write and move ... write and move ... write and move on
the reader has landed
Bookerage
This anthology selection from 12 volumes of poetry was published as a book in 2016 to raise awareness of the suicide rate amongst former military folk. You can have a copy here if you’d like one. No, no, it’s a gift, no catch.
Courtney Hulbert
CH is, was - feels strange writing in the third person to create greater weight and authority - a 'street' poet, writer, and drunkard living in Cheltenham. Then he went to Uni in 2016, studied Creative Writing and reinvented himself. To a greater or lesser degree ...
Lothlorien -- 'ome of good mental 'elf
When Life comes calling. Up until Covid, CH used to teach poetry and Creative Expression for a Safeguarding Trust in Glos. This came about from experiences in ’16 when he went looking for his Army knife. Not for whittling. Then a dog got in the way. More stuff about this troubling and difficult topic (to live through but also to talk about here.
I’ve lived a life of many changes, all without version control. Each iteration came bereft a Project Initiation Document, or functional specifications. The persona of Courtney Hulbert, shield while I hid behind my writing’s shadow side, spanned a decade and a half of the biggest, tectonic, changes. As a teenager grows out of childhood, the reflection teenager grows out of adulthood into some other shifted-shape. Old-age, maybe. Wiser? Huh! While I settled into my own skin, after six decades, into and out of the chrysalis stage we often dropped the baton, fussing around in the dust to find it again. I couldn’t say both hello to CH, in terms of this web presence, and good-bye, until my own compass had stopped its chaotic oscillation and finally pointed downwards to the earth. ‘Bye old friend, and thanks for all the fish. GPM, Spring ’24 xx.