ON March 18, 1994, you published a short article about me when I had my first poem accepted for publication.

This came about when I first noticed an article in your newspaper a few weeks earlier asking local poets for submissions. How many doors have been opened to me in the literary world because of this! I have since published two books of my own poetry and am now well into my third - and from these books I have had 32 individual poems published in separate anthologies.

Last year, one of my poems won the Poetry Guild's Editor's Choice Award, but the highlight for me was my poem, 'No Magic' which was voted by the members of the Guild as the best poem of 1997.

All this thanks to the Lancashire Evening Telegraph! I have been writing now more than 25 years, but I will never know whether or not I would have taken it any further, if I hadn't just spotted that first article inviting contributions.

ELIZABETH A SCHOLES, Claremont Avenue, Clitheroe.

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