Grit, Flesh, and more chairs

Next Thursday 4 June 2026, my two poetry pamphlets, Grit and Flesh, are being launched with Red Squirrel Press, alongside new work from Chris Powici and Tim Turnbull. I am beyond excited.

These pamphlets have been with me for years now. Long enough that they feel threaded through a whole section of my life rather than attached to one neat writing period. Some of these poems were written on my phone notes, in the dark when my children were just a baby and a toddler needing me in the middle of the night. Others I wrote during lockdown mornings, in those quiet early morning writing sprints where the world felt simultaneously frozen and frighteningly uncertain. More recently, I have been drafting in car parks while waiting for rugby training, swimming lessons, all the various places motherhood gifts me with forty-five stolen minutes and a lukewarm coffee. The pamphlets have grown up alongside my boys in a way.

That sounds sentimental written down, but I think it’s true. Their childhoods sit somewhere in the background of these poems. Not always directly. I’m not suddenly pretending I’ve produced an extended lyrical meditation on fish fingers and forgotten PE kits. But the conditions of my writing life have absolutely shaped the work. Interruptions and exhaustion. The need to grab at ideas quickly before ordinary life sweeps back in.

A lot of the poems were written in fragments first. Notes on my phone. Half-lines scribbled in workshop notebooks. Lines that arrived while walking the dog or unloading shopping, pondering a stanza that wasn’t working while standing beside a muddy sports pitch, with half my brain worrying if I’d remembered enough snacks (no I never will have enough snacks – this is a law of parenting). I’ve never had the kind of writing life that exists in pristine silence and uninterrupted afternoons. The poems have had to survive in the middle of real life.

In full sport mum mode helping out

As I spoke about last week, ultimately, that’s part of why it matters, because I need it in the push & pull of my days. Whether or not anything ever got published, I’d still be writing away.

The pamphlets themselves have had a slightly winding path into the world too. They were accepted by Red Squirrel Press a while ago now, but publication ended up delayed because of circumstances at the press. These things happen, especially in independent publishing where people are often balancing enormous workloads with limited resources and a genuine commitment to keeping good literature alive. During that extra year, my mum died, which meant I came back to the pamphlets as a different person from the one who first assembled them.

I found myself re-reading and re-editing the work while carrying fresh grief around inside me. That changed things. Not dramatically. I didn’t tear the whole structure apart (well, I did for a couple of them) or suddenly turn into a completely different writer overnight. Certain poems deepened and some images hit differently. Some pieces suddenly revealed emotional undercurrents I don’t think I fully understood when I first wrote them. Revisiting the work became a comfort, part of my mourning.

With my mum

There was something steadying about returning to language I’d already built. A reminder that part of me had kept going through all sorts of seasons already. The poems held traces of earlier versions of myself. Daughter, younger mother, tired mother. Hopeful writer and frustrated writer. Me in lockdown, me pre-grief and post-grief. To be honest, I’m still in the weeds of the grief and the wound is fresh. I won’t have my mother next week to debrief the launch with. Now the pamphlets are about to become actual objects in the world, which still feels faintly surreal.

I’ve spent years working around poetry in various ways: editing, publishing, running press releases and campaigns. Reading submissions and standing at the back of launches counting chairs and wondering whether enough people would come through the door to make the evening feel alive. Quietly trying to support other writers while often feeling slightly uncertain about where exactly I fitted myself.

Now it’s my turn to stand up and read the work. Which is exciting and also deeply exposing. There’s a reason one of the pamphlets is called Flesh! Poetry can feel like that sometimes. You offer up the unarmoured parts of yourself and hope they connect with somebody. You hope the room understands what you were trying to say, even if you didn’t always have the language for it when you began writing the poems.

I still carry a fair amount of imposter syndrome around Scottish literature, if I’m honest. Perhaps most writers do. I certainly look around at festivals and events sometimes and think everyone else appears far more assured and literary than I feel internally. There are always younger writers arriving with extraordinary energy and confidence. Bright young things with sharp bios, good literary pedigrees, creative writing qualifications, effective networks.  Meanwhile, I’m sweating through perimenopausal nights, battling homework deadlines and trying to earn enough to keep the kids in snacks (again, not possible).

I hope there’s room for all of us, that there’s value in writing from this stage of life too.

The sandwich generation years are intense in their own particular way. Caring in multiple directions at once. Children growing up while parents grow older, need care too, pass leaving holes in your heart. Bodies and energy changing. Time becoming sharper edged because you understand more clearly now that it isn’t infinite.

I think some of that sits inside these pamphlets too. Questions about endurance. About identity. About womanhood and appetite and grief and resilience and wanting to keep making things even when life is pulling hard in fifteen directions simultaneously. I am very aware that I am no longer the Next Big New Thing. Honestly, I probably never was.

I also think there’s a particular perspective that comes with having lived a bit and weathered a few storms. Raising children and losing people. Gone through a few a jobs and reinvented yourself more times than Madonna. Burned out slightly more than once and completely than one time when... Started again, dusted yourself off and kept going. Maybe readers will recognise themselves somewhere in there too.

Over the past few blogs I’ve written a lot about creative communities in Scotland and the strange, fragile beauty of small literary ecosystems. The coral reef image keeps returning to me because it feels true. Most of us are darting between multiple roles all the time. I certainly am. One minute I’m writing prose, then my alarm goes and I’ve got a poetry editing meeting. Clean sweep of publishing admin before lunch. The afternoon I’ll prep to run an event. Then trying to draft a novel scene while waiting outside sportsball training.

So now I arrive at the slightly terrifying bit where the pamphlets stop belonging solely to me. People will read them soon, actual people – maybe you?

Folks, you need to know that to be included as part of Red Squirrel’s twentieth anniversary year genuinely feels like an honour. Sheila Wakefield as Red Squirrel Press has done something extraordinary for Scottish literature over the last twenty years. Consistently, with a trusted band of collaborators, they’ve created space for poets across Scotland. So many important voices have passed through Red Squirrel’s lists, found early encouragement and serious editorial care there.

Independent presses shape literary culture in ways that aren’t always fully visible from the outside. They nurture work that might otherwise slip through the cracks and take risks. They keep poetry alive as a living conversation rather than a purely commercial exercise. The independent presses are the small worker fish of the literary coral reef, cleaning, grooming, promoting growth. I suspect a few will be in attendance next Thursday, to celebrate 20 years of Red Squirrel Press. The indie presses are pretty collegiate: we aren’t rivals, we’re colleagues. No one of us could publish everyone, and we need many of us to have a healthy scene.

This time, though, I’m not standing quietly at the back supporting someone else’s work. I’m the one bringing the poems into the room. But I once again, I’ll find myself thinking about chairs. Funny how often I return to that image. The hopeful arithmetic of literary life. How many seats are filled. Whether the room will feel warm and full or slightly echoing.

Because after all these years of writing in snatched moments, in exhaustion, in workshops, in determination, in grief, the poems are finally ready to meet readers. Perhaps that’s all any of us are really hoping for in the end: connection. A room with some filled chairs. A few people willing to sit for an hour inside the world you’ve made and see themselves reflected back somehow.

I am hoping to organise a few events round and about to share this new work, I’ll keep you posted, but if you know of a great place or would like me to come to you, just drop me a line. I love to meet readers!