Apryl Skies, "Elements & Angels"

Apryl Skies is a California native, an award-winning author, filmmaker, and founder of Edgar & Lenore's Publishing House. Skies’ writing is highly aesthetic, lyrical and provocative. She now resides among the ancient saguaros, colourful street art and opulent monsoon skies of Tucson AZ.

About Elements & Angels, by Apryl Skies
Elements & Angels is a wildly imaginative collection of poetry by award-winning author, Apryl Skies. Like snapshots capturing memories, past lives, Skies draws a full spectrum of emotion from each sacred moment, moulding them into cinematic poems, dramatic recollections and gritty vignettes. Skies navigates her way through an uncertain world recognizing the magic of the mundane. These poems are time capsules and the messages within overflow with thought-provoking metaphor. Long-awaited and epic in scale this collection reads like a survivor anthem.

From Elements & Angels

Poems inspired by Los Angeles

LosT Angeles

City to cinders
Buried beneath soot and ash
Paradise wounded

Fire at the Midnight Matinee

The entire southern California coast
bursts into flame

Radioactive egos tread water
exploding into a sea of cinder

centerfolds and cardboard cut-outs 
with their manufactured smiles, 
flailing arms, and yoga mats
rush toward a painted 
Hollywood horizon 
scraping the gum from their heels.

Ushers rip perforated tickets,
viewers take their seats
awaiting the next Black Dahlia

Mouths agape
full of popcorn
and imitation butter.

Poems inspired by Tucson

Tucson Landscape

Mai tai sunset sky
Over desert horizon
Coyote and moon


Oracle Starlings

Starlings in flight 
their peculiar formations 
mingle with the ghosts
above the cemetery on Oracle Road

a choreographed birdsong,
a dance with the dead
at twilight

here on Oracle road
the sun sinks
beneath the Tucson landscape
into the shadows of ancient Saguaros

where no one is less alive 
than the living

115 Degrees Fahrenheit 

I tickle Mexico 
to return to you
across desert horizons 
of saguaros and mesquite
miles rippled with heat
trundling onto this tired highway, 
my bridge back home …

And I could not love you more
as I lean heavy into your indifference,
once my soft place to land
now a shattered citadel 
of infinite distances

And those raw truths 
that continue to burn and consume
our existence, and each of these
haunting stars above
revealing all our unremarkable postures

How very foolish we are 
to think any one of us 
worthy of crown.

On Applications and Employability

By Jonathan Taylor

As part of the MA in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester, we run a major module on "employability" called Applications: Publishing, Teaching & Other Stories. This core module considers the vocational and professional aspects of Creative Writing, looking beyond the university workshop to the world outside. It's a crucial part of the Master's degree. I see Creative Writing as a hybrid subject, which brings together practice-based, research-based and vocational forms of knowledge. 

The module deals with three key strands in relation to employability: 

• the dissemination of Creative Writing in public and professional spheres (e.g. the publication and performance of Creative Writing);
• other diverse ways in which Creative Writers subsist in the world (e.g. through portfolio careers, made up of teaching, journalism, editing, writing for professional briefs, etc.);
• the myriad related fields to which the transferable skills that Creative Writing develops can be applied.

These three strands might also be seen as concentric circles, moving from the immediate vocational context of the dissemination of Creative Writing, to professional contexts directly related to Creative Writing, to the much wider circle of professions which draw on the writing skills students have developed. We look at major and independent publishing, the role of literary agents, literary magazines and reviewing, performance contexts and techniques, writing for briefs, and so on. The module includes workshops, seminars, talks as well as guest speakers from the professional writing world. 

I've been teaching the professional side of Creative Writing for twenty-five years now, and I've seen students go on to work in a myriad of different fields. In a literate economy, the value of writing well, reading critically, storytelling skills, imaginative use of language, communication skills can hardly be overestimated. Jobs and roles I've seen students go into after studying Creative Writing have included (among many more): novelist, short-story writer, poet, screenwriter, playwright, radio writer, speech writer, creative non-fiction writer, travel writer, memoirist, children's author, PhD student, academic, teacher (in all sorts of different contexts, and at all levels), tutor, publisher, performance poet, stand-up comedian, events manager, arts manager, festival manager, arts programme coordinator, literature development officer, public relations manager, human resources manager, advertiser, politician, journalist, literary magazine editor, commercial magazine editor, game designer, radio producer, radio presenter, voice-over artist, TV presenter, producer, web content creator, publicist, marketer, film producer,  accountant, literary agent, editor, copy editor, commissioning editor, copywriter, web designer, solicitor (through a conversion course), doctor (through a conversion course), civil servant, librarian, archivist, financial manager, administrator, counsellor, bookseller, actor, reviewer, arts organisation director ... and so on and so forth. 

Recently, though, I've been thinking a lot about "employability," and about how we should perhaps understand the term much more broadly. Given the state of the world, I've been thinking about the other invaluable (yet more intangible) roles Creative Writing graduates often take up, whether as writers or in their lives as a whole. Ideally, employability shouldn't just be a matter of "training" for particular roles in the capitalist world; it might also be about changing those roles, dreaming up new ones, maybe even dreaming of changing the world itself (however slightly). After all, Creative Writing, by definition, encourages you to re-imagine the world, or to imagine new worlds. In that regard, I think employability in Creative Writing is also about roles that have never seemed more vital in our society - such as dreamer, idealist, utopianist, magical thinker, empath, mentor, radical, creative, artist, activist, communitarian, critical thinker, social critic, optimist, pessimist, optimistic-pessimist, pessimistic-optimist, visionary, prophet, poet, storyteller, "unacknowledged legislator of the world" (as Shelley puts it).