Michael McKay has been a teacher, a head teacher and an inspector of schools and retired six years ago. For five of those years, I was in private practice as a lay psychotherapist, and managed to make a thumping loss because too many of my clients got my services for free.

He left school at fifteen, and studied for my ‘O’ and ‘A’ levels at night-school and via a correspondence college. In 1967, he entered teacher training college. He qualified in 1970 then promptly enrolled with the Open University. He has a BA Honours (1st class) and an M.A. in English Literature and is currently on an M.A. Creative Writing course at Keele University.

Michael has one poem published in the Critical Quarterly. Two of his more recent poems were highly commended in the Norman MacCaig Centenary poetry competition, and published on the competition web site.