On Wednesdays we feature a photo to inspire your writing. Feel free to post your work in the comments.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Jox

‘The Departure’ is Chris Emery‘s third collection of poetry, published by Salt, of which Emery is a director. Born in Manchester, he went to art school before turning to publishing and writing poetry himself. He joined Salt Publishing in 1999. His first full-length poetry collection, Dr. Mephisto, was published by Arc in 2002. He is also the author of a writers’ guide on publishing and marketing poetry, 101 Ways to Make Poems Sell. He now lives in Cromer, Norfolk, with his wife and three children.

‘The Departure’ features many narrative poems, playful and vivid. Departures of one kind or another form the main theme. The poet departs for various places, from Manchester, to Kettle’s Yard House in Cambridge to a seedy motel room. Emery departs his own persona to inhabit those of various narrative voices, from Bukowski, a street brawler, and a porn-star stand-in (“mostly, I stare at tan fabrics and zebra hide”). We even visit the ultimate departure – death itself, examining the poet’s own death, and that of his brother (“I see your sightless tiny hands, that peculiar half-kiss / as my life draws in to your permanent night”).

The narrative poems are like snapshots of longer stories, like watching ten minutes of a film – you want to know more. The ‘location poems’ feature such vivid imagery, so real that you’re right there – “a charcoal pushbike leaning on the door’s black velour”.

Emery shows no sticking rigidly to poetic form, taking the theme of departures around a tour of haiku, sonnets, couplets, free verse. It’s all here. The words are working hard – “the day moon is a wok”, “the sea’s womb bursts” – painting a vivid picture in your mind’s eye.

The breadth of this collection is tremendous, but my absolute favourite is the title poem ‘The Departure’, about leaving yourself and diving into your art.

Collaborations!

My latest book, Freaks!, is a collaboration. A three-way collaboration. And today I’ll tell you a little about how it came about, a little about how it worked, and share a few tips for those considering embarking on a collaborative project for themselves.

Agreeing on the Project

So. August 2010. I was fresh (read: knackered!) from all the promotion that had gone with my first short story collection, ‘Not So Perfect’. My friend, the brilliant Caroline Smailes, hadn’t, for one reason or another written for a little while either. During one conversation we both casually agreed that it could be fun to do something together and we suggested a few things but none really stuck and none really seemed to fit with us both. And then we had another conversation. And while I was talking to Caroline I noticed that someone had put their washing out and one garment caught my eye – a Superman T-shirt.

‘How about something to do with super powers?’ I said.

So, we had a starting point.

Establishing Guidelines

The next stage was deciding how it would work. We came up with some guides – in terms of what we were both hoping to achieve with the project and what we could reasonably expect from each other. We both have other commitments which take up our time so establishing what was expected and when, when we could call (without getting in the way of family life and other commitments as much as possible) – was important and meant we both knew where we stood and were not putting ourselves, or each other, under any unnecessary pressure. It helped keep things fun too, because as hard work as writing is, it should be fun. Mostly.

Trust

Then, further along the line, it was decided that the book (as it was now going to be) was going to be illustrated. Darren Craske, whose work Caroline already knew, was offered the opportunity to join us on our little project. And then, as they say, there were three.

Flexibility

I think the weirdest part of any collaboration is not having complete control over a project while it’s being created. Sure, once a book’s accepted for publication it gets edited and so that part’s collaborative, but I’d never experienced it at such an early stage before. So there needed to be a degree of flexibility and trust between us all for things to work; as the writers of the pieces (sometimes together) Caroline and I had to trust each other’s storytelling and writing, and we also had to trust that Darren’s interpretations of the stories were the best they could be. Even if they might not have been what we’d suggested!

And there was a flexibility to change things too. What the others thought mattered.

I’ll not pretend that it was all plain sailing or that we agreed on everything at the first time of asking. But we respected each other and what we did, we discussed things, and we, hopefully, came up with something good that was a good representation of the three of us which, in a funny sort of way, adds up to being more than just the three of us. So, that’s Freaks! and I, for one, am very proud of it.

Nik Perring is a writer and editor. He’s the co-author of Freaks!, and the author of Not So Perfect. His website’s http://nikperring.com and he tweets as @nikperring

Use this photo as a wordless writing prompt, feel free to post your work in the comments

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Manuel W.

Recently, Salt Publishing annouced the winners of its annual Crashaw Prize for debut collections of poetry: Kaddy Benyon and Luke Heeley. This week I interviewed Kaddy about winning the prize…

Born in 1973, Kaddy Benyon worked as a television scriptwriter before having children. She started writing poetry in 2009 and her poems have appeared in Mslexia, London Magazine, Popshot, Agenda, The Frogmore Papers, Ambit and are forthcoming in Stand and Magma. She was shortlisted for the 2010 Fish Poetry Prize, the Cinnamon Poetry Award 2010 & 2011 and the inaugural Picador Poetry Prize. She is the winner of the Crashaw Prize 2011 and her first collection, Milk Fever, will be published by Salt in November.

Congratulations on winning the Crashaw Prize, Kaddy. Can you tell us a bit about how it all came about?

The Crashaw Prize is run by a small independent publisher [Salt] in Norfolk. Each year they run a competition that aims to recognise emerging talent in poetry by publishing first collections. I’d just graduated from my creative writing MA at ARU where I’d written this collection and was encouraged by a friend to submit it on the day of the deadline.

Did you start writing poetry on your MA?

Yes, I started writing poetry in Autumn 2009 after a tutor encouraged me to give it a try. I had always read plenty of poetry, but had never been brave enough to write any (other than the usual teenage horrors!).

Do you think it’s essential for today’s writers to have a formal education in writing such as an MA?
No, not at all. I think it’s essential for writers to do whatever they can to enable their writing lives. For some people this will be an MA or something similar, but it isn’t right for everyone.

Can you tell us a bit about your winning book ‘Milk Fever’? Where does the title come from, and are there any recurrent themes in the book?

Milk Fever is, broadly speaking, about motherhood. About my experiences both as a mother and a daughter. The title is something I underlined last year when I was reading a biography of Sylvia Plath, it is an outmoded veterinary term for mastitis that she supposedly used with reference to herself when breastfeeding. One of my favourite of her poems is ‘Morning Song’ about a woman up in the night to feed her baby. I liked the idea of Plath made an animal of herself with the phrase ‘cow heavy’ where motherhood was concerned and it tied into the primitive, protective but sometimes wounding aspects of motherhood.

Which poets / poems do you admire and why?

I suppose I’ve part answered this question above. I love both Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, Adrienne Rich, Robin Robertson, John Burnside, Lavinia Greenlaw, Jo Shapcott, Don Paterson, Pascale Petit and especially Esther Morgan’s new collection ‘Grace’… the list is endless. It’s hard to explain why one likes certain poets or poems, but I would say that I find and keep on finding aspects of myself… or something I recognise… in the work of these poets.

Can you take us through a poem of yours?

Pomegranate & Pin

I have waited for the tenth day to tear
this fruit apart, my thumbs dig deep
in its rusty skin, get stung by its sharp, slick

spill. Just six of these gelled seeds – swaddled
embryos bursting with talent –
I’ve picked to place on my tongue, keep

warm as a first kiss, safe as a daughter.
Look, a globe of pale moon spins,
a darkening world turns below. Between

fair freckles of a star-blown night and hard
arthritic roots pulsing beneath my feet,
I stand alone inside this moment, this covenant

I am making with you, with her, the self I pray
to find. I push my fingers inside
the two half-shells, into unhealed flesh; live

fibres until a kind of blood weeps to my wrists,
leaks on my chest. I sprinkle dropped pips
around a mountain ash, whispering my hurts,

my fears, my lusts until the language I nursed
on runs dry. I seal my eyes, my lips,
each failure and regret as I crush the seeds,

feel a bittersweet surge of life, its prickling
rush urging me to taste, to become and keep on
becoming both the weapon and the wound,

Persephone and Demeter; pomegranate & pin.

This poem was intended to read like a prayer or a ritual. It speaks of a split sense of self, and a yearning for a merging or healing of that state. I did a lot of research on the Persephone and Demeter myth for this poem and so ripped a lot of pomegranates apart. I think it’s an essentially female poem, or at least I hope it expresses a kind of struggle or conflict that resonates with other women. I wanted the poem to be visceral and sensual because I believe a woman’s sense of her physical sense of self is incredibly important if she is to live as a free, creative being.

Wednesday is a wordless writing prompt. Feel free to post any work or ideas in the comments.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Foto_di_Signorina

A new magazine (poetry, reviews and articles, with a hint of prose) launched recently – Epicentre. It features rolling content, so is updated very frequently, and well worth a look. Submissions guidelines here.

I have a confession: I’ve not written anything for almost 6 months. Life just gets in the way sometimes. So to get myself back into the swing of things, I thought, hey, why not set myself a writing challenge. It would make me write something every day, flex that writing muscle again…

So to help me plan this challenge, I spoke to Calum Kerr, who’s running our current flash fiction online course, about his writing project flash365…

Hi Calum. To publish a new piece of flash fiction every day for a year, sounds rather mind-blowing and an awful lot of work! How have you found it so far?

It has been up and down. Mostly it’s been a positive experience but there have been days when I have been horrendously resistant and really not wanted to write. I’ve still written though, and sometimes produced pieces which I have been proud of. Looking back, I can no longer remember which ones were produced under protest.

Sometimes I’ve been in the mood to write, but finding the right idea has been difficult. And sometimes the prompts I chose didn’t help. In October I was using Barbara Cartland book titles. She did over 400 books, so it should have given me lots of scope. But because they were all romances, they were quite samey, so that became difficult. And in January I used the titles of books of the Old Testament. That was awful. So many of them are just the names of prophets – and obscure names at that – and so provide little inspiration.

All told though, I’ve learned that I can push myself to write and the words will still come, and nearly every time I produce a piece I’m proud of it. So I’m about 317 x proud, whatever that is.

 Why did you embark upon this crazy project?

In November 2010 I did NaNoWriMo and wrote 55,000 words in 30 days. Up until that point I had been a very sporadic writer of the ‘oh, the muse isn’t with me today’ school. It showed me what I could do if I sat down and forced myself to get on with it.

Then in January 2011 a photo posted on Facebook by fellow flash-fictioneer Vanessa Gebbie inspired me to write a story and – with a little bit of pushing from my partner – I embarked on a month of flash-fictions which became my pamphlet, 31.

That was fine, and I realized that I had managed to add 31 new stories to the bank of work available to send out. But after I finished, I started to drift again. I realized I needed a focused project. I was aware that Max Wallis , the poet, had done ‘Something Every Day’ where he wrote a new poem every day for a year and it had made people take notice of him. I thought to myself, I can do that, and as well as producing a load of new work, it would raise my profile as a writer. So, May 1^st 2011, I started, and the rest is history.

 People often say not to put unpublished work on the internet, as it can hinder it being published elsewhere. Can you comment on this?

 This is an issue. Some publishers won’t accept work if it has appeared anywhere at all. A lot, now, are happy for you to post it on your own blog as long as it’s not actually been ‘published’, ie: an editor hasn’t made the decision that it is good work and selected it to appear.

In my case it has meant that I need to write new things for some places (I’m currently working on my entry for the Bristol Prize, for instance, a place they doesn’t want work to have been blogged) or chose places that don’t mind.

But it’s also helped. Because I was doing the project in public it raised my profile, gained me a readership, and gave me a unique ‘thing’ to promote my work. I was able, after sending out press releases around the time of day 100, to get interest from Radio 4’s iPM programme, who interviewed me about it in the summer. Then, in December, I worked with them to produce the whole month’s stories and they featured them as an edition of the programme with professional actors reading my work. That was broadcast on Christmas Eve last year and was just amazing. (Still available to listen to at http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b018ft3w/iPM_24_12_2011/)

Also, when I was blogging November’s stories – a collection of tales all set in the same place at the same moment – I was able to get Salt Publishing interested in producing them as a pamphlet and I didn’t need to submit them as they could read them online and see what I was doing. That month’s stories have been taken down now and will be published by Salt in early May as Braking Distance.

So, yes, it does restrict in some ways, but it’s not insurmountable. And I think the profile-raising of it has helped me more than writing them in private and seeking many smaller publications would have done.

And, well, I like to show off, and you can’t do that without letting everyone see, can you?

 I love the ideas for your writing prompts – song titles, books of the bible… can you say something about how these ideas inspire you?

They work in different ways. Sometimes it’s by looking at the words themselves and their individual meanings. Sometimes its cultural connotations. Sometimes it’s a straight-forward interpretation.

But each set of prompts has led me to different places. When I used lyrics from They Might Be Giants, I think there was a larger dose of surrealism than in other months, as that’s what their songs are like. In September I used prompts created for poetry rather than prose writing. The level of imagery and word-experimentation in my writing was boosted by that. January’s bible books, although very difficult, did lead to some explorations of spirituality and religion – and the politics of those things too. And now, in March, I’m using towns and cities from across the globe, and I am having to research and set my stories in various places, something I don’t usually do.

So, I think when I get a prompt, two things are happening. ‘What does this prompt mean to me; how can I find story in this?’ and also ‘What kind of story have I not written; what genre do I need to cover; how can I make this different and new?’ And the combination of those work together to produce the story.

 Any advice for someone like me embarking upon some sort of story-a-day project?

Enjoy it. If you aren’t enjoying it and getting something out of it, you’ll go insane. Even on the days when I don’t really want to do it, I still do. That’s not some kind of masochistic ‘it’s good for me’ thing, and the whole threat of public humiliation is probably not enough to force the writing. It’s because actually, when I sit down and write, and my head takes me into the world of the story, and the words are dancing for me, it’s just the best thing.

My other advice is structure. I did 31 without any set prompts, just finding stories as they came along. And that was fine for a month; something with the end in sight. But I don’t think that’s sustainable over a year. The schedule of prompts gave me something to hang onto when I was lacking inspiration. And it also forced me into new areas where I could explore and improve my writing. And I think that should be an aim of a project like this: to improve. It doesn’t matter how good you are, I think you can always get better, and something like this is like attending a writing-gym every day for a year. You can’t help put strengthen those muscles.

 What will you do on Day 366 when it’s all over?

I laughed when I saw the number 366 there, because this should of course have been flash366 as it has been a leap year. I missed that when I set it up, but people soon started pointing it out. On February 29^th, therefore, I turned the blog over to other writers and posted 29 of their flash-fictions. That was great to see. It went crazy!

But that is also what I might like to do with it after I’m done. I’d like to see if other writers would want to submit for it – turn it into a kind of daily magazine – and go around again.

Either way, I will carry on but take it down to one a week. So, if I get no takers, watch out for flash52!

My other plan is to start work on a novel. After the experience of November, where the stories linked, and also how much I have enjoyed writing in different genres and styles all the time, I’ve been trying to find a way to do that but within the structure of a novel. I’ve got a couple of ideas now so, with luck, on May 1^st I start the next thing. Hopefully it won’t take me 365 days, though.

 Thanks Calum.

Calum Kerr is a writer, editor, lecturer and the director of National Flash-Fiction Day (May 16^th 2012 – http://www.nationalflashfictionday.co.uk/).

His work has appeared in Bugged, The Delinquent, Litro, Shoestring, Flash: the international journal of the short-short story, and many other places.

His flash365 project is online at http://flash365.blogspot.com/ and his earlier flash-project, 31, is available through his website at www.calumkerr.co.uk and, soon, on Kindle from Amazon.

His pamphlet, Braking Distance, will be available from Salt Publishing later in the spring.

After a brief hiatus it’s back! Each week we feature a wordless writing prompt. Feel free to share your work in the comments.

Photo courtesy of Flickr userJelle Druyts

Each Wednesday we feature a single-word writing prompt, to provide a springboard to your creativity. See where it takes you, and feel free to post your work in the comments.

“affair”