Almost Composed

Meditation and curiosity

Look ye also while life lasts

June 25, 2014

“The wonder of the worldThe beauty and the power,The shapes of things,Their colours, lights and shades,These I saw.Look ye also while life lasts.” These lines are tucked away at the beginning of Benji Davies’ beautiful children’s book, The Storm Whale. At first I thought it might be a quotation from a crow’s nest reverie in Moby Dick. In actual fact, these wise […]

categories: reflections

How to read a city

May 28, 2014

The weekend brought me to Dublin for a wedding. I had some errands to run in the morning and went out to beat the streets. Inevitably, I found myself in a bookshop on the north side of the river where I picked up some titles in the Penguin Great Ideas series. For a tense moment, it looked as […]

categories: journeys, reflections

Kanban, thank you ma’am

May 17, 2014

I’ll be leaving my publishing job in two weeks, after seven years’ loyal service. A lot of work had to be squeezed into every week if books were to be signed up, edited, reviewed, sent to print, and the little details satisfied, such as their having covers and blurbs. Digital projects were even more complex. So […]

categories: reflections

Getting published – talk by Alysoun Owen, editor of The Writers’ & Artists’ Yearbook

February 8, 2014

Alysoun’s talk focused on the changing landscape of publishing, self-publishing strategies and what publishers have to offer. I was particularly interested in ‘how to hook an agent’. What she had to say was pragmatic and at times sobering. Suffice to say a lot of people write but not many make much money at it. Fine […]

categories: reflections
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How we made our poetry pamphlet, The Inner Sea

July 1, 2013

Joe Franklin, Hugh Greasley and I are releasing an anthology of our poetry today, The Inner Sea. A printed pamphlet is available (contact me for details) but, for convenience, we’ve also created a pdf to be freely circulated on the web. Click here to read The Inner Sea. If you enjoy the poetry, please pass […]

categories: poems