The Mouse House #1
May/June 2026 Newsletter
Welcome readers, fans, followers. I have thought for a while of a way to keep you all updated with the goings on at Mouse Teeth HQ while I’m not actively releasing music, or performing much. Somewhere for you to see the work that’s (slowly) going on behind the scenes, and for you to be a little nosey about what I’m up to. I also want to share the great things going on, and the inspirations I’ve been indulging in. Let me know if there’s anything you’d like to see more (or less) of. I’m sure this will evolve the more I get used to writing it! Thank you for sticking around!
On Repeat:
Music Update
Does anyone else find gigging really hard? I’ve not been gigging for a while whilst I’ve been recording the new record, and I’m finding myself reluctant to head back to it. Don’t get me wrong, I love being on that stage and singing to an audience who have come to see me. But I find everything else realllyyyy difficult. Travelling, setting up, having to be there hours early to soundcheck, sitting around waiting for people to do things. Everyone is always running late (apart from me), and I find myself dreading gig days! I haven’t yet found an answer to my problem (other than get famous enough to have tour managers and sound guys and roadies and drivers to do all the hard bits for me). But in the meantime, I’m trying to microdose gigging in new fun ways. In May, local legends The People Assembly had me as a surprise guest at their huge sold-out show at The Big Difference. I sang with Joel on their new single, Song For Children. I had swung from being excited about it to incredibly anxious and wanting to pull out after a rehearsal that reminded me of many of the reasons I don’t like live music (waiting around doing nothing, too many men). But thankfully I shared my anxieties, which were then distributed through a music boy whisper network that resulted in all my anxieties being proactively sorted without me having to do anything, and overly enthusiastic band members telling me how good I am all night. Sometimes the boys are alright. I must admit it was nice to just sing and not have to do all the rest of it. I love being on a sweaty stage and seeing a crown having the best time. It made me remember what I do love about performing. Cheers People Assembly, I love you, you sexy chaotic morons.
Photo Credit: Kevin Gaughan, Music in Leicester
As you may have noticed, I’ve been a little quiet on the music front. But you might be pleased to know that I am in the process of making EP 2. In fact, the songs for EP 2 have been finished for at least a year. This month my producer was in the studio with another band, so I used the time to get my rat babies (the title my band inexplicably gave themselves) to record and track their parts for the two songs from the next EP that you may have already seen us play live (yes, Girlfriend Material is coming, you can stop harassing me!!). Ant came round to track his bass parts in my home studio (my attic and garageband), and drink Fanta Lemon.
Writing Update
I started May in a beautiful cottage in the Cotswolds for the yearly retreat with my writing group, Leicester Writer’s Club. I stayed up talking into the small hours and wrote very little of anything. But it set me up for a prolific month. I wrote one good sentence: and the dog, chasing his own tail, was just happy to be running.
The weekend away forced me to reckon with the fact that I’ve felt like I’d hit a wall with my writing. That I had been struggling to know how to improve and what steps to take. I felt that the small collection I’d finished a year previously no longer reflected my best writing, but I didn’t know what to do instead. I’d been to a talk with the writer Manish Chauhan, who wrote the novel Belgrave Road, set in Leicester. He was asked about his initial writing process and practise. He shared that an early writing mentor of his had challenged him to write 500 words every single day. This advice stuck with me, and I mulled on how to make it work for poems. A word count doesn’t work so well for poetry, so maybe just a poem a day? I also knew that an endless poem a day aim would never work for me, someone for whom even the most ingrained habits are easily broken. I also didn’t want it to become a chore that would make me come to resent writing at all. So, after my return and a couple weeks of stewing, I challenged myself to writing a poem a day for ten days. If I found it beneficial, I would aim to repeat it perhaps once a month, but with no initial pressure on this longer term aim. I did the ten days, and each day I shared the poem with my friend Courtney, to hold me accountable. For the first time in my life, I started to believe that my writing ability was something I could control, instead of the slippery creature I’ve always considered it to be. I’ve written some of my favourite poems in these ten days, and have a new direction for a new collection. If you’re needing a push right now: write a poem (or a song, or a paragraph, or make a drawing etc) every day for ten days and see what happens.
Inspiration
My biggest inspiration this month was visiting the Tracey Emin retrospective at Tate Modern. My friend, and birthday twin, Alice, drove us down to London, the day after our 31st birthday and we spent a good few hours taking in the work. We were both incredibly moved, especially by her paintings. One painting, entitled I Did Nothing Wrong, stopped us both in our tracks, and we turned to each other with tears filling our eyes, and laughed at seeing our own emotion reflected in the other’s face. As a woman who makes work about herself, about emotion and pain and life; an artist who is frequently called vulnerable and courageous, I sometimes feel bad about the navel gazing my work requires. Women have spent decades, if not centuries, being made to feel bad for making art about the personal, as if that is not what all art, at its core, is. Seeing Emin’s body of work displayed in all its soft, powerful, rawness was a reminder that it is a service to the world to make art that touches others who share similar wounds, even if the wounds take different shapes. How can I condemn my own work for being selfish or narcissistic, and also know that the artists who have most touched my life have made work from a similar place of desiring to know and share the self? This realisation, and the painting below, inspired the first of my ten poems, entitled “Confessional Poet”.
At the end of the retrospective was a small gift shop full of items specifically related to the show, including a selection of books curated to accompany it. It contained a few of my all time favourite writers, who often write “confessional” work: autofiction, autotheory etc. They had I Love Dick by Chris Kraus, Bluets by Maggie Nelson, and How to Tell When We Will Die by Johanna Hedva (all of which I recommend). If there was ever a collection of books I needed to buy from, it was this, and so I chose a collection of poems by a poet I’d never read before: The Rose by Ariana Reines. Reading the first section I thought I’d made a purchasing error; a small selection of poems that felt too edgy to move me. But I persevered and discovered in the second section some of the best contemporary poems I’ve read in a long while. I saw there, too, an exploration of the same thoughts I had had about my work - the tussle between worrying it is selfish, and hoping it is still important. The work of Emin and Reines have been my guiding lights this month.
Mouse About the House
Shout out Lewis for suggesting the people want to hear about what I’m doing just chilling around the house. My time at home has been low for me (which is still high for most fully-able people), as I’ve been working more hours at my writing assistant job, as well as continuing to smash book displays at the library. It’s been sunny and my birthday and I’ve been out and about more than ever. When I have been home I have been trying to learn to sew using my mother’s ancient sewing machine that was recently repaired. I started by making little pouches to put books in to protect them when they’re in your handbag. I’m replaying Alice: Madness Returns, one of my all time favourite video games, which I lovingly refer to as “Emo Spyro”. I’m doing a rewatch of Gilmore Girls before bed, and a rewatch of Orange in the New Black in the daytime, mostly while knitting squares for a blanket I’m slowly making. I’ve just finished reading Storm Over Camelot (unfortunately I would not recommend, although Arthurian Legend has been finding its way into my work), and will be beginning All Fours, which I’ve been recommended so many times. My biggest pleasure over the past months has been going for walks around Clarendon Park to look at the flowers in people’s front gardens. There is a garden entirely full of pale pink peonies, beautifully positioned just in front of a black bin. Inspired, I bought a pot of peonies from Homebase, and planted it in my garden. It’s a little late in the season to plant peonies, so I’m hoping that they will take, fuelled by whatever plant steroids they pump them full of. I have been getting thrashed in online chess.
Upcoming Events and Opportunities
I don’t have any events coming up myself. However here are a couple of gigs I think you should go to:
I also sent a lot of poems off to journals this month, including to a new Leicester based journal, Soup. They are accepting submissions until tomorrow, sorry for the short notice!
Love you! See you soon!
Nancy Mouse x