If poetry is the substrate of my life, it is the subconscious heartbeat. The surface materialisation, say the mechanisms of breathing, is in fiction. Both writing, and of course reading. If asked I’d say novels, long form. But always there is the comment of a very fine lecturer. When I started my MA, the course leader allowed me to sit in on the undergraduate BA modules. The finest of these was Short Stories, split between Drs ‘DD’ Johnson and Martin Randal. Martin said once, ‘most people think they write short stories to practice writing novels. I think you write novels to practice writing short stories.’