Welcome! Explore My Creations & Discover Your Favourites.
This is the central home for all of my creative work. Whether you are a long-time reader or visiting for the first time, I invite you to dive in and explore.
🧭 How to Navigate the Site
Latest Postings: Tap on the links in the written menus below to search my writing. To dive straight into my most recent pieces three will show on my front page. To browse by Category: Click the Menu drop down at the bottom of the page. Simply choose a category that sparks your interest and see what you discover.
✒️ The Poetry: From Craft to Soul
My writing journey spans over a decade, and you will find an eclectic mix of styles reflecting that growth.
The Evolution of Style: Explore everything from my early, structured days—where my poetry was more didactic and traditionally rhymed—through to my contemporary work, which leans toward free verse while still experimenting with classical forms.
Themes & Texture: I have a deep love for psychological poetry, vivid imagery, and the natural music of language. My hope is that you find lines within these pages that truly speak to your own experiences.
The Craft Behind the Words: Having dedicated several years to studying the mechanics of writing, I also share numerous craft-based articles. If you are a fellow writer or a curious reader, these insights into the “how” and “why” of poetry are for you.
📚 Coming Soon: Sneak Peeks & Previews
I am currently in the exciting throes of producing two new books of poetry that take an intimate look at psychology and the self.As these collections come together, I will be sharing exclusive snippets right here on the blog. Keep a close eye out for these previews I would absolutely love to hear your thoughts, reactions, and feedback as the project evolves.
Enjoy your time exploring, and thank you for reading!
Below see my Three Latest Posts.
- Pastures New
I found a picture of you today
a sudden, faded pocket of blue.
It is a heavy thing, how love moves on
while the ghost of it demands its due.
I found a picture of you, and smiled
at the giggling corners, the shared glances,
smirking together at a friend’s wild hair.
Just fragments of a younger sky,
safe to look at now without despair.
But the lens clears when I look close.
The old bruising starts to speak
how you held me back, a selfish thief,
treating my heart like a casual dessert.
You taught me a bitter lesson, then left,
leaving me stranded in the dirt.
But look at the ground I have broken since.
The brutal schooling of our affair
forced me to till a different soil.
I learned the boundary of when to care,
how to root deeply into my own skin,
with plenty of love still left to spare.
I hold this picture of you now
and see only a hollow, faded view.
You are still frozen inside the frame
while I have walked out,
into pastures new. - Podcast Episode: Metamorphosis and the Starched Apron. Companion to
‘Welcome to Hospital Corners—an audio mosaic tracing the hidden history, personal memories, and fierce discipline of 1960s nurse training. Based on the poetry and prose of former nursing sister and educator Mary Bray, this series steps past the romanticised myths to explore what it truly felt like to become the hands that care. In this first episode, Metamorphosis and the Starched Apron, we explore the jarring threshold where the vibrant freedom of 1966 collided head-on with a world of Victorian precision. Let’s join the conversation…’
Pip: There is a specific kind of freedom that involves sneaking back into a locked building via a tea towel dangled from a window, and Mary has written about it with the seriousness it deserves.
Mara: This episode follows the Hospital Corners series into the world of 1960s nurse training — the uniform, the discipline, and what it actually cost a young woman to become the hands that care. Let’s start with the metamorphosis itself.
Metamorphosis and the Starched Apron
Mara: The central tension here is a collision of eras. Outside, it is 1966 — Beatles harmonies, rising hemlines, Friday nights at the Norwich Speedway. Inside the Nurses’ Home, the doors lock at half-past nine and a Ward Sister can end your day over a crooked cap.
Pip: The poem Metamorphosis captures that collision from the inside. Setting up the moment she crosses the threshold, the lines read: “a flock of girls stepping into a starched world, a life ruled by the sudden strike of bells, by Sisters, Matrons, and the weight of the Rule.”
Mara: What that means in practice is that personal freedom did not simply diminish — it was architecturally removed. The Nurses’ Home had a Home Sister who functioned as both protector and warden, and the allocation was two late passes a month to stay out until half-past ten.
Pip: And yet the post is careful not to frame the discipline as purely punitive. The uniform — the cap, the apron, the notorious shoes — is described as a psychological tool. When a probationer walked onto a ward facing real suffering for the first time, the starched apron gave her an identity of authority even when her hands were trembling.
Mara: The second poem, Uneven Laces, brings that argument down to shoe level. It opens on “ugly black laceups, like shiny leather shoeboxes, slight squeak when I walked” — the entire weight of institutional expectation landing on one small human imperfection, a lace tied slightly askew during first-day inspection.
Pip: A tutor scanning a new cohort of twenty for signs of unsuitability, and finding them in a bow. That is a very efficient use of a morning.
Mara: The post frames it as lineage rather than loss — by shedding the civilian self and stepping into the uniform, these women were not erasing their identity but forging a historic continuity of care, one agonisingly polished shoe at a time.
Pip: The sounds and the silence of that world — bells, squeaking soles, whispered laughter through locked windows — are worth sitting with.
Mara: What stays is the image of resilience built inside constraint — discipline as the scaffold for confidence, not the ceiling on it.
Pip: Next time, more from those corridors. The story is only just getting started.
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Converging Lives. Sounds, Silence and Imagery 