LAURA FERRIES
Author Feature - January 2021
Hi! I’m Laura and I’m a secondary school English teacher, writer, and lover of all things language, linguistics and literature. I loved writing stories from a very young age but as I became a teenager, it seemed somewhat uncool back then, so I turned to secret scribblings in diaries and penning (rather rubbish) songs that conveyed my adolescent frustrations; nobody ever read them but me.
I went on to study for a degree in English Literature where I found myself amongst like-minded people and I fell even further in love with the English language and the literature I was studying. I chose to train as an English teacher to pass on my passion to young people as I feel very strongly about literacy and the power of the spoken and written word for all.
Deciding to expand on my subject knowledge, I studied for an MA in Victorian Literature, focusing my dissertation on William Makepeace Thackeray’s ‘Vanity Fair’ and the pursuit of woman’s fulfillment in the mid-Victorian novel. I didn’t realise at the time I was writing of the past, but I was also writing my future.
Upon graduation, I felt a void and I knew I needed to continue learning. After studying my native language for all these years, it soon became clear that learning a new language would satisfy my thirst for learning. I was ready to pursue my own…
fulfillment and decided to move abroad, alone, in order to accomplish this. I’d studied French at school but I couldn’t find any jobs in France so I moved to Spain where I learnt and became fluent in Spanish.
Spain inspired me to write on a regular, almost daily basis. I wrote poems that expressed my feelings about my life bridging two countries, the things I loved and missed about each whenever I travelled between them. These poems formed a collection which became my first book of poetry entitled ‘Somewhere Between Roses & Oranges’ and it has to be said that self-publishing this upon my return to living in the UK became a highly empowering experience for me.
In Liverpool, I began performing my poetry at spoken word events such as ‘Give Poetry a Chance!’, writing articles for online zines such as Peach Street, and I continued writing for my own travel blog at www.lauraferries.com (which hasn’t been updated for ages due to Covid travel restrictions!). This year, I met and fell in love with an Italian, my boyfriend Andrea, so I have since been teaching myself Italian. He is fluent in English but I consider communication to be a very important basis in a relationship and language and culture are intertwined so it’s a gateway to understanding and knowing the culture in which he was raised.
I continued to write poetry throughout 2020 which has now formed a new collection of poems and visual poetry photography, entitled ‘Lucid Dreamscapes’ which is almost ready for publication (due out approximately February 2021). I am also around 30,000 words into a memoir on my time living in Spain which I’ll be focusing on again after I release ‘Lucid Dreamscapes’. Watch this space!
AVAILABLE BOOKS
FEATURED POETRY
A Capella
I piece together these jigsaw words
thread them together in broken verse
spaghetti sentences
spun around my tongue
tangled elegantly
tagliatelle
a language not so much spoken but sung
staccato
I season my accent,
pepper my punctuation;
marinate slowly the sentence formation.
Meanwhile his English is crystal clear,
Distilled
but still
A capella
I learn the lyrics
I wing the words
still songless birds
raw in the word
down to the bone
unusual dictionary
devouring the words, I nurture them known.
Lineage
Riveted deep in your bones
reverberates an echo call
all your ancestors’ desires
reside in your irises
galaxies oscillate within
the cosmos of your eyes
celestial; orchestral
rhythms where your footsteps tread
the notes of your own fragrance
your voice’s unique timbre and cadence
you are more than the sum
of your muscle and flesh
millennia have unfolded
molded; multiplied
you leave stardust in your stride
look at your skin-
it has weathered wild seas and wind
shielding the resilience you hold within
prehistoric suns
colluded and collided
to spark off your life
we are not alone
your lineage is
etched within you
in skin, tone,
diamond and bone.
Lucid Dreamscape
in twilight turnings
thoughts beyond discerning
lucid dreams wash over me like the long
lost waves of a fragrant sea
fragments and pageants of
myriad imaginings that climb
like vines from a memory abyss
buried time capsules
treasure chests I
no longer miss
traced images of faces
& long lost places
I feel history’s touch
I feel it so much
graspable, laughable
in kaleidoscopic visions
I see it all: the joys and derisions
seismic decisions
heartfelt admissions
but what taunts me the most
is what haunts me the most
a ghost ship that not only sailed but sank
lodged in the sands of my memory bank
phantoms of fantasy and ghouls of gold
tease me, lead me, into believing a mirage
of ancient reel tape in playback montage
5am feelings
slumber beneath the ceiling
the sky sends me signals
in silky sleep symbols
of what was, what’s not, what could have maybe been
doubts and gladness and all that’s in between
sadness and growth
the kindness and the mean
and as the sun starts to creep
through my black veiled windows, in shallow grief
illusions and fantasies still run in me deep
I battle to prise open these eyes of mine
and I spend some time, trying to define
if it’s the devil or if it’s the divine
then I shake off the dream
reborn this morning, it’s all now re-forgotten and newly unseen.