One Night Stanzas

It’s been a busy week… so busy that last night I finally ran out of spoons and nearly burst into tears in a carpark, just because I was so, so tired. (Fortunately, Lovely Boyfriend was on hand to give me hugs, ply me with chips and pay for a taxi home.) However, it’s also been a totally amazing week. Here are just a few of the things I’ve been loving…

Spring finally arriving (properly) in Edinburgh
I love Tollcross in the Spring… loads of daffodils everywhere, the Meadows two minutes away (so as soon as it feels even vaguely warm I can sprint outside to lounge), the Pine Tree Bakery smelling delicious… wonderful.

Baking, of course
I recently discovered that the magical wonderland that is Real Foods stock frozen sour cherries, which basically made my LIFE. This week I baked the perfect (if I do say so myself) cherry pie, and Lovely Boyfriend and I got into Twin Peaks mode with pie and coffee.

Hanging out in my sweet flat
Lovely Boyfriend and I are probably moving house soon… I don’t want to jinx it, because we haven’t signed on the dotted line yet, but we’re kinda sorta buying our own house. Oh my goodness. But as excited as I am to have my own place — do a ton of decorating and have a veggie garden (!) and get a dog (!!) — I am also a little sad to leave my crows-nest of a top floor flat in wonderful Tollcross. So I’ve been trying to appreciate it and enjoy it while I still have it. Thanks so much to Kate for making my living room look extra pretty this week!

Ooh! New tattoo?
My half-sleeve is finally totally 100% healed, which means it’s finally photogenic! This is obviously only a section of it, as it wraps most of the way round my arm, but you get the gist! It’s a psychedelically-coloured Oliver No.9 typewriter with the words O beautiful Garbo of my karma spiralling up from it on an On-The-Road-style scroll. The words are from Allen Ginsberg’s Kaddish, which is a contender for my all-time favourite poem ever.

Hanging out in the Forest Cafe
Forest, I shall miss you too when I move away! (Don’t worry, I’ll still visit for sure.) Pretty much the absolute best place for people watching in the whole of Edinburgh. Also, cool murals with dragons in them.

Packed poetry readings
The first photo here is of the lovely Louise Peterkin, reading at the Shore Poets Open Night. She was absolutely brilliant, in spite of major technical difficulties, and as you can see, the audience is rapt! The second photo is my all-time favourite, Scotland’s most underrated poet (seriously), the great McGuire, bringing the awesome at the last ever Ten Red.

My students
Often puzzling, occasionally aggravating, generally excellent. Some of them (I don’t know which) stole this sign, which reads IN HERE FOR HIGHER ENGLISH EVENING CLASS, and placed it on the janitor’s cupboard door. Those pesky kids…

Filming for Making It Home
But the very, very best thing about my week was this: going out on set with some of the amazing participants from my poetry/film group at Women Supporting Women, to help them on their first ever filming session for Making It Home. We spent roughly five hours together, mostly on the beach under the most incredible volcanic sky, and I’ve never been so proud in my life. They were so confident and able, and such a great team — hard to believe that only a handful of months ago these women were intimidated by an Edwin Morgan poem! I felt like a bumbling idiot as I shuffled along in their extremely professional wake, mostly holding stuff! But so inspired and so, so proud.
There’s still a tiny bit of time left in our fundraising campaign, too: if you want to help these women to translate their experiences into a book that we can give out to the public for free and share their incredible journey, then please click here. Watch our video (bonus! derp-y shots of me), read about what we do, spread the word and, if you can, donate. I’ll love you forever!

What have YOU been loving this week?

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Budding writer? Creative person in need of a fun job? Check out the various resources and services at Bookworm Tutors. Alternatively, check out Edinburgh Vintage, our sister site. If you want to get in touch you can follow OneNightStanzas on Twitter, or email claire[at]onenightstanzas.com. I reply as swiftly as I can!

An update on the Making It Home Project, which I blogged about a few days ago: YOU ARE ALL WONDERFUL PEOPLE.

On Sunday, we reached our funding target of £1,000, which means we can make our magical book a reality. Thank you so much to anyone who read about the project, shared the link, sent folk in our general direction or best of all, donated a tiny little bit or a whole great big lot to help us make our book a reality. YOU ALL ROCK.

However, we’re not done!

There is still time before the funding deadline passes. There is still time for you to give us some money.

But why? I hear you cry! You’ve already got what you need! And yep, you’re right. We have the money we need to create our book and print a few copies and distribute them about the place, hopefully for free. BUT! There are various ways that, with your help, we can make our magical book even more magical. They are as follows:

- Right now, we’re only able to budget a very small amount for graphic design, which means we’re having to call in favours from our pro graphic design friends. We’d love to be able to afford more, so a) the book can look fancier and b) we can pay the people involved a proper rate.

- More money means a larger print run, which means more folk can get their hands on free books. FREE BOOKS are what make the world go around, amirite?

- While the fundraising’s been going on, we’ve been busily collecting quotes from printers and other book-creation folks. If we raise more money, we’ll be able to go for the option that’s best for us and our book, rather than just the cheapest options.

- Fancy binding! Fancy papers! END PAPERS! Basically a much more fancy, pretty, lovely book for all of YOU to read!

Convinced? Click on the title in the widget below (or click here) to head to the donation page! Not convinced? Click it anyway — it’ll take you to a video that shows you some of the amazing work our two groups of women have been doing. You can also read more about what we hope to achieve with this project, and that might help you to make up your mind about donating. Can’t afford to donate? Please don’t worry. You should still click on the link, because there are other ways you can help. Below the video are a series of tabs that will allow you to tweet or Facebook details about the project, or share them via email. Spreading the word is just as important as giving money… really!

Here’s the link:

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Budding writer? Creative person in need of a fun job? Check out the various resources and services at Bookworm Tutors. Alternatively, check out Edinburgh Vintage, our sister site. If you want to get in touch you can follow OneNightStanzas on Twitter, or email claire[at]onenightstanzas.com. I reply as swiftly as I can!

Hey ONS-ers. I have a big, big favour to ask.

I don’t often ask you guys for stuff. I’ve never run ads here, and I even took down my tip-jar ’cause I felt bad about it. But now I’m asking for your help, because I know you’re all super-cool individuals who know a damn good cause when you see one.

I’ve spoken a bit before, here (scroll past the inevitable cake pictures!) about the totally life-changing (really!) work I’ve been doing over the past year with a thing called The Making It Home Project. I won’t say too much about it here, because I want you to go and read all the details at this link instead, but I will say: this is the sort of creative work that I deeply, passionately believe in. Forget fancy book launches, forget big anthologies, forget even the humble poetry slam. This is what poetry ought to be doing with itself: opening up amazing new creative possibilities to people who might otherwise never have read a poem in their lives.

I’m being mysterious, so go see what I’m talking about! But first, listen to the following, heartfelt plea…

You guys all know the power of books — you wouldn’t read this bookgeek blog otherwise. You know there’s something about a book: they’ve got a special sort of magic that no other object has. And a lot of you know how much more magical a book becomes if it contains something that you yourself wrote… right? Well, we want to make a really, really magical book. It’ll be a book we can give to the incredible women we’ve been working with, so they can also experience how awesome (literally) it feels to hold and read and share a book that has your words in it. It’ll also be a book we can give to all of you — for free! — to show you the amazing work these groups of women have been doing.

I’d like to ask you to do three small things.

One: watch our video.

RST Poetry Film taster from media co-op on Vimeo.

Two: click on the link in the image below, go and read more about what we’re doing, and how we plan to make our book.

Three: if you can (and only if you can), donate a pound or two to our cause. Any donation over £5 gets a reward… the more you give, the bigger and cooler your reward will be. If you can’t afford to donate, that is totally OK. But I’d be super grateful if you could spread the word around to anyone you think can help us.

These three things will take you what? Five minutes? If that. But your five minutes will make a massive difference and I promise, I will be very, very grateful to you!

Thanks guys. You rock.

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You can also visit Read This Press for more poetry (and typewriter paraphernalia!). Alternatively, check out Edinburgh Vintage, our sister site. If you want to get in touch you can follow OneNightStanzas on Twitter, or email claire[at]onenightstanzas.com. I reply as swiftly as I can!

Isa Chandra Moskowitz

So, I’ve waxed lyrical about this lady a good few times already, but I am going to do it again, because she so totally rocks my world. For Christmas, Lovely Boyfriend bought me her Vegan Cupcakes Take Over The World (co-authored with Terry Hope Romero), along with a bunch of cupcake-baking equipment, and I have been cupcaking like a mad person ever since. Those starry babies in the photo above were my first effort: they’re the most basic chocolate cupcake in the book, but they came out beautifully, so I thought I’d get more ambitious. Next, I made the maple and candied walnut variety you see below, as a ‘birthday cake’ for Lovely Boyfriend’s brother. They were so good that he requested a second batch! So, for a family gathering (pressure!) I moved onto pistachio and rosewater (second photo down). These are super cool, because the cake is green and the icing is pink (excuse the weird orangey photo — it’s my kitchen light, not an Instagram filter)! I was kinda flu-filled on the day, so I couldn’t really taste my creations, sadly… but I’m told they were delicious. My most recent offerings were the double chocolate truffle cupcakes you see in the bottom photo. These are a variation on the basic chocolate, but with gooey ganache on the top and a Booja Booja truffle for decoration. FREAKING LUSH. What next, I wonder…? I am officially a cupcake addict!

(PS: I made a Flickr set for all my vegan baking — and some of the vegan food regularly rustled up for me by the Lovely Boyfriend — so if you fancy following my spoon-lickin’ exploits, check back here!)

The Making it Home Project

I’m really excited that I’m finally able to talk publicly about my involvement with this amazing project! I keep mentioning this mysterious women’s community project I’ve been working for, but I’ve been unable to go into much detail until now. I’m happy to announce that we’ve been able to go public, thanks to an injection of much-needed funds from Creative Scotland. So, what’s it all about?

Poetry is an extremely powerful educational and social tool. It has all sorts of amazing uses — I’m sure that if you follow this blog, I don’t need to convince you of that. Making It Home was born when, a little while ago, the Refugee Survival Trust decided to harness the awesome power of poetry and use it to do cool stuff in some of Scotland’s local communities. They got in touch with Glasgow’s Maryhill Integration Network, Edinburgh’s Women Supporting Women (part of the Pilton Community Health Project), and the wonderful folks at the Scottish Poetry Library, with the aim of creating two poetry-reading groups for women. Through the poems read, discussed and shared in these groups, the women present would explore ideas about home: belonging, nationhood, community, family and everything else the word ‘home’ conjures up.

I feel incredibly lucky and blessed, because I was approached to be the creative facilitator at Women Supporting Women. My group of incredible women have given me a whole new understanding of what poetry is, and what it can do. They’ve discussed poems I’ve read probably hundreds of times, and made me see them in totally new ways. They’ve learned tons about poems and their ever-so-slightly magical powers — and so have I!

Even better: thanks to the funding injection, the project has grown a new arm. As of early January, the Making It Home groups teamed up with Media Co-Op, a brilliant independent film-making co-operative based in Glasgow. These guys are now working with the groups of women, teaching them how to translate their many, many great responses to the poems into short films detailing their personal journeys. It’s early days yet, but already it feels like a whirlwind of brilliant ideas and inspiration. I’m so happy to be part of the ongoing project, and feel really lucky to be able to witness the creative process behind what will, eventually — we hope! — become a full-scale film installation that all of YOU can come and see and support!

(Both these photos are from the Maryhill Integration Network’s amazing Flickrstream.)

What are YOU loving this week?

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You can also visit Read This Press for more poetry (and typewriter paraphernalia!). Alternatively, check out Edinburgh Vintage, our sister site. If you want to get in touch you can follow OneNightStanzas on Twitter, or email claire[at]onenightstanzas.com. I reply as swiftly as I can!