I had a lot of fun this week when I visited Listening Books to record my poem ‘Voices’. Apparently the building used to be a broom factory. We went down a winding staircase to the recording studio and I tried on the headphones (everything goes very quiet once they are on) then I got to practise with the microphone before doing the final version. I wrote ‘Voices’ in Vancouver, Washington, in NW United States. I was upstairs listening to the voices downstairs: our host, my partner, plus two elderly women who had come to talk about their lives in the 1930s and 40s. I had been downstairs to share tea with them and to eat the most amazing blueberry pie. It was raining outside and one of the guests had incredible bright blue eyes. To echo my experience in Vancouver WA that day, the poem would have to be read with a British narrator, intermingled with Northwestern accents. I’m not much good at accents, though, so I didn’t try it. The poem is included in Forgotten Letters, which is an anthology of dyslexic writing. As it says in the introduction to the anthology, to a lot of writers, dyslexia is a strength – something people don’t often realise. The anthology takes the notion of dyslexia as a ‘problem’ and turns it on its head -illustrated really well by Rebecca Loncraine in her poems ‘Details’, ‘Tangents’ and ‘World in Parallel’ and also in Josie Williams’ ‘Life in a List’. After I recorded the poem Fiona from Listening Books interviewed me about the process of writing, so I was able to tell her about my experience in Vancouver WA – maybe readers will be able to imagine the voices as they read. As I left the building I asked Fiona if it was haunted. It felt very friendly there so I was expecting her to say no: but apparently there might be a fairly recent spirit lurking upstairs because one of the bookshop workers died there in the 1970s. Perhaps he was like Cuthbert Binns, the History of Magic Professor in Harry Potter, who died one day but didn’t realise. Maybe he’s still up there sorting through the recordings. Very excited when I returned home to find a box of books on the doorstep. My free copies of A Small Steps Guide to Goal Setting and Time Management. My son helped me open the box (or tried to stop me from opening it depending on your viewpoint) -watching him helped me not to take it all too seriously, but even so I was very proud to read the first few pages.