Right then. It’s dark at 8.00, I’ve started lighting my stove regularly, and the boat and I are heading back to our winter moorings at the end of the month. Byron has done his last festival, you’re all over the post-Chill euphoria and the bloody trees are changing colour. This is when we all start digging little burrows and dragging in grass to make a cosy hibernaculum, right?

Wrong. Out there in the cold, Charlie Jordan is still slaving away at the poetic coal-face, hewing another gem from the mud of West Bromwich Albion – and we are regrouping, to work on her continuing residency. She’s had a little break but we are going to speak soon about how best to make use of her remaining time. I’d like to give her tips on how to keep herself going as a writer and performer – some kind of ‘performance targets’ like entering slams or competitions, submitting to online journals or running a podcast (ideal for Charlie, a professional broadcaster). What would you suggest, dear My Placers?

For those of you who are hard of thinking or have only just tuned in, the spoken word performance at last week’s Big Chill festival was the culmination of months of effort for all the writers concerned, for their mentors and for director Thierry Lawson. Rukus, Byron Vincent, Emma McGordon and my own dear mentee Charlie Jordan got up on stage to deliver their collaborative piece, based on residencies across the UK.

Charlie and Dreadlockalien

I met up with them all on the Saturday morning and loitered backstage to help them chew their fingernails. In fact they were supremely calm. Being a mentor at this stage is a bit like being a midwife – you can make helpful noises but ultimately, your support is almost irrelevant. Byron, Rukus, Emma and Charlie just had to get up on stage and do their thing.

Last minute rehearsals

And so they did; with poise, with confidence, with panache and in Charlie’s case, with a borrowed West Brom shirt. The mixture of urbane Charlie and urban urchin was very endearing. They all looked comfortable, credible and committed. They faced a festival-going audience, many of whom had only happened by, or had been sucked in by MC Dreadlockalien’s ‘whoop and holler on command’ strategy: and the poets held that audience’s attention for 45 minutes and more.

The staging was simple but powerful. Tactics like Rukus ‘heckling’ Byron and then coming forward to take the mike, or the four poets moving together in Charlie’s piece We Are Albion, worked well, and each poet had given a lot of thought to their My Place or Yours residency. Well done all. Most of them can now put their feet up for a while – but Charlie’s residency continues for a few weeks more and I’m looking forward to continued draft-swapping and critiquing.

So well done to them and thanks to Apples and Snakes for giving us all the opportunity to enjoy this project. Mind you, I’m a bit disappointed not to have received more congratulations myself. After all, I did sort out all that sunshine as promised, at great personal expense. And was anyone grateful? Well….. we’ll overlook it this time…

Just thought you’d all like to know that I have personally guaranteed good weather for us all at the Big Chill.

There are two reasons. Firstly, after weeks of listening to water trickle into my boat when it pours with rain, I have had the portholes fixed and am longing for a good storm to show me whether they are now watertight. Therefore, it will not rain. This works on the same principle as ‘washing your car makes it rain, taking a brolly to work with you makes the sun shine’.

Secondly, a friend of mine who has been living in a tent for two months is moving into the boat this weekend, whilst we are all under canvas at Eastnor. For weeks he’s been drenched every day and night. It stands to reason that with a solid roof over his head and hot water at his disposal, he won’t need either of them, doesn’t it?

I just thought I’d flag this up now so that you can buy me a beer when you find your feet are still dry at the end of the festival….

Charlie Jordan and I continue to bat her draft poems to and fro. This is a great way to make myself feel clever – she does all the work, then I swan in and make smart-arse suggestions. But I can see real progress and I hope I have had some hand in it.

Lest I give myself airs and graces, I have just been invited to expose my own work in a similar way, in a new e-mail group. I don’t know anyone in it, except Ann Atkinson; though I know some of them by reputation, like the admirable Carole Bromley. I send off my poem – not one of my best anyway – with some trepidation. But I know how much my own work benefits when a fresh pair of eyes is cast over it, and I hope Charlie feels the same way.

Nine times out of ten, when your critical friend says ‘well, I think the second verse sticks out like a sore thumb/ I’m not sure you need the aardvark in line 5/ you need therapy’, you can swallow your pride and say ‘okay, yes, you’re right’. On the tenth occasion you’ll say ‘sod it, that aardvark is the whole point of the poem!’ and retain the line. After all, it’s your bloody poem and you can do what you like with it – otherwise we would all be turning out bland workshop-perfect pieces with no soul.

Meanwhile, I am seething with jealousy. YOU lot (mentees) are off to work with a fantastic director, the one who helped Innua Ellams with his recent dynamic performance at Lit Up. A professional director is a gift to be leapt upon (not literally, unless he likes it) and should help even the most experienced performer to do better.

I’ve done only a couple of professionally-directed shows, both directed by Kevin Dyer of Action Transport Theatre. Just like critiquing, his comments and ideas improved our work immeasurably. And in the same way, he was right 90% of the time in suggesting new approaches – but 10% of the time we told him to bugger off. We went with him when he asked us to act like earthworms at a snake-charming; we went with him when he asked us to learn little songs or juggle poems between us: but when he said ‘and now, Jo, I’d like you to act like a herd of caribou swarming,’ I drew a line. Even I have some dignity, and besides I’m not sure that caribou do swarm.

I hope you’ll really enjoy your time with Thierry. My advice from our own experience is – whatever he suggests, try it. Give it a fair chance; trust his experience; reject it only if you are quite sure it isn’t for you. And enjoy the rare opportunity to perform alongside other poets in a proper ensemble show; it will be fantastic and I can’t wait to see you all.

On Thursday we had a great audience for our poetry roadshow Fourpenny Circus. They were a generous lot – laughing in the right places, crying in the right places, occasionally giving an encouraging murmur – and I was reminded that performance is a two-way thing. I think we did a really good performance that night – but we’ve delivered just as well or better in other venues, and yet gone down like a lead balloon.

Have you ever done the same set of poems two nights in a row, only to find that the first audience loved you and the second received you in stony silence? We all have off days, but it’s down to the audience too. They might not be in the mood: maybe the venue is cold, or they just heard that the bar is closing in ten minutes, or someone introduced you with an unfortunate turn of phrase that makes you sound like an arse; it might just not be your sort of audience. All we can do in these situations is try to win the blighters over, and accept that some audiences are harder than others.

Generally, though, the audience is on your side. Nobody comes to a live literature event hoping that the performers will be rubbish: they’ve made a small investment in seeing you on stage, and they are hoping to be entertained, amused, provoked or aroused. You can do that; we all get up on stage because we are show-offs, but also because we have something to share, something to tell, something to say.

The Big Chill performance is coming up and for this performance in particular, even the experienced speakers might feel a bit on edge. We’ve formed a little online community here, and it feels as if there is something to live up to. I’m really looking forward to seeing Charlie on stage, and to hearing the rest of the performers for the first time. So if there should be any nerves (which I doubt) just remember; the people in front of you are right behind you.

If I thought I had a demanding work schedule, Charlie Jordan’s puts me to shame. I’m driving up and down the country to various engagements but she’s up at 4am most mornings, broadcasting from Smooth FM at an hour when most of us can barely speak. In spite of that, she is still putting the time aside to write new material based on her residency at West Bromwich Albion FC. The piece she’s working on is a kind of anthem, combining West Brom’s history with her family’s own landmark experiences at the club.

We haven’t been able to meet up lately and voicemail is not the best way to deliver a sensitive critique – ‘Hi Charlie, sorry to miss you. Your poem is far too long. Why not butcher it savagely, put the last verse at the top, put the top verse at the bottom, insert a section based on Land of Hope and Glory and cut out the 24 lines which (as far as I know) are the whole point of the poem for you?’

So when Charlie sent me a couple of drafts – with an email which essentially read IT’S A DRAFT, OKAY? IT’S NOT A FINISHED POEM. IT’S A DRAFT – I did something that I usually avoid. To save time and to avoid going through the finer points one by one, I rewrote it Jo Bell-stylee, just to illustrate how a different pen might approach the same subject.

Charlie knows that I’m not saying ‘your poem is rubbish – write it like this, you oaf!’ I’m saying ‘IF this poem were mine, this is the part I would expand – these are the lines I would bin – these are the phrases that could be tightened to give them a better rhythm, a stronger sound. But it’s not mine. What do you think?’

Charlie can pick and choose from my comments, and might well reject them all. After all, she has to decide what story she wants to tell and she has to tell it in her own voice. But critiquing makes it possible to look at your own work through fresh eyes. I hope it’s helpful for her – it certainly was for me. Mentoring Charlie makes me think about how I write too. I ran a workshop yesterday and was reminded that looking closely at published work is a great way to examine your own strengths and weaknesses. Likewise, seeing Charlie’s work in progress is a rare privilege, giving behind-the-scenes access to another person’s writing process.

Last weekend I had to do a marathon drive between a Fourpenny Circus show in Kendal, a short-but-sweet performance at the Larmer Tree Festival near Salisbury, and Rufus Wainwright’s new opera in Manchester. It was a round trip of 730 miles but worth it – except for the last bit, sorry Rufus.

Larmer Tree Festival was a perfect example of how poetry can reach new audiences. The spoken-word venue was a little tent in the Lostwood area, which was indeed hard to find, and we were competing every time we spoke with loud music from the main stage nearby – but people gave us time, attention and a fair hearing. We had an audience of around 30 and a couple of people said the words I most like to hear – ‘I’ve never heard poetry before but I really enjoyed this.’

Meanwhile, Charlie Jordan has gone from the sublime to the ridiculous, suddenly generating reams of new material for her own Big Chill slot. I was beginning to wonder if I had served any useful purpose with my mentoring, but here she goes doing all the things we’ve discussed – playing with different perspectives and voices, using formats like a football chant to help frame a performance piece, and ruthlessly guarding against her ‘rhyme whore’ tendencies to produce a more sophisticated sound which still has structure and pace. God knows if any of this is actually a response to my input, or whether it would all have come about anyway, but I have a warm glow of pride.

By the way, bloggers, you have an honourable mention in the first pages of esteemed journal Mslexia this quarter. It plugs our Big Chill slot and mentions a few of you by name – enjoy!

Oooh, the Big Chill is getting closer…. close enough for Charlie Jordan and I to start really working on her West Brom commissions and honing them into shape. At least, Charlie is really working on them, sweating blood over new pieces. I then ring at some inconvenient moment and critique them viciously. I don’t know how welcome this is (not very, I would imagine) but I can certainly see Charlie’s work developing in response to this project, and her voice becoming stronger and more sophisticated.

It won’t surprise any of you to hear that for us, as for many of you, the mentor/mentee benefits are not all one way. Being involved in this project is making me think hard about a number of things – how best to frame constructive comment, how to conduct by email a conversation about live performance, how to keep up the pressure without reducing your mentee to a nervous wreck, and also how I would approach some of these commissions / residencies if I were in the shoes of these writers. I was getting concerned that I had never seen Charlie perform her work, but this week she sent me some of her poems as sound files and it was massively helpful. Digital technology, as Tom Chivers points out, has all kinds of practical benefits for artists and this was one.

The My Place project is also, of course, making me think about my own place – in particular the canals that I have visited this summer as part of my annual narrowboat journey. Can I write about them in an interesting way? Let’s see…

Saturday took me to Ashbourne Festival for a reading of poetry about music and water. The regnant Poet Laureate of the Peak, Ann Atkinson, did the ‘music’ bit and I did the bit about water. It was a brilliant, friendly event proving that even a simple change of location can brighten up a poetry reading. Instead of a stuffy room where everyone wants to be outside, we were on the banks of the river Dove in a beautiful garden – 30 years’ worth of roses, honeysuckle, trees and outrageously fecund shrubbery. Someone has put their heart and soul into this place, for the benefit of other people as well as themselves – it was a properly sensual, stunning location.

Last week I read at the Troubadour (she said casually), the most famous basement in English poetry. I was one of many voices there to launch the new edition of Magma, which I’m in (she said casually) so it was a feast of at least thirty poets.

This edition of Magma seems to have brought together everyone I’ve ever met in poetry world – Anne Caldwell and Clive McWilliams from the north, Alison Brackenbury and Lawrence Sail from the south west, Charles Bennett now of Northants. In the audience were friends including Daljit Nagra and Derek Adams. And there were plenty of  voices I didn’t know – Christopher James, the brilliant Imtiaz Darkher and others. I was chuffed to see how many people read from memory, and what a difference it made when they did. I can’t always remember my poems but I do try.