Not About Now with The Writing Squad

Not About Now was a 2020-21 project by The Writing Squad, funded by a donation from Simon Armitage and the TS Eliot Foundation.

I was selected for The Writing Squad, a collective for writers in Northern England, in 2016, and now, as a graduate, I attend many of their workshops and groups. During the first Covid lockdown, the Squad moved their activities online, and I was part of a poetry group that met every week on Zoom.

For Not About Now, 14 poets from this group were commissioned to each write two poems for a print anthology. We were placed into pairs, to edit each other’s work, and I worked with Hannah Hodgson.

My poems, ‘The cat hops down from the helicopter’ and ‘The goslings’, explore Manchester, urban nature, mental health and isolation, and my life with PCOS (polycystic ovaries) in a more abstract way.

We performed our poems at the Zoom launch, and were each given a stack of the books, which are beautifully produced. It was a really nice project to be part of.