Rachael Greyhound is a wandering post-graduate and writer of travel pieces when she’s not wrestling with poetry.
Rachael performs poetry regularly in the city of Exeter and has written for the Enigma Journal and Silly Linguistics Magazine. Her most recent poetry was published in the Enigma Print Journal and as part of the Siren Poetry Project 2020.
She was long-listed for the Edward Lear Nonsense Poetry Prize and Culture Recording’s New Voice in Poetry Prize in 2020. She is currently a BBC New Creative.
I’m 22, a Midlander, and I write when I’ve run out of ways to procrastinate. I grew up with greyhounds, cross-country running and looking like a gangly muppet.
At some point, you just have to steer into the skid. The name “Greyhound” followed me into adulthood and poetry readings, where I stopped running and just looked like a gangly muppet.
I grew up awkward, like most people do. In my case, this manifested itself externally, as a haircut somewhere between Shakespeare and toad from Mario Kart.
This, alongside an unfortunate phase breeding African land snails, meant picking me out of a crowd wasn’t exactly Where’s Wally.
I’m 22 now, a veritable fossil, and an English Literature graduate who wrote on Kepler, Renaissance musicals and cavemen. Like every Lit grad, I had confidence that this would translate to a stable future.
Now that I’m here, I continue (through no fault of my own of course) to find myself in situations, in which I’m completely out of my depth. I’ve come to the conclusion that I enjoy being out of my comfort zone. It would explain a stint farming mussels off the west coast of Ireland, an eight-hour taxi across Northern India with raging stomach flu, and a relationship with a German man, having gone through the education system learning French.
I owe a lot to the kid with the Mario Kart head, she taught me how to enjoy being out of place, to blag it, when you’re frankly just proceeding with caution.
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Enigma (Vol.1) – Poetry Anthology with Exeter University Creative Writing Society (Poetry Contributor)
Silly Linguistics Magazine – Language and Culture Magazine (Poetry Contributor)
Hear No Evil – Radio Drama with XpressionFM (Writer & Director)
Beer – Radio Soap with XpressionFM (Co-Scriptwriter, Script Editor)
Breathing Space – Radio Drama with XpressionFM (Assistant Producer)
Behind Closed Scores – Specialist Classical Music Show with XpressionFM (Presenter)
Proceed with Caution 