Every year, I get caught out by important dates.
I usually get wind of their significance the day before, by which time more organised writers have scheduled tweets, prepared jpegs and booked themselves in for several talks relevant to the day…
And so it was that on October 1st it came to my attention that National Poetry Day was about to launch itself upon the country on 4th.
As luck would have it, a Twitter post caught my eye for a competition requiring poets to submit ‘flash poetry’ of no more than 20 words, and, even better, up to 10 poems could be submitted (I subbed two). The competition hosts are Caboodle National Book Tokens.
The results are in November and the prize is not only a £100 book token featuring the winner’s poem, but also a glorious £300 worth of poetry books. WOW!
On October 3rd, I scheduled my first tweet using Tweetdeck so that, should I forget all over again about National Poetry Day on 4th, something would be in place.
The theme this year is ‘Change’ and the hashtag to use is #poetryforachange.
I made a jpeg of a poem I wrote many years ago, which was originally titled ‘Uninvited’. As there’s a bit of biology involved, I wasn’t sure that it would be obvious who this visitor was so I added a colon before clarification: ‘The Tumour’. It was written after hearing that someone special had had a breast cancer scare. Thankfully, all turned out well in the end. It’s an example of how change can be sinister and can go unnoticed.
I look forward with enthusiasm each month to the challenge of writing for Visual Verse. More often than not, I come up with poetry, but for this month’s challenge, I wrote a piece of flash. The title is ‘The Third Thing’. The word count can be anything between 50 and 500.
In October I received my contributor’s copy of:
Poets were invited to submit material in a bid to keep open public toilets around London.
This was my effort:
P.S. The editor added ‘Professional Writer’. I LIKE it…
And finally, one of my children’s books, Mandrake’s Plot, was chosen by a Goodreads group as their book of the month. Fingers crossed for more reviews next month…
Helen Laycock | England | Helen Laycock | Fiction in a Flash 