The Madness of Inspiration
It’s a sentence dropped in passing, just a side-note to the conversation, or a jotting blotted in the margin, only really half a thought. Yet it opens the earth beneath you, hooks in under your fingernails, drags you to dimly lit, dusty corners, both imaginary and real. It doesn’t care that no one wrote it, or if someone did then they lost it, or passed it into a safe place too good given the hindsight. It’s dug a home in the meat of you. Demanded your eyes, you tongue, your head. Drew a line between now and then as translucent as spider silk. Now you only have to find it. I’m working on a new poetry collection at the moment which I think I’ll probably name ‘Women, Water, and Witches’. The inspiration for it stems from the folklore surrounding women and water in Shropshire. This has led to me spending evenings researching Sea Witches, Jenny/Ginny Greenteeth, witch trials in Shropshire (there’s almost nothing in any source I’ve checked so far), then …