My blogs

About me

Gender	Female
Occupation	Full-time mother
Location	London, United Kingdom
Introduction	I'm a time-rich/money poor, single mother. I mostly write haiku, because I like the discipline of the form. I had hardly written anything for years, and it took some terrible events in April 2007, which led to the end of my marriage, to start me writing again. That was the start of a sequence of poems about my divorce, which I have called "Separate Ways". I think each poem can stand on its own, but it is also an unfolding (and as yet, unfinished) story. I have found the haiku form stops me from getting over-emotional and "gushy". It took several months before I wrote about anything else, but when I did ("Summer Solstice"), it felt like a really big step. I think the style and subject matter of my "non-divorce poems" are also influenced by the fact that I am quite a keen photographer, so a lot of them are purely observational, and are about things that caught my eye, because they were quirky or ironic. I believe that my poems are carefully crafted, and I think very hard about every single word (well, you have to, when most of them are only 17 syllables long!). By the way, the photo was taken, while I was actually writing the poems on 8 October 2008!
Interests	Writing poetry, chatting with friends, reading, cinema, gardening, occasional drinking, eating (but fussy), watching TV, sending birthday and Xmas cards.
Favorite movies	It's a Wonderful Life, Pulp Fiction, Raise the Red Lantern, Wizard of Oz, Amelie, Spirited Away, Blade Runner, Casablanca, Die Hard, What's Eating Gilbert Grape, The Graduate, The Bourne Identity trilogy, Sound of Music, Full Metal Jacket, Once Upon a Time in the West.
Favorite music	Almost anything pre-1981, plus currently: Rufus Wainwright, Richard Hawley, Coldplay, Keane, Amy Winehouse, Mika, Kaiser Chiefs, James Blunt, that sort of thing... Also, all sorts of jazz, and some classical.
Favorite books	Everything I've read so far by Hariko Murakami, anything by Jane Austen, Charles Dickens or Thomas Hardy, The Lovely Bones, We need to talk about Kevin, The Time Traveller's Wife, The Poisonwood Bible, This Thing of Darkness, A Prayer for Owen Meany, Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, all the children's "classics", like the Narnia books.