About Me

Although I have lived in Cornwall since 1984, I am not Cornish-bred. I was born into a tribe of South and East Londoners to be raised and educated in what seemed to me then – the late 1950’s – a kind of vast industrialised hinterland.  It stretched from the City, where my mother used to work, down to  Southend-on-Sea where my extended family liked to go on daytrips and where I spent my first proper holiday. At about age 4, I stayed with  my grandparents in a boarding house on the seafront. It was August, but the room we slept in was no less damp and chilly for that. I didn’t mind. Ice cream was plentiful. Also, there was Punch and Judy, The Kursaal with its famous ‘caterpillar’ ride, and Peter Pan’s Playground. We stayed the whole week without ever visiting the ‘beach’ but I went to the Playground every day.

 

Much later on in my life, I worked in a variety of jobs –  office work, newspaper advertising, cleaning, play leadership and  youth work - before, eventually,  finding my niche in teaching and qualifying as an English specialist. In 1982, I began my first teaching job at a large comprehensive in Laindon. It wasn’t the easiest of schools to launch your career in but it was there I found I loved teaching. I stayed two years before accepting a post in Redruth. The area was known to me because my father, a Bevin Boy during the SWW, had been a dynamiter at South Crofty mine. He fell in love with Cornwall and, during our annual summer holidays, I did too.

 

 As well as my teaching qualifications, I also hold a degree in Complementary Medicine (London, 2008) and a Diploma in Creative Writing (OU, 2010) Both of these were awarded with Distinction and they both turned out to be important steps on my path to becoming a poet. By 2008, I had been diagnosed with quite a serious health condition, one which, in the end, cost me my teaching career so, once having completed my two year Creative Writing course with the Open University, I began to submit my work regularly. I have since been published in numerous magazines,  journals and anthologies. Many of the latter are not-for-profit fundraisers for causes close to my heart.

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The work I am most pleased and proud to see published is my 100 poem collection Out of Eden which sets out  to honor the stories of working class women, including the remarkable women of my own family, while celebrating their achievements, their enduring resilience, their pride and their strength. Also included is work that originates in my own early experience of grooming, sexual abuse  and life-threatening male violence. It was many, many years before I was able to address these darker aspects of my past but I sincerely believe that it is important for those who have suffered in this way not only to speak out but to be heard. Yes, some of the work is dark but it is written in  the spirit of survival.  I spent far too much of my adult life without a voice at all, silenced by victim-blaming and  the continuing impact of my trauma , not to write about these more difficult themes. 

 

Recently, I have enjoyed some success in major competitions. In 2024, I was placed second in the International Plaza Prose Poetry Competition, and I was awarded  third place in the International Patricia Eschen Award, before going on to win the National Metro Competition on the theme of ‘Care’. The problem of providing adequate care for elderly parents is one that faces many older people  today, mostly but not exclusively, women. Indeed, until four years ago, I was one of those people, caring for my ill, frail and very elderly mother. Not surprisingly, this too is reflected in my work. 

 

In October 2025, I was invited to speak at the FiLiA women’s conference in Brighton where I appeared alongside Emma Thomas in support of Vaishnavi Sundar’s ground-breaking documentary (Lime Soda Films) Behind The Looking Glass. I continue to support women’s causes and women’s charities as much as I am able, and I am delighted to have been booked to appear on a  panel discussion for cancelled poets and writers at Women Create (UK and International) in the spring of 2027.