I began to write in childhood, and in my early twenties had fiction published by Faber and Faber. When I opened  New Measure magazine to find my first published poem, it was printed opposite one by W.H.Auden. I remember leaping and waving my arms in the air in the fields near my home. Soon my play, Cadenza, was staged on the Edinburgh Fringe and land earmarked by Anthony Cornish for BBC radio production (though he couldn’t get financial backing). Peter Jay published my hybrid prose/poetry collection The Green Table of Infinity, which led B.S Johnson, in  Aren’t You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs? to include me in his list of groundbreaking UK fiction writers.

But I changed direction, took a degree in philosophy, then immersed myself in meditation, and later became a psychotherapist, a profession I continue to practise. For decades I published nothing apart from papers on psychotherapy. Occasionally I’d draft a story or a poem, but they hardly went further than my desk.

Then, after moving out of the city, I began to take meandering, solitary walks. Lines of poetry began to appear, persistently enough for me to write them down and work on them. I read Ruth Padel’s  ’52 Ways of Looking at a Poem’ as an entry into reading current poetry, took Poetry School workshops with Tim Liardet and Carrie Etter, Arvon courses with leading UK and U.S. poets, and an MA in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University.

My New Writing Life After a long digression via philosophy, spiritual search and being a psychotherapist, I’ve immersed myself in contemporary poetry, studied with the Poetry School and Arvon, and gained an MA with distinction from Bath Spa University.  I’m on fire with poems and stories, and getting widely published in magazine and anthologies. My full collection, A Bluebottle in Late October is now published by V.Press