Poets Anonymous

Jun 27, 2025

Members might be interested to hear about the regular local monthly sessions of Poets Anonymous. They meet in person on the First Friday of the month at Ruskin House, 23 Coombe Rd, Croydon CR0 1BD, from 8pm. The cost for attending is a very reasonable £2.

If you can’t get there in person, they also meet on Zoom on the Third Friday of the month at 8pm. Log-in details are sent out the day before.

To sign up for an online session or for further details please contact peter@poetsanon.org.uk

Helen Dunmore’s Rules for Writing

Jun 12, 2025
  • Finish the day’s writing when you still want to continue.
  • Listen to what you have written. A dud rhythm in a passage of dialogue may show that you don’t yet understand the characters well enough to write in their voices.
  • Read Keats’s letters.
  • Reread, rewrite, reread, rewrite. If it still doesn’t work, throw it away. It’s a nice feeling, and you don’t want to be cluttered with the corpses of poems and stories which have everything in them except the life they need.
  • Learn poems by heart.
  • Join professional organisations which advance the collective rights of authors.
  • A problem with a piece of writing often clarifies itself if you go for a long walk.
  •  If you fear that taking care of your children and household will damage your writing, think of JG Ballard. (Ballard was a devoted father who brought up three children alone after his wife’s early death)
  • Don’t worry about posterity – as Larkin (no sentimentalist) observed “What will survive of us is love

From the Guardian

Michael Round Prize

Jun 1, 2025

The Michael Round Prize is now closed. The winner will be announced at our November meeting.

The competition…

  • was free to enter,
  • accepted stories up to 1,200 words on the theme ‘Far and Wide’,
  • offered prizes of £100 and £50
  • was open until 30 September 2025.

The full rules are here.

9 June – Open Meeting

May 31, 2025

Our meeting on 9 June was an open meeting, for sharing, reading work, and discussion. We read our work, which covered a variety of topics from the humble pressure cooker, a handbag, this “island of strangers”, childhood memories and death. 

12 May – Will Noble

May 13, 2025
Ethel, who presented the meeting, with Will and a copy of his book.

The greatest city that never was? At the 12 May meeting, Will Noble gave us an entertaining view of the history of our town, based on his book Croydonopolis, enjoyed by meany members and now in paperback. Will highlighted Croydon’s long story of bold innovations and early failures, with an undaunted determination fuelled by men such as Archbishop John Whitgift and Sir James Marshall, a persistence which has carried through many rejected bids for official city status up to the present day.

Will told us his sights were originally set on scriptwriting, but instead he developed a career on the Londonist website, which he now edits. He plans to do more non-fiction one day, but his next book – you heard it here first – will probably be fiction. We look forward to it.