Long-time readers will know I’m in a poetry circle called the Wyverns, where members critique each other’s work on a monthly basis.
The pieces are typically written especially for each meeting, often around a theme agreed at the previous one. Because I write mine quite quickly, it’s not unusual that I’ll submit mine the week before we meet.
By Friday of last week, I had no ideas for the October prompt of wonder, at least until I happened to walk past the house of a former friend. A ten-line verse quickly began to emerge and I submitted it the same evening.
I try to avoid rewrites because we keep in touch via an email distribution list, which makes it difficult to track multiple versions, but I made a rare exception. It’s already received some good feedback, but the best critiques come at the meetings themselves, where members read in front of the others, offering an extra angle that a poem on the page often doesn’t convey.
That’s not the only piece I created over the weekend.
On Sunday, I made a last-minute decision to see two exhibitions at the V&A Dundee, followed by one at Dundee Contemporary Arts. During the last of these, I was struck with another idea for the Fun a Day challenge held every January. It’s early days, but this is already beginning to exist inside its own self-contained universe.
The challenge for this coming January is already in the can and will be revealed towards the end of December this year, so this current idea will need to wait until 2028. Maybe the real challenge will be to keep it under wraps until then.
