Shaw Thing!

I hobbled along to News From Nowhere this evening for an excellent Feminist Book Fortnight event featuring two great writers.

One was the superb poet, novelist and activist Meena Kandasamy, whose novel ‘When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife’ was shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2018... it was a pleasure to meet her and to hear her read from her work. Here she is performing her poem ‘I Dream of an English’ https://youtube.com/watch?v=VBKLJMzkcHI

The other, with whom I was delighted to reacquaint myself, was this wonderful woman, Clare Shaw, whose third collection of poems, ‘Flood’ was published just last week.

Clare is a Forward Prize winner, a Royal Literary Fellow, and a tutor for the Writing Project, the Poetry School, the Wordsworth Trust and the Arvon Foundation. She also works as a mental health trainer and consultant.

She’s not only a great writer but also a powerful performer and an engaging personality, for whom the personal and political are always closely intertwined.

It’s been about 4 years since Clare was the tutor on the first creative writing course that my organisation was involved with running, and also since she performed her poetry at an international conference on alternatives to the established western model of psychiatry, which we coordinated.

So it was lovely to see her again this evening and to have a chat with her about another project we’re hatching. Watch this space...!

Here she is performing ‘Self Portrait as Hermaphroditus Entering the Water’ and ‘Self Portrait as Hermaphrodite Leaving the Water’ https://youtube.com/watch?v=EBC6OLvkY_k just a few days ago.

Today’s song, still on a poetic/mental health theme, is Tanita Tikaram’s interpretation of Stevie Smith’s celebrated poem, ‘Not Waving But Drowning’ https://youtube.com/watch?v=zrqfjvYfAno