Hello, and welcome to my website.

I began writing when I was a secondary English teacher. I used to write all my lesson plans and other materials to encourage students to write and then it dawned on me that I should really take some of my own medicine and have a go myself. It was quite an eye-opener and I discovered that my expectations had been ridiculously high; I had been pushing them very hard. Nevertheless, some of my students excelled in producing brilliantly precise and spare poems.

I hasten to add that these students were not the ones expected to do well, and often they hadn’t written anything at all before, so the results were particularly stunning. When I retired, I set out on a journey to find out what sort of writer I actually was. I tried writing a novel, short stories, and poems. This took me to the Open University and the University of Warwick before I finally accepted that I wasn’t going to ever write a best-selling novel. I discovered that I was, at heart, a poet.

My first ever published poem was in the Interpreter’s House (edition 42) in 2009, after I had been attending workshops and writing poems for a number of years. This was a real breakthrough for me, and I will always be grateful to Merryn Williams, editor. I would suggest to anyone who writes poems to consider sending to literary magazines. Usually there is no payment; poetry is not like novel writing, which is a little more likely to make your fortune.

Often though, you will get a free contributor’s copy, and the sense of success and appreciation is marvelous. Here is that first published poem, which was written in response to an old story about a priest being executed, burnt at the stake at Priest End, in the sixteenth century in my home town of Thame, Oxfordshire. I must add that this was unlikely to have actually taken place, as most executions would have happened in large cities for maximum impact. However, the thought of it did haunt me for a long time.