Well, the Poetry Wire is all switched on and the lovely participants on my first online course are writing high voltage poems! The Life of Things course ends in mid-May, so I’ve thought up a follow-on course to start on 25 May. It’ll be The Inside and The Outside, and it’s booking now.

Our lives in this lockdown summer are dominated by The Inside and The Outside.  But constraints enable us to create.

We can write about ourselves and others – what we choose to show the world, and what we hide.  We can write about the very local, that we’ve walked and driven past for years. We can pay attention.

What’s inside, and what’s outside, can define the experience of living.  It’s a fascinating prospect, and as poets, this will grant you travel both on and off the map.  You’ll be offered inventive prompts,  and we’ll explore both within four walls and completely boundlessly.

I took this photograph of ‘Couch’, the chintz-wrapped cottage by Alice Francis for Spring Fling 2012, in Dumfries and Galloway. Wonderful video here.