Hello there! I’m Andrew McMillan, the poet who has the pleasure of guest blogging on here for the next couple of weeks. I usually keep people up to date on what I’ve been doing over at my own blog:
http://andrewmcmillanpoet.tumblr.com/
and so it’s actually quite nice to have a change of scenery. Over the next couple of weeks I’ll be discussing various ideas/debates/stories as well as keeping you up to date on what I’ve been doing and who I’ve been meeting.
Today is a fairly quiet day, just running a workshop this
evening for a group of young people who are working with Simon Armitage on the Stanza Stones project. I’ve booked myself in for a tattoo a week today, a new copy of The Stinging Fly just arrived with a generous cheque for writing them a review of Brendan Kennelly’s new selected poems. It is times like this I feel incredibly lucky to be able to do what I love and to make a living from it; I get to read countless poetry books, pass comment on them, I get to discuss ideas with people of all ages at writing groups up and down the country and I get to be creative in lots of different ways.
Tommorow I’m giving a reading at the Wordsworth Trust over in Grasmere. There are worse things one could do to fill time. In case any of you are wondering just who on earth I am then I have the same ponderings sometimes too but, I find the biography below sometimes helps.
Andrew McMillan was born in 1988. He studied English Literature w/ Creative Writing at Lancaster University and now works as a freelance writer; he will be beginning at part-time MA in English Literature at University College London in the autumn.
His work has been published in print and online journals and a debut pamphlet, every salt advance, was published in 2009 by Red Squirrel Press. A second pamphlet, the moon is a supporting player, is due from Red Squirrel Press and Andrew will also feature in the upcoming anthology The Salt Book of Younger Poets.
Andrew has been Poet-in-Residence for Off the Page and the Regional Youth Theatre Festival; writer-in-residence for the Watershed Landscape Project and Apprentice Poet-in-Residence for the Ilkley Literature Festival. In 2010 he was commissioned by IMove, the cultural olympiad body for Yorkshire, to produce a new sequence of work. He regularly runs workshops for amateur poetry groups and in various community and school settings
He co-edits Cake Magazine alongside Martha Sprackland: http://www.cake-poetry.co.uk/
and is a poetry editor for The Cadaverine:http://www.thecadaverine.com/
Andrew Oldham's Boneyard 