My Arts Council writing residency at Sunnyside Rural Trust has culminated in The Memoir Garden – a poetry collection that will be launched in Berkhamsted on 22nd May.

I held monthly workshops and interviews over the course of a year, collaborating with participants to create and edit poems from their own words and reminiscences. 

The Memoir Garden captures a wide range of expressions and experiences – from enforced celibacy to engagement parties; from a father’s funeral to the discovery of a birth mother; from a relative who no longer visits to a house filled with friends. But all these poems offer rare insights into lives that have too often been silenced. These voices are clamouring to be heard.