One Night Stanzas

But although my living room is a total mess, ONS is not! I’ll admit, I had kind of let it go to rack and ruin recently, and for that I apologise! The One Night Stanzas Store was still advertising Christmas deals and sold-out pamphlets, and my bio was seriously behind the times! But if you look at the top right-hand corner of One Night Stanzas‘ homepage now, you’ll see it’s all been tidied up a bit.

The One Night Stanzas bookstore is no more. Sorry guys — blame yourselves! You all nagged me for a cheap place to buy poetry books and then no one bought any! However, One Night Stanzas does still have a Store page — you can still grab the Read This Press jewellery and pamphlets by following this link.

“About One Night Stanzas” and “About Claire” have now been merged — they’re just About now. And “Contact” has become Contribute — so if you want to send me something, ask me something, give me feedback or write something for the blog, that’s now your place.

While I’m here I just want to say two more things…

One, I’m sorry for the slow-down in postings over the past little while. My life is becoming increasingly busy, hectic and exciting, with so many projects to work on, events to attend and so on! I’m now teaching at college and Uni, reading a PhD, working the performance poetry circuit, helping to co-ordinate this collection, making jewellery, editing chapbooks, judging poetry contests, working on major poetry commissions and preparing for the return of Read This Magazine in not too long a time… plus trying to find time to write! It’s insane, but fantastic. But it does mean One Night Stanzas has to take a back seat sometimes.

And two? Thanks so much for sticking around, reading, commenting, sending me links, following me on Twitter, inviting me to read at events, sending your books for me to review, recommending stuff and doing everything else that you do. You guys rock.

– I sent out all the contributor copies of Skin Deep, so if you’re in it, you should now have seen it! If you haven’t received your copy, let me know — it may be that your postal service just needs a few more days, but things do get misplaced. If you have received your copy, I’d really love to know what you thought — any comments or suggestions you have will be really helpful when it comes to putting together the next RT Press anthology, so don’t stay quiet!

– I’ve been helping my poor class of 23 students through their mock exams this weekend. They’ve been keeping me on my toes, bombarding me with questions via email and sending me revision notes and practice past papers to look over. The exam was yesterday and they were all rather shell-shocked when I saw them. Fingers crossed, they did OK!

– ONS is moving house! The Boy and I have been looking for flats, too — living in a one-room studio flat for nearly three years was fun and all, but it’s time for a change! Fortunately, we have found a beautiful top-floor flat in the lovely Stockbridge area — it has no less than FIVE rooms (kitchen, two bedrooms, living room, bathroom) and feels enormous in comparison to our present house. We’re looking forward to being able to have guests staying again, something we haven’t been able to do for years, and having a dinner table to eat off! If you want to come and stay, get in line now… I know loads of people are already clamouring to visit when we move in!

– & of course, today is my birthday! But because I have loads of teaching and other boring stuff to do this week, I celebrated over the weekend with The Boy, my sister and my ‘rents. We cooked, sat around nattering (family trait), went out to dinner, opened presents, went to the seaside, had a great time… more in this week’s TiLT! It was a low-fi, relaxed kind of birthday, but a lovely one.

THANK YOU to those of you who have sent me birthday wishes, left a tip for ONS, or bought me something from my Amazon wishlist (not sure how you did it though — this link didn’t work before!!). I really wasn’t expecting anything, so you guys are AWESOME. Thank you thank you thank you!

…I also woke up this morning to the news that two of my poems are going to be published in William Soule’s fantastic magazine The Clearfield Review. Pretty good start to the day so far!

Normal service will be resumed soon. Thanks guys!

(Photo by Lspeng)