Third Year is very hard! Writing for a grade has become draining and it has made me fall out of love with writing. I love what we learn at Edge Hill but I feel like I don’t have time to write anything else.

However, it’s not all doom and gloom! I’ve gained a new found appreciation for poetry through gaining confidence in my own poetic style. I’ve always enjoyed reading more traditional poems by Keats (to use an example) and poems with a political twist/context. This is why one of my favourite modern poets is Claudia Rankine; her book Citizen blew me away with its political and real outlook on being an African American and really gave me a focus on my own writing. Her work and poems by Valzhyna Mort and Geraldine Monk opened my eyes to the potential – not only my poems – but my writing could have. These literary works made me feel more comfortable in expressing my own experiences and viewpoints.

I think that whilst writing for a grade has become more and more tedious, my experience with my poetry has given me a more optimistic outlook; I can use these assessments for my final year to really push the boat out and write what I feel like writing (within the parameters of the marking criteria) and have if not a finished product, a starting point to new projects that I can hopefully expand and work on after I graduate.

I plan to upload more onto this site (I know I said this last year but I really mean it) and hopefully not just update posts on my life but snippets of poetry, short stories and non fiction pieces I’m working on!