facebook or instagram. Alas you will have to bring your own wine.
Thursday 30 April 2020
Writing In the Time Of Covid 19
There is a Czech saying that my friend Hannah regularly quoted at me: "How to make God laugh - tell him your plans". My plans for this year were considerable. With my collection Owl Unbound due out this year, I had plans to build up my reputation at poetry readings, to network, to continue sending out to magazines, and of course to launch the book. God must have found them very amusing.
Even the sending out to magazines is becoming less easy as some print magazines are having problems with their printers. My publishers are having problems with their distributors. However online there is a surge in Zoom, Hangout and similar forms of internet events. I have enjoyed being a member of the audience at some of these. The Cheltenham Poetry Festival is organising a series of online workshops this summer and I am helping out with these.
And yet, online poetry for all its attactions, is not the same as being in a room with people. Technology (especially mine) has a habit of failing at the worst time. The connection falters and sometimes fails altogether, words are mangled, images of poets freeze. Nor is it possible to get the non-verbal feedback one gets when reading.
There has been a flurry of covid poems (some of them brilliant and some awful) and several covid anthologies are calling for poems, including one being produced by the Gloucestershire Poet Laureate, Z.D Dicks. Write Where We Are Now is an initiative by the Manchester Writing School and fronted by Carol Ann Duffy, creating online a living record of the crisis.
Pandemics have been a subject I have been interested in for decades. The threat and reality of the plague appears in my Healer's Shadow trilogy. And in my files I have an unfinished poem cycle about the impact of illness and environmental depredation on the collapse of the Roman Empire.
In the last month I have written two poems that might be termed covid poems. But as is usually the way with what I write they aren't a direct take on the subject. I am cautious about writing about covid now. Everything I write comes from somewhere in my brain where it has been brewing for a while. It is linked to my mental wellbeing.
Never has it been more the case that we write about what we must. For some people that is about virus, for others they need to write about anything but. The current anthologies can only capture a snapshot, and a valid one, but the best work on the subject may well be written in hindsight.
Tuesday 18 February 2020
Doors Close, Doors Open
I was chatting to an old school friend of mine last week and we both commented on how sometimes your life can suddenly change: doors close and new ones open. They certainly have for me over the past year.
My life in the Czech Republic has ended. Out of the blue a buyer came forward with an offer for my house there and I could not refuse. Last month I spent a fortnight in the country getting rid of most of my things and storing a few others, handing in my Czech residency papers, and handing over the keys. The door to my Czech home literally closed.
I am near to closing another literal door. As I said in the a previous post my mother died at the end of June and my life as a carer came to an end. Of course there has been work to do for her since her death. Over the last month I have been clearing one room a week in her house. It will take me another four weeks before the house is in a state ready to be put on the market.
The door that has opened is of course poetry. With my collection with Indigo Dreams (now called Owl Unbound) due out later in the year I have work to do. Firstly there is the editting of the collection prior to sending the finished version to Indigo Dreams, this I think is pretty well done. Then there is the need to get some readings sorted. The best place to sell books is at readings and that means getting my name around ahead of the book launch.
In the last two months I have given readings in Gloucester and Bristol, as well as at the launch of Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal (I had three poems in the magazine) and at open mic's in Stroud, Gloucester and Cheltenham. I must confess I loved performing my poetry. It gives me such as buzz.
The other poetry work I have been busy with is helping Anna Saunders with her Cheltenham Poetry Festival. As I may have said elsewhere in this blog I have a background in organising community events, so it isn't hard to get back into the swing of working on an event. It is great to be able just to help out, rather than be the director.
There will be more about the Festival in another post, but for now here is the link to the amazing programme Anna has put together: https://www.ticketsource.co.uk/cheltenhampoetryfestival
With performers as diverse as hip-hop legend JPDL and former Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, there really is something for everyone.
Thursday 5 September 2019
Speaking Poetry
Thursday 15 August 2019
Changes
My mother died at the end of June. I have been spending a lot of my time caring for her and before that my father over the last three years. As she was 89 and had Alzheimer's we knew her death was coming, but nevertheless it was a shock. But the blessing was that the disease did not take from her the awareness of who we were, she was still our mum.
Mum was very important in fostering my writing, especially my poetry. She had wanted to study English at university and would have done so had not her father's death meant that she needed to earn money for her family. When it became clear that I was naturally talented in poetry, I was given poetry books. I still remember poems from Happenings, and Junior Voices. But perhaps more importantly Mum encouraged me to look and to imagine. We would go on long walks and she would point out flowers, trees, animals. "Look, Zoe. Do you see that tree root? What do you think it looks like?" When I replied that it looked like a witch or a dragon's claw, she would be delighted.
When I sat with her in the last few months, I sometimes read poetry to her and she loved it. Poetry has that power. Despite her Alzheimer's she beamed when I showed her a magazine with one of my poems in it and a spark appeared in her eyes.
With Mum gone, I have the freedom and time, and perhaps the emotional energy, to really pursue my poetry career. It is what she would have wanted. I am preparing a collection for submission to publishers. I have a publisher in mind already. In fact looking over the body of my work, I have enough for several books and I continue to add more poems, including one recently about her death.
Today would have been her 90th birthday. Happy Birthday, Mum.
Sunday 4 November 2018
"The Worst Enemy to Creativity is Self Doubt"
Well I have done it, at last. I have started sending my poems to magazines again.
When I was younger I was regularly published in magazines, including South West Review, The Rialto, Aquarius, Pennine Platform, and others. I was probably on the point of getting my first collection, but something happened.
I lost confidence. I have since discovered, this is not uncommon among women poets. Jo Bell and Jane Commane write about it in their excellent book How to be a Poet . And I had a similar conversation about the issue with Briony Bax (editor of Ambit) at the Poetry Book Fair. My loss of confidence was ridiculous really. I had two great poets saying I was good (Michael Horovitz, Philip Larkin) and still I gave up submitting.
There were some mitigating circumstances I suppose. Looking back I was struggling with depression, something neither I nor my husband really confronted. My way of dealing it was to stop being a full-time mum and taking on a demanding job, which meant I was balancing motherhood, career and poetry. Poetry was what suffered. My poetry was increasingly taking the form of long sequences or indeed long poems and so not exactly suited to magazine submission, and I used that as an excuse for doing nothing. Then of course the longer I left submitting poems, the harder it was to get back into doing so.
But that is behind me now. I have restarted submitting poems and already in just a month I have had three poems shortlisted for publication, so that is good for my confidence. Fingers crossed the poems make it to publication.
In case you are wondering about the quote in the title of this post - it is from Sylvia Plath.
Friday 12 October 2018
The Girl Who Forgets How To Walk by Kate Davis
can t be trusted"
The debut collection from Cumbrian poet Kate Davis tells a personal narrative of contracting polio as a young girl, her subsequent disability and slow rehabilitation. A book of things known and not known, of untrustworthy ground and unsteady bodies, The Girl Who Forgets How to Walk finds comfort in the ancient limestone of her home county as she teaches herself to move again along its hills and coastlines. Inspiring, funny and deeply personal, with this book Davis creates her own map to navigate the wild landscape, demonstrating a unique connection to the earth beneath us.
Sunday 30 September 2018
Czech fox
I have just submitted my poem Midday Fox for possible inclusion in an anthology.
I have often blogged about my local fox in my Czech blog. I will see our local fox making its way across the fields as I walk up from the bus or down from the woods. And I have come to associate it with creativity. One of my favourite poems is Ted Hughes' Thought Fox, which is for my money the best poem about the writing process I know.
As some readers of this blog will be aware one important reason why I bought my Czech house is that I needed somewhere to write. It is so to speak my den, my dark hole, built into the hillside, a hill called Fox's Lair. Over the last year I have indeed started to write again, and not just this blog, and superstitiously I have partly put it down to my fox companion. Even when I do not see him, I hear him in the woods above the house, tormenting the village dogs. "Ha!" he seems to be saying, "You have sold your freedom for a bowl of meat. I have the woods, all the roots and dark places as my kingdom." And at this the village dogs go mad with vain barking.
I have put his face on my door in the form of a brass knocker, he hangs on the wall as one of a set of horse brasses, I have drawn him in oil pastels. And the more I find out about him and his place in folklore and superstition, the more I think I have found the right familiar. A month or so ago I was telling my husband about this, and how strangely although I had been writing almost continuously, my fox had kept out of sight. My husband stopped me at this point "Look, look," he said. There in broad daylight no more than a metre away from the window my fox was strolling across the grass in the direction of the neighbours' chickens.
Tuesday 30 December 2014
A Poetry New Year Resolution
Wednesday 6 August 2014
What Magic Realism Means to Me
Sunday 24 March 2013
Winner - EPIC Ebook awards
Tuesday 30 October 2012
Poems for multiple voices
Since golden October declined into sombre November
And the apples were gathered and stored, and the land became brown sharp points of death in a waste of water and mud