Michael Higgins talks to me today about his contributions to the latest LAA Anthology

 

 

'The Morris Dancers' Farewell' is about the Royton Morris Dancers, led by Jimmy Cheetham, dancing out of Royton on a Saturday Morning in 1900. The little boy centre dancer is Mark Irwin and his sisters await his return in the lamplight. It was a man's dance but a woman's artistic touch.story was told by Mark's sister Alice many years later. Alice was a grand old lady in her eighties when she told it . All the Irwin sisters helped to boil shirts, sashes, ribbons and stockings for the dancers and dressed them in the street before they danced off.  

 

'The Hour Ahead' echoes a visit to my friends James and Jill in Toronto and remarks on time and distance a comforting hour. 

 

I have a third piece in dialect prose which makes fun of the minefield of dialect spelling and pronunciation.

I write history - I edit the Royton Local Society Newsletter and write articles on local history and grander historical themes for other outlets. I write on literature from Old English to modern. I review books from time to time. 

I decided to enter the LAA  competition because I like writing and had not entered the competition before as I have not been a member long. The other side of the coin is that I have to size myself up to entering them. 

I have entered few other competitions before, though I have won a couple of awards in various categories for dialect societies.

I had heard of the LAA through general reading and already knew the LAA president through dialect and folk events.

I am currently writing a history of the Royton Morris Dancers. I am compiling a collection of poetry.

 

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David Lythgoe talks to me today about his work in the antholgy: Lancashire Writers of Today 2023

 

I entered five poems for the 2023 competitions, of which two, Asteroid and Anonymous, were placed first and second for the Pomfret Cup, and three, Elegy For a Hermit, Lockdown Safety Glass and Torbreck were placed first, second and third  for the Batty Cup. I usually write poetry and my preferred typeface is Calibri. I like to enter poetry competitions to test my competence which I think (and hope) is still developing after 30 years of writing. My urge to concentrate on poetry rather than prose was very much influenced when I won a nationwide competition in 2003 to write a poem on the theme of 'Discovery' associated with the renaming of the Swan Hellenic Ship 'Minerva'. The competition was adjudicated by the then Poet Laureate Andrew Motion and my wife and I were invited to attend the re-naming ceremony in the Pool of London where my winning poem was read by Dame Judi Dench. I joined the LAA in 2016 having previously been unaware of its existence, even though I was born a true Lancastrian in Wigan 86 years ago. 

 

My current writing project is to publish a fourth collection of poems. I've already written about ninety, but I know that some need to be revised. There's no going back once your words have appeared in print. 

 

The photo was taken on the summit of Suilven, a Scottish mountain. which I climbed at the age of 83, and the book, A Distillation of Hills  was published last year by Chapeltown Books. Although fundamentally an autobiography based on some of my selected walks and climbs, it also contains some of my poetry.