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…

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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!

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

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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.