Wildlife

Apparently this is what I looked like at last night's reading... 

I'll be reading a few poems at Lloyd Markham's event at the Full Moon with other performers and musicians... Come along! Here's the poster: Following that I will be giving a lunchtime reading at Can Openers in Bristol on 1 December, and then hosting and reading at Brown's Poems & Pints in Laugharne on 7 December... Then I'm taking a little festive season break before returning with gigs in Carmarthen, Bristol, Cardiff, Newport and more in 2018. Susie x

Hello Lovelies, How are you all doing? Great, I hope! I am almost back to 100% and ready to kick off the tour again this Saturday 25 November by hosting Wild Words at The Wheatsheaf in Fitzrovia, London . This is the London launch for Better Houses , in my birth city, so I will also be reading, but before that I will be introducing some wonderful writers from Parthian Books and our friends. Here are the bits and bobs: Join us for an afternoon of poetry from Wales and the World at The Wheatsheaf. We will be featuring poets with links to London and Wales and poetry in translation published by Parthian Books and their friends.  Poets performing include Eleni Cay (A Butterfly's Trembling in the Digital Age, Parthian, 2017 in translation from Slovakian), Christina Thatcher (More than you were, Parthian Books, 2017), Rebecca Parfitt (The Days After, Listen Softly London, 2017), and Tracey Rhys (Teaching a Bird to Sing, Green Bottle Press, 2016). More special guests T...

Back to Swansea we went, for my third Better Houses tour gig in the city... this time at Do Not Go Gentle festival, which had made the move from the Uplands to the city centre. I was reading with the excellent Emily Blewitt, and it always a pleasure to share the stage with her. We were upstairs at No Sign Wine Bar. I used to work as a waitress in a cocktail bar (Indigo, which was part of the building) when I was an undergraduate (my glamorous youth). Thanks to Pierre for booking us and all who came along to see me perform my words in a slightly more nervous than usual manner (Mother was visiting). Les, who stored my furniture for me during one of the many moving times of my life also came along and bought a book! (I've only been inviting him to my readings for 12 years! (It was lovely to see him)). I didn't take any photos, but it did happen.

It was wonderful to return to Bristol, where I lived when finishing my first book The Art of Contraception quite a few years back now. I had been invited by Charles and Tim to be the guest feature at the Berkeley Square Poetry Revue at cocktail bar and arts and media hub The Square Club and had planned a tenuously-linked set of Halloween poems – at least I had the Jaws one, and one that mentioned spiders, another blood, and so on – but the audience seemed non-plussed by Halloween so I read the love poems and the house poems and the courgette crisis poems instead. I was glad I'd only opted for witchy tights rather than a full costume, and for making it in time to also catch the Grayson Perry exhibition at the Arnolfini beforehand, and for the 1:30am train home as the gig finished too late for the 11pm which meant I had to call in to my favourite theatre bar on the way home, the shame.

On 27 October, I celebrated both Dylan's Birthday and my Swansea book launch at the Dylan Thomas Birthplace in dear Swansea, reading poems from Better Houses to a lovely, receptive audience and then sleeping in Dylan's boyhood bed afterwards. It was a gorgeous gig – thanks for booking me, the accommodation and the wine Geoff Haden! – and I'm dead happy to have been there. Great to hear from Uplands' urban sketcher Bill Bytheway too! Here are some snaps: Action Shot: Crowd Bill Bytheway Dylan's Bed