A Room of Someone Else’s:
My current blog is on the Substack platform. It forms my attempt to get going again after the massive upheaval of being forced to leave London — priced out. It’s been going for a couple of years, but it turns out it’s a process — I’m still finding my new feet. We’ll get there. You can sign up here or at the bottom of this page to get the posts straight to your inbox.
Here are a couple of my favourites.
Seeing The Favourite: an everyday story of chips and c***s
The atmosphere in the ladies’ room was electric. No one was saying much — just stunned women, ordinary, several in their 60s, all with an air of inner peace and joy around them. Queueing, I think we were all together and not wanting to break the bubble. Then another woman burst through the door, looked around and then straight at me and said with a huge smile: ‘WHAT A FILM!’
When Fanny Met Sian
This is a story about friendship, that excitement of discovering kindred in the wild, when one meets a sympathetic equal. And an equal as an artist! It’s like a romance. But unlike the ‘bromance’ model, when it’s two female artists this friendship of intellects must founder on the rocks. A woman without private wealth must ‘live on the thin soup of opinion’ — whether she’s the slave who speaks whatever language others require, or daughter of Dr Burney and pet of Sam Johnson.
'No, I'm Mad' Land: how the movie missed the story
…When I left the cinema I ran into a young guy I know sitting outside a pub with some friends, and he asked about the film. I said I thought it was too photogenic, sentimental, and a few other things like that, and his friend — who’d only half-heard me — said, ‘Oh yeah, “make it look really grim for the voyeurs”, eh?’
At once I realised that, while on the contrary I felt it had been ‘nice-ified’ (as my friend Elaine put it), my discomfort was precisely that I felt co-opted as a voyeur.
One morning in June 2006 my friend Jane said to me, ‘Do you seriously mean to say you want to be published as a poet and you haven’t got a blog?’ That lunchtime, sitting with my laptop outside my local Turkish place, I opened a Blogpost account and the name Baroque in Hackney popped into my head. It was a joke; Hackney was nowhere near so gentrified then, and I had just been made redundant. The joke depended on pronouncing it in the American way, ‘Baroke’. I wasn’t a big blog reader; I only knew I wanted to write something people would want to read. It started with poetry, then ran through poetry world gossip to movies, art and culture, to funny things that happened on the way to work, funny stories about having three teenagers, and effortlessly on to politics.
It was the heyday of blogging, but after a year of searching vainly and thoroughly for the other blogs like mine that I thought must be out there I was forced to conclude that no one else was doing what I was doing. Baroque in Hackney went from my own little personal backwater to a big, influential poetry blog. It showed up in Top 10 lists. The Deputy Director at work came in one day and smiled, ‘Saw you in Time Out this morning’. In the end the blog was getting over 2,000 hits a day, which may not be much by Insta standards, but it’s an awful lot more readers than most poetry magazines ever get.
The blog, as Jane had predicted, pretty much enabled my poetry career, and it was definitely the reason we sold 116 copies at the launch of my first collection. Baroque was my digital living room. I’d get up, throw out a couple of hundred words, and go to work with a light heart.
Eventually, along came 2011, the year of Tory austerity, and the cuts. The so-called Bonfire of the Quangos that cost me my job. The 500,000-strong TUC march the week before. That summer the nation burned with riots that had their epicentre in my part of London. The government’s ‘Hostile Environment’ against undocumented immigrants was everywhere palpable in Hackney. It felt like a siege. Eventually I gathered together ten political posts I felt good about and entered them for the George Orwell Prize for political writing. (It was a good thing I did; it was the last year they had a blogs category.) I got shortlisted. I didn’t wi, but that was okay. The winner really deserved it, and I felt I’d done my bit, recording the experience of ordinary life on the ground.
I wish I could say that shortlisting changed everything, but afterwards I felt too strange, too alien, and frankly too much in need of an income. I was having to focus on getting paid freelance work, and I’ve never felt quite so carefree again (which is saying a lot considering I was already a single working mother who wrote in the cracks). The whole vibe had changed. The blog carried on but we had moved into a different era.
In the end the blog — by that stage self-hosted — was lost to a bit of Wordpress chaos within months of me losing my flat to a 45% rent increase, and I was rendered digitally as well as physically homeless.
At least part of it had been archived by the British Library. And there are bits of it on the Wayback Machine. But it’s the past now, and we know you can’t go back there.
The first blog…
A Far Cry from Hackney:
What do you do when you’re a blogger and lose your long-term home, but make a blog of it? I took the advice of another friend when she said she thought the best thing I could do would be to take charge of the narrative by writing through whatever was about to happen.
The day before I left my flat, knowing I was about to give up my iMac at least for the foreseeable —which had my old Photoshop Elements on it — I sat and got on with making a banner for the new blog: A Far Cry from Hackney. (The only things on it that aren’t really mine are the books. And of course the hot-air balloon. In real life I had to take the train like everybody else.)
The blog no longer exists. I relinquished the domain a couple of years later, feeling like I really was a far cry from Hackney now, and needing to find a way to move on — but it had helped, and its content has been more or less preserved in the manuscript I’m working on, for a book about the experience of losing the family home and how the housing crisis developed. To be published by CB Editions.
“Katy’s blog, Baroque in Hackney, was and still is a one-off. When Poor Rude Lines started, all I could find online was self-published poetry. Discovering Baroque in Hackney was a shot in the arm. Katy is disarmingly well read, humane and infectiously engaging.
It’s a thrill to read these essays [Forgive the Language, Penned in the Margins 2015] from our foremost blogger. It’s testament to her talent and a validation of blogging in general. Flicking through these essays on Negative Capability, Dylan Thomas, plagiarism and poetic metre, Katy’s significant contribution to British and international poetry becomes clear. You could set your watch by those tedious little posts asking whether poetry is dead. Meanwhile, with characteristic chutzpah, Baroque in Hackney has just been getting on with the business of creating the sort of online space and conversation that poetry lacked but needed. Erudite – yes. Academic – no (well, not in that way). Baroque in Hackney is for us, for general readers, and surely continues to bring new audiences to contemporary poetry.”
John Field at Poor Rude Lines:
There I am, on the banner of this poetry blog! I’d never heard of John Field until I saw this. He was one of the next generation of poetry bloggers in the UK, because Baroque in Hackney did in the end give rise (or give way) to a slew of other, equally ambitious but very different poetry blogs. It was a blossoming.
This quote is extracted from his review of my book of essays, Forgive the Language, which in fact is made up mostly of commissioned material and not blog posts — with just a couple of exceptions.
Baroque in Hackney is no longer.
But I’m back online, in A Room of Someone Else’s. Intermittent posts on arts, culture, politics, the odd funny story (I hope) and updates from the cost of living crisis.
“I'm a poet, essayist & blogger starting a new life after being forced from my home by rising rents. My book on homelessness, displacement & precarity will be published by CB Editions. In the meantime, here's where I'm writing about my new world.”
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