I’m Jo Somerset. I write stories, poems, nonfiction and results of my experiments in life – for adults and children. I’ve even had something translated into Catalan. Here’s the latest from me.
Let’s all feast on seasonal reading
Two wins in one day. That’s how it feels: end of lockdown 2.0 marks the next page of reaching my audience.
Today, two totally different pieces are published, in the outstanding new Queerlings magazine, and the dazzling foodie creative delight that is mishmash.
Bringing a couple of aspects of my self together – the bit that is writing ‘ever more queerly’ according to Meg-John Barker – and the bit that can’t separate writing from cooking, tasting, or doing a myriad of other things – gives me great pleasure.
So today I present:
a chunk of my history which is also our history, with a Christmassy flourish,
and
words to make you salivate in the feasting season.
Submission results
Taking stock of this autumn’s submissions, my whiteboard tells me it’s
4 wins
4 rejections
4 still to come
✨ I can live with that. ✨
Lockdown Lit
I was resistant to writing anything about Covid-19. Enough that it’s invaded our bodies, our lives and our world; I refused to let it seep into my creative space too. But in the end, submerged thoughts rose to the surface while swimming in desolate waters. ‘Swimming away from the virus’ is published by Bounds Green Writers in its Lockdown Lit series.
Autumn Voices Guest Poet
This month I’m honoured to be the guest poet at Autumn Voices creative community in the UK. Five of my poems appeared weekly through October 2020:
As the clock displayed 00.01 am on 1st January 2000…………CLICK HERE
Lorraine’s imagined voice speaks to us, reflecting on her life as a polio survivor and disability activist.………..CLICK HERE
Oh, the yeasty smell from the pizza shop……….CLICK HERE
I performed this rap poem at my sixtieth birthday party at Fort Belan, Wales in 2005.
Welcome to the Fort, to my birthday celebration.
Welcome to the place that’s welcomed every generation
to play out their dreams
in this tiny dreaming nation
of dragons and despots and demons and dens
of poets and passion and beaches and friends………..CLICK HERE
Often, navigating the small hours is a roller-coaster journey.
There is a place where thinking and sinking join,
where knotted thoughts loosen in the dark,………CLICK HERE
Leanne Bridgewater Award
I’m honoured to have received the inaugural Leanne Bridgewater Award for Innovation and Experiment from the University of Salford. Leanne was a well-known poet artist, aged only 29 when she died.
“I’m proud to be following in her footsteps,” I told Write Out Loud.
Different eras, unique voices. Both of us were born in Birmingham, both migrated to Manchester as young adults, both got a distinction (brag, brag) in our creative writing MA at Salford.
Now there’s only one path to take, the one forged by Leanne and which I will follow: creative as I can, daring or bust.
A slice of queer history
Dear Jay,
You’re telling my childhood story except it’s 40 years later and it’s not mine, it’s yours. In grown-up words you describe how your three-year old self realised about gender restrictions,
I’ve experimented with format in this piece – contrasting my experience as a young lesbian in the 1970s with someone working through gender issues in the 2020s.
Click to read the full version Jo and Jay: a conversation across the generations
Clavmag is ‘something new and exciting and very very gay’ according to its founders, Gab and Frey. It’s a digital lit mag publishing creative writing from queer, trans + non-binary people.
Bugs in our lives
It seems a long time since February, when I wrote this poem about bugs. In 2000, the Millennium bug (computer virus) never materialised, whereas now……
Millennium 2000
The dark sky crowded into our city streets.
No rain (thank you, gods), not freezing (nine degrees),
just clouds and stars peering down on
children pouring beer into the gutter then, with assumed bravado, holding up a near-empty bottle.
It was all fireworks and damp squibs and a few Cava corks popping
and my neighbour being hit by a rampaging Catherine wheel that flew off its nail.
The bug never arrived
and anyway it would have been sterile, computer-housed,
not a killer like the bugs to come.
Not like polio-malaria-AIDS-foot’n’mouth – funeral pyres consigned to memory thanks to intelligent-progress-scientific-advances
but SARS-Ebola-Coronavirus, science fiction-like, not a reality for our generation,
just what we were about to bequeath.
Sorry.
5th February 2020
How to think about VE Day
As a pacifist, it’s important not to glorify war. But I don’t want to be a killjoy. Just as the coronavirus crisis is leading to more questions than answers, VE day heralded hope laced with uncertainty, which the jigsaw pieces observed in this poem.
JIGSAW: VE DAY
I
An extraordinary day inside the jigsaw box. Feelings ferment, pieces panic, rebellion rises from the ranks, jokers juggle and jumble, all descends into disorder.
A human opens the lid.
“Hmmm, grey, I don’t like grey.”
“Nor do we,” says a tiny voice.
II
The parts ask the whole:
“Why are they dancing, flags flying?”
750 pieces. Is that all it takes to dispatch and dispel six years of death and destruction? Dancing on the cobbles, forgetting that life is grey. Shades of. They say it’s black-and-white, but it’s not. Yesterday they died, today they dance. Piecing together the future.
28 April 2020: 11 a.m.
Silence
for all those funerals not attended.
One minute
for the hundreds, thousands gone.
Sixty seconds of nothing
echo in a skull,
bouncing:
life desperate to burst out.
New Year Cheer
A new poem to get the juices flowing in 2020
QUEUEING FOR PIZZA
What a difference a dough makes.
Kneading her as if they’d never had that scorching row,
hoping she’ll rise
and rise again after the next punching down,
this time playful,
grabbing by the handful, her giving way to
sinking fingers plunging stickily
and being shaped and rolled
and tucked into lightly greased pans,
eased in by loving hands,
and oh, so delicately rising once more
– some call it proving –
before the heat’s turned up,
a gaze at her perfect dome,
and sliding her in to bake.
What a difference a dough makes.
