Sukhema (Larry Butler)

the moment we've been lucky with Ken Coburn who used to work for the Poetry Library, he's been working with us for five or six years now as our project manager.

Were you working at Maggie's before you had the cancer experience?

No.

Because you went and experienced the benefits of the Maggie's Centre in Edinburgh.

Yes.

And as a result of that, with my encouragement, as I recall, you ended up starting leading writing groups there.

And I was already leading writing groups in the Maggie's in Glasgow.

Would you like to read those two poems?

No, and I remember I published that in Living or Dying, and I remember when we went and led our first facilitator training course in 2004 with Ted, Jerry Luce, and Sheena Blackhall, and Tinto, and you made a map of Tinto, and we used that map as part of our writing prompts.

Yeah, that's right.

I think there might be an opportunity to go on to the question I asked you before we started this interview, which was what helps you to choose and develop your repertoire of writing prompts and poetry writing prompts?

What are the criteria that you use to build up your repertoire?

Do you have a few favourites of your writing prompts that you use with different groups?

And that's inspired by a poem by Ellen Bass.

Which is a poem about grief.

Yes.

And I use that one too, a lot.

And I think one of the things both Valerie and I do is we encourage people to write in their own voice.

And so like the thing is, it's a verbal thing.

The thing is, I was walking down the street one day and... Yeah, it's got that colloquial just kind of, yeah, you don't