I am a Leeds-based performance poet, event host, broadcaster and one half of the Poets Talking Bollocks podcast. Chiefly writing about borders, migration, trespass, mental health and structural inequality, I can often be found on a road somewhere between events across the North.

My poetic journey now seems like a long fuse that burned for several decades before starting to spark around 2013, but not fully detonating until early 2020, shortly before the pandemic shut the country down. This detonation has turned out to not only be just in the nick of time, but also fortuitously timed to combine with other related factors to lead me to a point where I am now not only performing my own poetry across the North of England – and occasionally beyond – but helping to build a significant community in the region (see community section)

I have always had an interest in and somewhat of a flair for writing. However, following school, I kept any subsequent writing to myself and didn't develop it in any way. It was not until I travelled to Australia and South Africa in 2001/2002, and subsequently moved to Spain where I wrote a Bill Bryson-style travelogue of that trip, that I made any attempt to trouble agents and publishers with my work. I did have some promising overtures from one publisher, but the book remains unpublished today.

Life then became busy with starting a business, parenthood and some personal difficulties during the years which followed; writing took a back seat. I finally joined a writers' critiquing circle in early 2013, where I was submitting mostly prose and only occasionally poetry. I started going to open mics in Leeds in 2016, and became an occasional visitor to Wordspace, where I learned about this course. I did not seriously consider starting an MA at that stage, however, and I did not even consider myself a poet, merely a prose writer who dabbled in poetry. In December 2019, I was still only an occasional open mic attendee. At this time, a friend invited me to join a radio magazine show on what is now East Leeds Community Radio at Chapel FM Arts Centre (see Broadcasting section). In February and March of 2020, I read poems live in the studio, and on hearing these back when I listened to the broadcasts afterwards, and it struck me that while they had some merit, I could see where they might be improved. A national lockdown was then declared, and finding myself with significant free time, I found a huge range of new online activities, such as virtual open mics, workshops and more formal courses.

This was where my craft finally began to be developed. I particularly remember an excellent course run by York St John's University on poetry appreciation. I also used the money I was saving from not going out to pubs, restaurants etc to order in dozens of poetry books every week, and I started subscribing to journals such as North, PNR and Poetry Wales. By 2022, I had immersed myself in poetry for two years and had, in periods when the lockdowns had been lifted, started performing live to real audiences, at Wordspace again and also at Chapel FM. I then saw a course that Carcanet Press were running with the University of Manchester in the summer of 2022 (see Community section again). The following year, inspired by what I had learned on that short course, I enrolled on an MA Creative Writing course at Leeds Trinity (with which the Wordspace open mic is connected – see Study section)

The standard of guidance on the Carcanet/University of Manchester short course (see Poetry) was impressive, and it felt like a breakthrough period. I produced what I believe were my strongest poems so far at that time, but I also remember a tutor making a throwaway comment which has stuck with me and I believe influenced many things I have done since. He encouraged us to remain connected as a community of writers, as community was, he felt, important to the business of making poetry. The idea stuck with me and when, in late 2022, I began to involve myself in more live poetry events as restrictions were lifted more comprehensively, I also began to cultivate these connections more. I started to go to a poetry circle in Manchester, became involved in a literary affinity group in Leeds, went to more events in Manchester and, at the end of February 2023, spent a lot of time at the Leeds Literature Festival, watching magnificent performers and also performing my own work alongside some of them. I discovered there were many, many more open mics in Leeds than I had realised, and I not only started going to all of them, but I encouraged people I had met at one Open Mic to join me at others and so on. Along with a couple of friends I had made on the circuit, I started going to a weekly music open mic in Leeds where we persuaded the organisers to allow us to do spoken word. We thought we would be laughed off stage or worse, be treated with indifference, but in fact we were warmly embraced by the community and found ourselves invited to other crossover events.

It was at one of these, in mid-June 2023, at the Packhorse Inn off Briggate, that I was outside getting some fresh air and reflecting on what a flat night it was, when a group of half-a-dozen or so middle-aged people, looking worse for wear, stumbled through us and into the pub. The last of them turned out to be a friend from early in my involvement with Chapel FM, a local performer, host, broadcaster and producer, someone I regard as a top spoken-word performer. After niceties, I begged her to perform, as I was sure she would inject some life into the evening – but she initially tried to decline. I managed to persuade her, and it turned out some of her friends were performers too. The night became a legendary one, and I had the idea that we should not rely on people chancing on open mics in the city but connect everyone better.

To this end, I started a WhatsApp group, adding most people present and making two of them admins so they could also add people. I reckoned on maybe 30-50 people eventually becoming involved, a hard-core of people who would use the group as an information exchange so we would get to each others' events. In fact, there are now some 340 people on the group as I write, bearing in mind some 70 have also left deciding it wasn't for them due to the number of notifications, so over 400 have joined in total. Those that stay find a mine of information about events both local to Leeds and further afield across the North. Ever since, I find that events I go to have faces I recognise even when I don't expect them to, because they are getting their information from the same place.