An Arvon course and a poetry prize
May 22, 2009 at 9:59 pm(This post might make more sense if you read the ones below, first)
I’ve already had my main holiday abroad this year (the inspiring poetry course in Spain at Almaserra Vella, run by Penelope Shuttle, but the weather then was cold and wet, so I’m hoping to get some proper sunshine in August during my summer break from my job with the Birmingham Adult Education Service.
This August, it’ll be thirteen years since that poetry course at Arvon’s Lumb Bank Centre in Yorkshire. Joining that course was far more daunting than floating around in the sky, firmly linked to a boat in the coastal waters of Gran Canaria. It was also a more significant stepping stone into the future I wanted: being a writer. It’s amazing to think how far I’ve got with my writing since that particular turning point in my life.
I’d been dabbling in poetry during the previous years, when my job took up more and more of my free time. Not that poetry can easily be squeezed in to a brief half hour, here and there, but it was something that helped to satisfy that creative itch, and is still a significant part of my writing life.
Various friends and family members had said, ‘That’s really good.’ But then they would, wouldn’t they? I knew I needed to brace myself for something more objective from someone with more experience and knowledge of the craft of poetry.
The workshops, run by Joan Poulson and John Lyons were an inspiration, but I always dreaded the time when we were expected to subject our half-finished creations to the comments from the tutors and the group. It was fascinating to hear the contributions from all the others and I’d marvel at the standard of these offerings. I found it very enlightening to see how the tutors focussed in on the best parts, and explained what they felt had worked well, and why, with suggestions on how the piece might be further developed.
My life-changing moment came with my one-to-one appointment with Joan. She looked through the poems I’d brought with me and seemed to consider some of them worthy of publication. I’d known nothing about the various small poetry presses and she suggested a few that I might try.
One of these, Envoi, was running a competition, with a deadline that October. That was my very first success with poetry. My poem, Something Like a Stone won first prize – a cheque for £100 !
Anyone who’s ever written poetry or fiction can imagine the size of the smile on my face for hours after receiving this news.
The next hurdle was to find somewhere to lodge this cheque. I’d decided years earlier to use my maiden name of Coleman for my writing endeavours, rather than my husband’s name that I’d (willingly) taken on at our wedding. I was shocked to find how hard it was to open a building society account in my own, original name. For the first time in my marriage, I felt like ‘goods and chattels’ as I was sent home to fetch my birth and marriage certificates, my passports, and a bill for the water rates that just happened to be in my married name, rather than his.
May 26th, 2009 at 8:57 pm
[...] This post might make more sense if you read the ones below first – or at least An Arvon course and a poetry prize [...]
June 20th, 2009 at 11:36 pm
[...] gained so much from my first Arvon course, I decided to apply for an ‘advanced’ fiction course, which was to be held at Totleigh Barton [...]
July 5th, 2009 at 3:05 pm
[...] but it wasn’t till my Arvon Course at Lumb Bank in Yorkshire that I ‘came out’ as a poet. (see my post: an Arvon Course and a Poetry Prize….) I think that some of these poems have stood the test of [...]
August 26th, 2009 at 12:16 pm
[...] the next few years, I had less time for writing, and focused mainly on poetry. I had some success with this, but in the late 90s I was back in the firing line again with my novel, In The Lamb-White Days. [...]
November 2nd, 2009 at 12:50 am
[...] met Alice in August 1996 at my first residential poetry course with the Arvon Foundation at Lumb Bank in Yorkshire, and, like many others who have fallen under [...]
April 7th, 2010 at 11:04 pm
[...] Like a Stone, is on the CD in both languages. Read more about my first ever prize-winning poem, here But that wasn’t the end of the Romanian connection for me. Towards the end of February, I [...]