Kathy Pimlott

October 2026

Late September, sun still out, brought a visit to Cromer for a long weekend in the company of my Saturday Zoom group, first convened by Paul Stephenson during the pandemic. Based in The Netherlands, Brussels, and widespread in England, we aim to meet up in real life once a year. We very nearly made it this year, losing just two of us to Covid and family obligations, but they were able to join our morning writing sessions via Zoom. We had a lovely time.  I can't express strongly enough how important this group is to me both in terms of developing and testing my work but also as a team of cheerleaders who celebrate each small success and commiserate with each disappointment. And I rejoice without a smidgeon of envy in their many successes. As well as reading, reading, reading, I would say having a group of poets you respect and admire on your side for the long haul is key to keeping going.

Looking for a notebook to take to Cromer, I came across one I’d filled with diary entries in the six months following my husband’s death in 2021. Towards the end of the entries, when I had just started to write the poems which became my pamphlet After the Rites and Sandwiches, I had written this:  Its a miracle really, how doing writing - actual writing not just general poeting - grounds me. I do enjoy the general poeting* and am fully engaged in it - but actual writing has a much stronger and enduring effect on me. It makes me feel real. I have been feeling that all that I have been doing has been surface, going through the motions, makeshift. Yesterday and spilling over into today, I feel integrated into life, that I am actually living - which sounds very dramatic and fanciful but there you go. It is as it is. It makes me feel better. It makes me feel me. *poeting is anything to do with poetry other than writing it- like this!

This month, I'm thrilled to have poems in two of Candlestick Press's 'instead of a card' mini anthologies, 10 Poems about Beer and 10 Poems about Retirement and one in Macmillan's very smart collaboration with Deb Alma, Poetry Poison: Humbug.

I'm reading:

Martin Figura's The Remaining Men (Cinnamon Press); David Floyd's A Night at the Snooker (Hearing Eye) and Jake Wild Hall's Alanis Morisette (Broken Sleep Books)

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