Burning Bright

It’s been a strange year so far. My dad had a stroke in March and has been staying with us, battling every day with short-term memory problems. This week he’s been going for a walk on his own and putting on a bet. He can calculate a complicated bet but can’t yet manage his own medication. Or, rather, he has no idea what time he should take his tablets and as I’m preparing his meals it’s not very helpful to use food as a prompt. But I’m hopeful for him and he is determined to do everything in his power to recover as much as possible.

In April, my son and his girlfriend moved in as well after 5 years in London. He was given notice and could not find anywhere affordable to live in the capital. I’m glad they’ve been able to come to us.

Work has been a balancing act because of my need to care for my dad. So I’m grateful that I can keep going, even if it’s at a much slower pace than usual. I am so lucky to be working at the University of Chester on Mondays and Tuesdays in term-time, as Royal Literary Fund Fellow. Grateful, too, to be appointed as writer-in-residence with The People of Anfield Project. This is a Culture Liverpool project being delivered by Open Eye Gallery and I will be working with photographic artist, Emma Case, to deliver the project up until 2025.

I am proud to have contributed to the Home project at Open Eye Gallery supporting Ukraine Photography and Ukraine, at the time when Eurovision was being celebrated in Liverpool. I helped to produce the Schools Activity Pack which uses Ukrainian photography as a prompt for creative writing for Year 5 pupils at KS2. This work owes a debt to the 2021 awards from MaxLiteracy. Their award enabled me to work with Wirral Hospitals’ School on a project inspired by Open Eye Gallery’s archive. The MaxLiteracy case study of our work is about supporting young people’s wellbeing at Key Stage 3 and 4 through creative writing inspired by photography, during disrupted learning as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. The MaxLiteracy resources we produced can be found here: Writing Through Photography.

Another joy this year has been work with dot.art and the wonderful artist, Madeleine Pires who is currently painting beautiful murals in the Flower Streets in Kirkdale. I had the chance to deliver four creative writing workshops for this project at The Gordon (Kirkdale Community Centre). You can keep an eye on Madeleine’s progress with the murals here.

I was also delighted to have an essay, America’s Last High Modernist, published by the RLF about one of my poetry heroes, Frank Bidart.

I have much to be thankful for.