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not to blog about, literally! A huge parcel greeted me when I got home from work today and inside, this!
My runner’s up prize for my poem, ‘Great grandma’s house’, appearing in the July edition of Writers’ Forum. I put the pen there to demonstrate its size, all 1114 pages of it to hold 420,000 synonyms and antonyms. Wow! And it’s packed full of little extras too, my favourite being a section called The World Lover’s Gallimaufry (now there’s a new word!), which has useful tidbits like 30 words to sound more posh, e.g. ‘frightfully’ and ‘awfully’, and 23 words and phrases to avoid in politics, such as ‘big society’ and ‘fit for purpose’. And then did you know there are 19 ways to tell someone to hurry up and 15 ways to express enthusiasm?! The best though is 40 words to use to sound more poetic – ‘daystar’ (the sun), ‘fuliginous’ (sooty) and ‘periculous’ (dangerous). Think I’ll be slipping some of those into conversation.
So a huge thank you Sue Butler, poetry editor of the monthly magazine, for publishing my poem and for this fifty pounds worth of thesaurus, which at 2.2kg couldn’t have been cheap to send to the other side of the world. I am ‘agrin’ (the act of grinning).
So I finally got round to reading a couple of the writing magazines I subscribe to and reaching p.52 of Writers’ Forum, nearly choked on the tipple I was drinking! (a glass of chilled Nepenthe, very nice).
How fab is this, what a wonderful surprise! This is a poem I work-shopped during the Poetry School’s online feedback course I took part in recently hosted by Catherine Smith, which I then submitted to Sue Butler, the poetry editor of the magazine, a few months ago.
Writers’ Forum is an interesting read. Published every month out of Bournemouth in the UK, it’s essentially a toolkit for writers, full of articles, tips and reviews to help you along. The deadline for the poetry competition is the 15th of each month and with no entry fee and prizes to be won, I’m sure Sue gets inundated with submissions. So again a little bit pleased, got my happy dance perfected!
J V Birch 