On Sunday I went to CB1 - live, open-mic poetry in Cambridge. Maybe 30 people were there. My favourites were a poem about grief (with mirrors and boxes) and a comic piece that kept coming up with good lines (I wish I'd written some down). I read a 250 word piece of Flash - maybe the shortest piece of the night.
On Monday I Zoomed into a Milton Keynes Lit Fest event - a discussion about Flash with Electra Rhodes and Jupiter Jones. About 70 people attended. Rhodes gave some useful checklists of ways to improve a text. One idea is to use vocabulary from one domain (e.g. knitting) for a piece that has nothing to do with that domain. What most struck me was the number of Flash pieces she's published given that she only started writing Flash during Covid. I manage about 5 published Flashes a year.
Tonight, Thursday, I Zoomed into a Matthew Stewart reading (Fire River Poets) - about 20 people, half of them doing open-mic. There was a short discussion after about Factual Truth vs Poetic Truth, and the influence of Larkin. When Larkin wrote "Every poem starts out as either true or beautiful. Then you try to make the true ones seem beautiful and the beautiful ones true" maybe by beauty he meant poetic truth.
My story collection "By All Means" (ISBN 978-0-9570984-9-7), published by Nine Arches Press, is on sale from 
My poetry pamphlet "Moving Parts" (ISBN 978-1-905939-59-6) is out now, on sale at the 
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