Our first winter

I’ve got two collections of the poems that Ann wrote in the first few years we were together. In recent years she stopped sharing, unless I asked specifically (and even then I didn’t always get to see or hear what she’d been writing) I don’t know why that changed.  I remember saying to her that I shared my images with her and that she happily talked them through with me, but still her words stopped coming.  I wonder why.  I thought my next project would be to gather these poems into a book project.  When I first started printmaking I thought we’d have a joint project, but somehow it didn’t happen.  I’ve been thinking that I might be able to persuade some of my artist friends to contribute an image for a specific poem - maybe it will happen.

I enjoyed reading through them again last night.  They are a mix of things she wrote about our early relationship and poems she wrote for children in school.  At the time she was working as a Writer in Education with a Sheffield Project, though later she was also one of the Joe Fewles Writers in Residence with Wakefield Schools.

I need to search for computer hard drives and storage - there were many more that came after these.

p.s. I’m sure I never suggested painting the shed yellow, but Ann was always willing to indulge a little artistic imagination.