Ten Years of Ictus and Call for Submissions

 In a post from earlier this year I mentioned that its been ten years this summer since I began this blog; sporadically enough at times and with a couple of hiatuses along the way but I've just about kept it going through what seems an unbelievable time-span, a decade of dramatic ebbs and flows during which my life has transformed itself in almost every way. Writing has been the one constant in a sense and this irregular blog has trickled along with it like a meandering tributary, never my main focus when I've found time to write but more like something running in the background, a testing-ground for thoughts and opinions, a fairly unpremeditated repository for poems, reviews, interviews, bits of music and miscellaneous other jottings.

  It amounts to a rather incoherent record of a decade it would be hard for me to summarise in any other way. Who knows how many readers came along for the circumlocutory journey, if any at all. I'm only pleased to have got this far. It seems a good enough point, however, to change things up a bit, alter the format and open the blog up to other voices a lot more, as I have often talked about doing in the past. I've included several contributions from guest authors in the past (both poems and reviews) and enjoyed the experience of sharing what I regarded as engaging work.

  I'm inspired by the likes of The High Window, The Interpreter's House, Eyewear and Gists and Piths to move Ictus away from being a common-or-garden writer's blog and more in the direction of an online literary review, with less of myself and more of other people's writings. So if you'd like to submit some poems, a review, an essay or piece of creative non-fiction, or even a short story, please send them to: ictuspublishing@gmail.com. 

 There isn't a particular style or genre or approach I'm more inclined to publish, although there are certainly qualities I value in both poetry or prose: a care for and awareness of form and crafted language; an ungeneric freshness of perception that's liable to give the reader a jolt of surprise and recognition; an engagement with ideas and concepts not as abstract add-ons but as dynamic forces energising the text. Overall the sense that this creative act was a psychological or even physiological necessity on the part of the writer: it wasn't just a classroom exercise, it urgently had to get out there into the world and communicate something to me as a reader, if only its own presence.

 If this sounds prescriptive, it isn't meant to be and I welcome contributions from both experienced, published writers and complete beginners. I'm also very open to works from potentially marginalised or less often represented voices, especially BAME, LBGTQ and disabled poets and authors. I know that many people have turned to poetry during lockdown as a source of consolation or a repository of thoughts and ideas which have been beneficial to reflect upon in this anxious crisis; the simple fact of having more time or working from home has allowed a great creative outpouring to occur in many households, home-offices and garden sheds. I would welcome lockdown poems or poem-sequences: its become the key issue of our time and we are still processing its impact.