I went round to Leila Segal’s for afternoon tea to talk about her contribution as a guest booker.

Leila's tea pot has the air of a rare find on Antiques Road Show. I think it really might be worth a thousand pounds. She bought it for next to nothing in a charity shop. We drank black Earl Grey and looked through her notebooks.

Leila and I met a few years ago when she came to a workshop I was facilitating. She was writing these fascinating stories about living in Cuba and I was captivated by them. We worked together on them for a while and now she has a publishing deal and is writing some new stories and editing old ones.

Leila’s going to take us through the process of editing one story over two weeks in February. In the meantime she’ll be reading through all the notebooks from that period. She said that she now wants to go back to some of the original notes she had, as that’s where the freshest, most impactful writing resides. Five years down the line she feels she knows more about creating stories and has the perspective to structure the material.

Her guest blogging may look something like this.

I’m excited to see how the editing/recasting process pans out and am glad she’ll be examining it here. It has a sense of coming full circle but ending up in a slightly different spot.

Here are two of the cards Miriam has sent me since we started our correspondence.

Some birds have all the talent. Take the Mockingbird, for example. Mimic, composer, arranger, vocalist, clown, he still finds time to devote to his family." Charles Harper's Birds & Words

Both are lino cuts Miriam made herself. She sent three, but although it’s not lost, I can’t lay my hands on the third right now. It was so exciting receiving them. There’s something quite magical about the wood/lino cut as a form. Bare branches become barer. The tree’s limbs more clear. The prospect of news. Letter writing is, I realise, inherently intimate.

Over the holidays I’ve found making things to be very calming. Folding a sheet of A4 was an antidote to the stresses of the season. I created several little origami books of a single poem called An Aviary of Small Birds. The petals you can see in the picture are from bouquets of flowers I dried over the summer and I used these as a backdrop on the paper for the book.

Birds have become something of a presiding spirit in my correspondence with Miriam, as well as a motif within my new work. Now of course they pop up everywhere. We went to Liverpool for Christmas. The city is represented by a mythic Liver Bird, a cormorant-eagle cross.

I didn't write much in Liverpool except on the back of an envelope. The phrase 'foghorns wake me at wren o'clock' has lodged in my head. A starting point.

Something to play with:

Boxing Day and I wake at wren o’clock to the sound of foghorns so deep and loud I think they’re a mobile phone on vibrate. I imagine giant sea lions bellowing across briny mist in  baritones. The foghorns are grief and they miss me….

In her latest letter Miriam says she is more interested in flight than in birds. This made me think about whether I am interested in birds that cannot fly. For Christmas she sent me a beautiful book: Charles Harper’s Birds & Words.

Flightless birds include the Great Auk that Harper says ‘swam like a fish, walked like a penguin and flew like a stone’ who was hunted to extinction for oil and feathers, as was the Labrador Duck, who lost the power of flight during the breeding and moulting season. On Christmas Day we ate goose and in the January sales we bought a new goose down duvet.

I also bought myself a treat: a first edition (in English) of Pablo Neruda’s Art of Birds. Jack’s Schmitt’s translation is sublime. Not that I know it in the original, but there’s such a purity to it I think you can safely say it’s a good one.

OCTOBRINE: The tricolored octobrine/is born, lives, and dies in October:/it has a revolver's blue shape,/feathers descended from mother of pearl,/tail like a celestial sign,/and this bird is fragrant/like the bee's homeland:/it sings seven copper notes:/then seven notes of rain.//And the intense octobrine dies/a blue and natural death.

Octobrine is my favourite poem. It is blue and intense. As high as the foghorns are low. Outside it’s dark now and snow is just starting to fall. I wonder where the parakeets go in this freezing weather?

I suspect that now I am thinking about birds as a subject I’ll have to look away from them to write about them. I think you need to catch a poem out of the corner of your eye. Meanwhile, the snow still falls…

As the white boat glides
along the wide brown river
bare branches shiver.

A trumpet, a train, a gull.
In the distance a footbridge.

Pinpricks of snow fall
on the abandoned roadworks.
The pavement is cold.

Tomorrow oysters, people
and the clink of champagne flutes.

Yemisi Blake and I met at the South Bank to talk about the next phase of his guest blogging.

Yem shows me his notebook. We discover that we both like hands and feet.

We talked about how some of the ideas behind ON are informing the way he notebooks. The H00die Project is looking great and we’ll showcase more of it here in the coming months.

We also decided to write a collaborative piece together on Open Notebooks. I suggested a renga and Yem liked the idea. This is a collaborative Japanese form, that utilises the 5-7-5 syllabic 3-line format of the Haiku, followed by a 7, 7 syllable 2-line verse that shifts the poem on. Check this site for more on renga.

Now here’s the EXCITING bit. Yem is off on a train trip round India with 350 creative young entrepreneurs.

Yem's Route Round India

So the Renga will document his travels with a post from each of the 13 stops. We’ll be moving from the season to season, hemisphere to hemisphere as I respond from the snow-driven streets of Blighty, incorporating the moon, a flower, love – as the renga form dictates – and subverting it by posting ‘haiku photos’ to complement each iteration.

I was inspired to write a Hai Bun recently: this is a short piece of prose/prose poetry followed by a haiku. The haiku’s relation to the text is non-linear, so it addresses the underlying heart/energy of the poem rather than the narrative. I’ll be writing some Hai Bun here – but replacing the closing haiku with a photograph that performs the same function. This is how we’ll aim to use the photographs in the renga.

Yem will text/email me his verses and images from India and I’ll upload them here. I get to start, as I invited Yem to take part in the renga. I’ll do that in a separate post so the piece builds.

I can’t wait. I’m off to start the first installment.

My last entry on Open Notebooks was on 30 July when I was waiting to give birth. In between then and now the worst thing that has ever happened to me happened: after a healthy pregnancy of 41 weeks I went in to a long labour that lasted for nearly five days all in all. It wasn’t until the morning of 7 August that the midwives picked up an irregularity in the baby’s heartbeat and I was rushed in to theatre for an emergency Caesarian. Unfortunately, the surgery was unsuccessful and after a long fight for life, our son Otto’s heart and lungs gave out. He was a first and a much longed-for child.

The rest of August is a blur of shock and grief. I think the body literally puts you into physical shock so you can cope with the spiritual and emotional turmoil. I didn’t know whether I would write or not, but as it turned out, it felt quite natural to open my notebook, start a journal and write poems about the experience.

A Parcel from Helen

The next question was whether I would share that process here. In many ways it was something I wanted to do: surely this was the point of Open Notebooks? The death itself had been necessarily public: pregnancy is a time of expectation and many of the physical changes in the body are obvious. Friends, family and colleagues await news. Yet the intensity and depth of grief felt inherently private. My Twitter, Facebook, online blogging and browsing were all abruptly halted. Even connecting to the internet to check email was something I was slow to do. I needed the quiet of trees and birds, to look at the sea not the screen.

The Beach at Cassis

A huge wave of support washed in from everyone we knew. The buzzer would sound and packages arrived. The parcels, notes of condolence, cards and flowers were a comfort, and something I came to enjoy, despite their provenance.

Abiye Sends Me 'The Poet Reclining' and Some Shades. There's a beautiful synchronicity to this package's arrival. All week I'd been working on a poem - in my mind was a long walk in the Luberon earlier in the summer I wanted to compare to a painting by Chagall, with a horse, green fields and a bruised-looking sky. There was something very particular about the colours and the atmosphere I wanted to catch but I couldn't quite conjure up the image. Abiye's gift came with a postcard of Chagall's The Poet Reclining - the very same image.

The Shades Were Hot Too

I began also to venture back online.  One day I clicked through to fellow poet Miriam Nash’s blog post about her creative letter writing workshops which explore the letter as a form. I loved this idea. I left a comment and also started to think about how I’d enjoyed the snail mail letters I’d received and how this experience related to the idea behind Open Notebooks.

With this in mind, Miriam and I met earlier this week and she’s going to be guest blogging on the site with me over the next few weeks.

Notebooks at the Ready

We’ll be sending each other snail mail letters, responding to the contents and using the correspondence to generate poems.

The Book of Stamps

I gave Miriam a book of stamps. She seemed very pleased with them. Now I need to write my first letter…

The monkey that bursts from my torso
burns toast and blisters thumbs.
It swings on bone asymmetric bars,
palms strapped in waxed cotton.

A doll-sized heel kicks in a balloon
bomb of raspberry leaves
while the monkey slides from rib to spine,
fast and strong as a drum,

slips from my grip, rattles
on my ribcage, forces an escape
to an English hillside
grey with rocks and a tupperware sky.

An old soul licks its lips,
swallows salt water, savours the taste
of roasted buffalo
flesh between teeth, wet with juice and blood.

Gulls tannoy traffic, wail
for sea when I wake in the morning,
listening for a heartbeat
under the screech of green lorakeets.

The monkey that bursts from my torso
burns toast and blisters thumbs.
It swings on bone asymmetric bars,
palms strapped in waxed cotton.

A doll-sized heel kicks in a balloon
bomb of raspberry leaves
while the monkey slips from rib to spine,
fast and strong as a drum.

An old soul licks its lips,
swallows salt water, savours the taste
of roasted buffalo
flesh between teeth, wet with juice and blood.

Need to add another stanza from the earlier draft where I wake from the dream but I’m not really in the dream but I’d like to capture the feeling afterwards – FEAR – of something bigger and stronger than you at work over which you have little control.