The difficult second album. If, like me, you don’t get your first collection published ‘til you are fifty years old, then you have a whole lot of life to go...

The Beginning Back in January of 2015, while I was wrapped around a mug of extra-strong coffee in Sandino’s Bar  in Derry, the bar’s owner (and long-time supporter of local...

Am I a writer? I think so. Most mornings I read the paper and within a couple of articles find myself reaching for the laptop to write a letter to...

It took 7 years to make Keeping Bees. And a broken heart.  And some guts.  A lot of guts. I won’t go back to the beginning – to the broken...

Poetry is irrelevant or has elitist language you find patronisingly offensive? It’s archaic. You don’t understand poetry and contemporary poems just aren’t poetry at all, they don’t even rhyme… The...

I think pretty well all of us are poets at heart – it’s just that most of us don’t dare to ‘come out,’ fearful that our ramblings would be embarrassing...

Recently, I set myself a challenge: to write 100 poems in only 30 days. I had previous seen on Facebook a few other people set themselves writing rencounters, and wanted...

I started out as a fiction writer – I liked a good story, loved to read, wanted to convey a human condition. Then, I took one great poetry class and...

It is a propitious time to begin discussing the protection of original works, given the expansion of specialised internet usage, be it through sites such as Wrting.ie, or the huge...

Like many satisfying things, poetry can be difficult to define.  I am reluctant to be categorical about what exactly a poem is, yet it seems to me that a good...