I told them that I had recently been inspired in my poetry ‘teaching artist’ life in many ways – including by seeing the blog of my Chicago teaching artist exchange partner, Amanda Leigh Lichtenstein – who was also speaking at that event.

Off the cuff, off the top of my head, just like that, I committed to setting up my own blog.

In the intervening weeks, while touring in Orkney and Yorkshire in my capacity as stage manager with Puppet State Theatre Company, I jotted down a few notes about what this blog might include:

• an account of the poetry teaching I’ve done in schools and other settings over recent years and months
• examples of the poetry written by young people – and older people
• ideas & writing exercises for other facilitators – or simply folks keen to write
• links to good resources
• photos, pictures
• how-to make origami boxes
• a frog poem section
• information about the Scotland Chicago Teaching Artists Exchange
• Scottish Poetry Library links

It remains to be seen to what extent I’ll use this proto-blog as a place to reflect upon my own writing practice or poetry performing – and how much it will focus purely on the teaching side of things … Let’s see!

Let me know if there are themes, issues, general-sorts-of-stuff that you’d be curious to see here.