About

Back in the mid-1990s, my friend Sally Evans and I were discussing her newly launched broadsheet magazine Poetry Scotland. We agreed it would be a good idea to associate a web presence with it, so the PS: Poetry Scotland website was developed. It was always an interactive site, and one of the interactions was The Open Mouse, a page to publish poems by magazine readers and the wider international community of writers.

It has gone on successfully since then, and in its twenty-year existence it has published thousands of poems by hundreds of poets.

Time marches on, however, and although I have very much enjoyed reading the submissions and selecting poems for publication, I decided that the Mouse would close in July 2018, and it has now done so. The fact is that my own writing and editing life is now focused more on fiction, with a new collection of short stories – Word Play – published by Postbox Press in June 2018. And I’ll be doing more to promote the writing and publication of short stories.