Dearest friends,

Welcome back to our writerly thoughts to distract, inspire and reassure you. Be well, keep reading, keep writing and know that we’re always here.

 1. Writing

Tomorrow is Tom Stoppard’s birthday. He once posed, “What are a friend’s books for if not to be borrowed?” Are you a lender of books? If so, you probably fall into one of two camps; either you always manage to engineer a safe return to the bookshelf mothership, or you’re happy to leave everything to book karma, thinking that what goes around comes around perhaps in a different form.

Think of a cherished item a friend has borrowed (real or imagined) but not yet returned. Now write a poem in which you ask for it back. Try to express the deep connection you have with it.

 
2. Reading

The Small Box

The small box gets its first teeth
And its small length
Its small width and small emptiness
And all that it has got

The small box is growing bigger
And now the cupboard is in it
That it was in before

And it grows bigger and bigger and bigger
And now has in it the room
And the house and the town and the land
And the world it was in before

The small box remembers its childhood
And by overgreat longing
It becomes a small box again

Now in the small box
Is the whole world quite tiny
You can easily put it in a pocket
Easily steal it easily lose it

Take care of the small box

Vasco Popa
Quoted from page 9 of Poetry Is, by Ted Hughes. Doubleday, 1967.

3. Celebrating
We are beyond chuffed that fellow Dark Angel, Lucy Beevor, has won the 2021 Mairtín Crawford Short Story Award. Lucy is a very special writer who has previously been a finalist for the Michael McLaverty Short Story Award, was short-listed for the Mairtín Crawford Award for Short Story in 2019, the John O’Connor Short Story Prize in 2018 and the Bath Flash Fiction Award.

Read Lucy’s winning story, Landslide, here. It really is a shining example of the form and so beautifully written. Brava!

4. Gathering
Join us via Zoom for an hour of writing and talking with other Dark Angels. We meet at 7pm UK time every Tuesday. Click here on the night. There’s no need to register in advance and we’ll be using the same link every week from now on. There’s no charge. And feel free to bring a friend along.

From everyone at Dark Angels