Today my living room floor disappeared beneath poetry.
Twenty-three poems, pages spread across tables and floors, clipped into piles, moved around, shuffled, and questioned. Some belonged together immediately. Others fought me every step of the way.
This is the part of writing people rarely see.
Most readers see the finished book.
They see the cover, the published book, the finished poem.
They don’t see the tea going cold, the notes scribbled on scraps of paper, the rewrites, or the moment a collection starts revealing what it wants to become.
One thing I always do is print my poems.
Partly for copyright reasons. I like having a physical copy of my work from the moment it starts becoming something real.
But the bigger reason is dyslexia.
Reading from paper is simply easier on my eyes than reading from a screen. When I hold a poem in my hands, I can see it differently. Awkward lines stand out. Missing words become obvious. Rhythms that looked fine on a screen suddenly feel wrong.
A poem can hide from me on a monitor. It can’t hide from me on paper.
So before Poetry in a Northern Kitchen became four piles on my living room floor, it became twenty-three printed pages in my hands.
As I sorted through them, themes started appearing.
Home.
Voice.
Survival.
The spaces in between.
Some poems already fit perfectly. Others will need work. I’ll be tweaking them, grounding them more firmly in the world of Poetry in a Northern Kitchen.
Because this book isn’t really about kitchens.
It’s about the lives lived around them.
The conversations held over mugs of tea.
The worries carried while washing dishes.
The memories tucked away in drawers.
The people who held families together with determination, humour, and whatever happened to be available at the time.
Today wasn’t about writing new poems.
It was about listening to the ones already written and asking what story they were trying to tell together.
The answer is still unfolding.
But for the first time, I can see the shape of the book beginning to emerge.
And honestly, that’s a pretty good day’s work.
Thank you for reading
Your DislexicPoet 🖤
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