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Post-it poets: Katy Ewing

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Ceris Aston

The Poetry Round

Katy Ewing is making her mark on the Scottish poetry scene, both print and spoken. The winner of Inky Fingers' world's smallest poetry slam has recently been published in Octavius and From Glasgow to Saturn. Keep an eye out for her at upcoming Edinburgh and Dumfriesshire shindigs! 

cafebabel.com: What do you want to be when you grow up? 

Katy Ewing: Competent and aware of it.

cafebabel.com: What poem would you take to a desert island?

Katy Ewing: Very difficult. This is like asking me to choose a favourite, which I don’t like! I guess I’d take fragments of lots of them internally (and then be really frustrated that I hadn't just picked one whole poem!)

cafebabel.com: If you ran away, where would you run away to?

Katy Ewing: Home, always home. As a child though, it was always to a hidey-hole, indoors or out, in cupboards or attics or up trees or in ditches.

cafebabel.com: Do you have a favourite line or fragment of poetry?

Katy Ewing: Favourites again! Maybe this from John Burnside’s ‘Halloween’:

“I have peeled the bark from the tree

to smell its ghost,

and walked the boundaries of ice and bone

where the parish returns to itself

in a flurry of snow”

cafebabel.com: If you were a cheese, what kind would you be? Explain using diagrams if necessary.

Katy Ewing: I don’t think I’d like to be a cheese. It seems as if it would be a sad life. But if forced, then Raclette. It’s a Swiss cheese, delicious melted and served with new potatoes and cold meat, but very difficult to find round these parts. So I’d be it just so that I could have some. Which seems a bit self-defeating somehow.

cafebabel.com: Suggest a question for next time.

Katy Ewing: How do you know when a poem you've written is a poem?

cafebabel.com: Draw us a picture.

Katy Ewing

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