cinnamon at costa poetry cafe, Liverpool

Glasses - I never move without them – I can’t remember ever being anywhere without them- my eyesight is so bad I'm not allowed to drive - even with the glasses, so imagine my horror when I'm alsmost in Liverpool (from ~North Wales) and discover I have no glasses with me and I'm about to launch my prose poetry collection, Stale Bread & Miracles.

Anyway I tried Rowan’s glasses, but still couldn’t see the words. When we got to the cafe I stood under a light with a torch for extra impace and could make out odd words and shapes, though horribly blurred. Someone managed to find a little magnifying strip, but I couldn’t use it constantly as it blurred the words and I couldn’t track along lines – to read poetry you need a bit more than one word at a time to get the scansion right ;)

I could make out enough through the blurry shapes to jog my memory while there was daylight and went over and over the pieces. By the time I got to read it was about 9.00 p.m. and the daylight had gone. I could see next to nothing so it was a 90% memory, 10% torch and magnifying prompt job.

And it was a pretty good reading :) I think the combination of concentration and high octane adrenalin saw me though – not something I’d want to repeat and my body is still coming down, but it worked and the audience was great. You can see for yourself on YouTube - it should be up later today and is at http://uk.youtube.com/user/cinnamonpress

Joan Hewitt, also reading for Cinnamon, was brilliant and you can find her performance on YouTube too - on Cinnamon's new channel courtesy of Rowan.

How can it be April one moment and the end of August the next? Time really is a tricky thing, especially when it's full of amazing books. Since my last post we've had events at Hay festival, launched lots more great titles and told ourselves that we'd catch up on all those fiddly admin jobs in august when it's quiet. As if! Ah well, wet (even for Wales, extraordinarily wet) summer almost at an end and we're looking forward to a sparkling array of literary treats this autumn.

Tomorrow I'm off to Liverpool to perform at the Costa Poetry Cafe alongside Cinnamon poet, Joan Hewitt. I'll be reading from Stale Bread & Miracles, a novelised sequence of prose poems that I'm pleased with (and liking one's own writing doesn't come easy to most authors) which deals with a long process of becoming one of the first women priests - hammering on the doors of the institution to be let in and then let out.

Joan will be reading from her fantastic collection, Missing the Eclipse. It's poetry that tells stories and sees life through the reflexive eye of the camera - it's visceral, but beautifully crafted. And Joan's performances are brilliant.

So August is ending on a high note and there's a lot more high notes to come.