Lifting the Curtain on the Writing Process: Blackbird Singing at Dusk - Five Weeks to Launch Day
And for my paid subscribers: a pre order discount code
It is five weeks to the publication date of my new poetry collection with Nine Arches Press, Blackbird Singing at Dusk.
This has been an unbelievably exciting year, with the launch of The Ghost Lake in August, and it feels utterly lovely to return from prose to poetry with this collection at the end of the year. Let me tell you a little bit about it, and the place where I came from in order to writ it.
I think of myself as a cross genre writer, finding the right medium for each project. In some ways, Blackbird was the precursor to The Ghost Lake and has ended up being a kind of sister project to it.
The collection wouldn’t have been possible without a small work in progress grant from the Society of Authors way back in 2021, which enabled me to settle into exploring my place in the landscape, giving me a day a week for a while to just sit with the themes, create some found poetry, explore what I was in relation to the environment around me. That’s what this collection is, it is an exploration of place.
This will be my fourth full collection, my seventh collection in all, if I include my two short collections, and I feel it marks a change in how I write and where I write from. Though the collection is not about neurodivergence, and I should add the usual imposter syndrome led caveat that I am not officially diagnosed with anything and still awaiting an assessment (and will be for some years to come I imagine), admitting to myself my oddness, accepting myself as different actually freed me to write the way I wanted, or needed to write, it gave me a permission slip to explore creatively and shake up my writing habits. I was no longer writing with the purpose of being a poet, I was writing as art, as exploration and using poetry as the tool to dig. This sounds terribly pretentious, and if you know me you will know that I’m not, but perhaps we avoid talking about poetry or writing as an art form, as something a bit magical. I see a lot online about how to craft a poem, but less about the utterly ridiculous magic that is creativity. Why shouldn’t we admit to the strange, evolutionary trait that we as human beings have, that is to explore and express through a process that is, essentially, observing what are own brains are doing and putting that into a medium that can be shared and communally experienced.
I am not sure if writers are supposed to pull back the curtain like this when they’re promoting a book, but I’ve always felt that the industry and even the craft of being a writer or an author is a bit opaque and it’s probably useful to know that I had gotten a bit stuck in my poetry and had genuinely thought about giving up on poetry altogether after When I Think of My Body as a Horse, which came out in the pandemic, launched. I felt a bit drained by it all. I didn’t know where to go from that position of absolutely pulling my bleeding beating heart out and stapling it to the page. What was I supposed to write about after that?
Blackbird is a slower, thoughtful collection, that is, I hope, an exploration of the internal in relation to the external. It asks the reader to sit with the ideas in the poems, to explore deep time, and loss, and how women in particular, exist in the environment, and the ancestry of being working class, the experience of climbing away from that. I hope it asks the reader to perhaps turn then and ask themselves about their own lineage, their own language, the place that their physical body exists in in the environment.
I’m very proud of it, and can’t wait to share it with you.
Blackbird Singing at Dusk by Wendy Pratt is a bold exploration of place within nature through themes of rural working-class identity and the female body, alongside explorations of loss and the repetitive nature of time.
I’m enormously grateful to the people, writers I admire hugely, who have endorsed this collection. It really does mean the world to me. Here’s Ian McMillan being his genuine, lovely self:
'Here is marvellous poetry that explores deep history and loss; here is the echoing power of boulders and fields shaped into shining stanzas on page after page. And here is the tight redemptive language of anger and memory.' - Ian McMillan
I’ll be posting a few bits and pieces about Blackbird in the next few weeks, I hope you’ll join me to sing at dusk with the blackbird.
As a thank you for the support my paid subscribers have given me, which also enables me to spend more time writing, below the paywall you will find a code to be used on pre orders of Blackbird Singing at Dusk. It will give you £2 off the cover price in the Nine Arches shop.