How I put The Art of Falling together

In May 2012 my first pamphlet If We Could Speak Like Wolves was published by Smith/Doorstop.  Having the pamphlet published felt completely different to having my first full-length collection The Art of Falling published by Seren in April 2015.  For a start, when the pamphlet was published, I didn’t stop writing.  It felt like I was just getting started with working out what I wanted to say.  From what I remember though, I didn’t carry on writing poems with the aim of getting a collection together.  I just kept writing.  When I had what I thought were enough poems, I started to make a list of the themes I was writing about:

The Body

Relationships

Falling

Violence

Famous People

Music

Wolves

Cumbria

I put these words into bubbles and then drew a line to link each poem up with a word, sometimes…