Andrea Ross’sPloughshare’sarticle “A Feminist Look at Edward Abbey’s Conservationist Writings” details the way that Abbey sexualizes the landscape in his many writings of the American Southwest, taking a racist and misogynist approach to the wild world. Ross has a complex relationship with the natural world of the west as a former ranger and current English professor.She often works with writers of this area, people like Abbey, Jack Kerouac, and Kenneth Rexroth, so I was excited to see her take on the landscape, how she would use it in this memoir about finding her birth family while trying to find a home within the natural world. What she finds in her relationship to the land is exceptional. Ross, unlike these other writers, is able to see the natural world as a place of rest; in her long journey to find her birth parents and herself, she finds…
writes poetry, fiction, and occasional essays from her home in New York. She has published four chapbooks of poetry and three full-length collections, the most recent being MEDUSA’S DAUGHTER from Animal Heart Press. Her novel, SISTERHOOD OF THE INFAMOUS from New Meridian Arts Press, was inspired by the life of her sister, a one-time punk rocker and prodigy in mathematics. She also is the author of the novel, THE HAWKMAN: A FAIRY TALE OF THE GREAT WAR (Amberjack Publishing 2018) and an experimental memoir, AN UNSUITABLE PRINCESS (Jaded Ibis Press 2014). More information is at jane-rosenberg-laforge.com
-Jo Fearon
Is Public Sector Administrator and hobby poet. Second of Ian McMillan’s guest Hear My Voice Sonnets on You Tube. Soon to be published in HMV Barnsley 2020 competition anthology. Passionate about live music especially rock/blues/punk. Aiming to devote more time to what I love. Rediscovered love of writing the past 2 years.
-Maxine Rose Munro
writes in English and her native Shetlandic Scots. She is widely published in the UK and beyond, both in print and online. She runs First Steps in Poetry, which offers feedback to beginner poets. More here http://www.maxinerosemunro.com
—Kathryn Southworth was born in Blackpool, Lancashire, and now lives in Camden Town, London and Prinknash, Gloucestershire. She is married with three surviving children and three grandchildren.
She has always written poetry but returned to it in earnest only after a long career as an academic in midlands universities. She was a founding fellow of the English Association, Head of English and Cultural Studies at the University of Wolverhampton and held senior management posts there and at Newman University and also worked for the Quality Assurance Agency. She has been a governor of the Camden and Islington Mental Health Trust and is currently a governor of Rose Bruford College of Drama and Theatre Arts.
She has published poetry and reviews in several magazines and anthologies and reads at a number of London poetry venues, including the Poetry Café and Torriano Meeting House. The literary canon informs her writing, as does her Catholic faith, surreptitiously.
-Dr Sara Louise Wheeler
has Waardenburg Syndrome Type 1, a genetic condition which affects her physical appearance as well as her hearing. She writes the column ‘O’r gororau’ (from the borders) for Barddas Welsh poetry magazine and her poetry, belles lettres and artwork has been published by Unique Poetry Journal, Dark Poets Club, Fahmidan Journal, Cloverleaf Zine, and 3am Magazine. Sara is currently writing an autobiographical bildungsroman opera called The Silver Princess, funded by Theatr Genedlaethol Cymru. Originally from Wrecsam in North East Wales, she now lives on the Wirral peninsula with her husband Peter and their pet tortoise Kahless
“Catch Up” is a series of posts in which I discover what the writers I previously interviewed have been up to.
This slideshow requires JavaScript.
Catch-up – 4th May 2021
When Paul Brookes interviewed me in 2018 it must have been just before or just after the Carmarthen Book Fair, where I met David Norrington. I actually bumped into him in the town car park, where he was panicking over not having change for the parking meter and needing to get along to the book fair and get set up. I leant him change enough for the meter, told him to pay me back later as I would also be at the fair. (Over the years, going to book fairs and the like, I’ve learnt that there is more friendly cooperation between publishers, especially us indies, than competition. We tell one another of printers that might suit, pass on tips re websites, venues, etc.)
Later that day David sought me out at The Journal stall, repaid me, and looked over my display, which had some of my own books as well as Original Plus publications. He didn’t seem so much interested in my recent novels and collections as in those few out of print titles that I had looking for a buyer. He also asked what I was working on and talked of his own press, Wordcatcher Publishing, and what he was hoping to achieve with it. There were two of my out of print titles that he seemed particularly interested in – a Boho copy of Problems and Polemics and the SF series, the unMaking of Heaven.
When I got home I sent David the MS of my latest SF novel, Once Were Window Once Were Doors and of my eco-novel, Trees. A week or so later there began an exchange of emails which culminated in me taking along, as requested, copies of various out of print titles to David’s garden office. David explained how he was endeavouring to build up Wordcatcher’s backlist and that he wanted to put out new editions of some of my titles.
I have met up with many enthusiasts in publishing, not all of them able to deliver on their promises, along with more than a few wanting to make money out of me rather than with/for me. David though was running no vanity press, all would be standard royalty contracts. No advance, but I didn’t expect one. A few weeks later three books arrived, Problems and Polemics, Rooms and Something’s Wrong. All with brand new glossy covers.And it didn’t stop there. I turned up at a Cardiff hotel for a meeting of Wordcatcher authors to find David unpacking two more of my titles, The Secret Report of Friar Otto and The Care Vortex.
I had not anticipated anything like this happening to me. And it carried on all through 2019, when David brought out all five books – Balant, Happiness, You Human, Not Now and (renamed) The Eternals – of the unMaking of Heaven SF series. The covers for them, of his own design, were exceptional.
How quickly we adapt to new circumstances. Because, although gratified by all these new editions, I was impatient to see my eco-novel, Trees, in print. David though wasn’t confident what genre Trees should be in, and didn’t seem to understand my urgency. So I found myself quietly pushing for it to be published. On 4th March 2020 Trees finally made it into print. Guess what happened next?
Before I could arrange a proper launch for Trees we were in lockdown. And that’s been it more or less since. I’ve entered my mini-collection of Mock Sonnets & Other Lives for a couple of US competitions. Unsuccessfully. I thought of seeking publication through competitions would guarantee some publicity. But one has to win for that.
As the lockdown wore on and Wordcatcher was forced into abeyance I put aside book promotion and concentrated on each of The Journal issues and on my new detective series. I now have almost 3 novellas under the umbrella of Disclosures. Their titles are The Bride Vetter, Donny’s Puzzles and A Woman Wronged. Still unsure how best to publish them – as one book or 3 separate novellas. Now that Wordcatcher is slowly coming back to life I’m waiting to see what happens next there. David always has plans. How will my books figure in them? Once Were Windows Once Were Doors still languishes in his slush pile.
Anthologising is, assuredly, a contentious art, not just a little like canon forming, despite numerous protestations. The mere act of including someone and leaving others out, with its corollary to granting book publication, seems nonetheless indispensable. We need to try to get a better flavour of the times, to put worthy contributions within the same pages of a collaborative volume, just to digest and try to sample what has been going on. In contrast to the BloodaxeStaying Aliveseries, which began in 2002, Carcanet’sNew Poetrieshas just reached its eighth volume, having commenced in 1994, with by the standards of the series more contributors, some 24, than usual this time out. A slight bias is doubtless inevitable in that we find here Carcanet authors as well as Manchester associations. Nonetheless the range of poetries is highly diverse.
Aside from the high calibre of the various poets, presentation wise…
Today I welcome Hedgehog Poetry Press poet, Brian McManus to reflect upon a poem from his new collection, Solastalgia
Definition of Antecedent (Cambridge English Dictionary)
‘Something existing or happening before, especially as the cause or origin of something existing or happening later.’
How important, or otherwise, are our antecedents? How, if at all, do they impact, colour or shape that which follows, comes later? We are all guilty of sometimes castigating ourselves for missed opportunties, beomaning what might have been if we had acted differently, or indeed simply just acted at all.
Philip Larkin, one of post-war Britain’s most popular and famous poets, opined that the way in which we live, the actions we take or fail to take do absolutely colour and shape our lives. A failure to seize opportunity when it presents itself he would call ‘time torn-off unused’.
-Masquerading As Rocks, written and performed by Kathryn Cowley
Muses
Here are her muses, ocean borne, beach combed. Her teenage confusions and mumbling frozen tongue that can win no arguments bring her out here, where stories are written in a language she understands.
Endless tourists snap their picturesque romance of seals and seabirds, the painted clinker-built boats. She doesn’t talk to them, hooded parka pulled tight, alone on beach below ancient stone pier, touching base with her realm.
Among the Sulphur perfumed seaweed, things speak to her. Blue, blue, fishing nets twisted into gordian knots. Barbed wire, rusted orange and no friend of the unwary. A yellow fish-box. A clear bottle of Klondyker’s vodka – a mostly empty message.
Excited tourists photograph a pod of orcas, she sees oil rigs, trawlers netting vast subsidies, a white sheep skull poking ridiculous teeth through the weed. She pockets a lava rock from Iceland, maybe sell it to a tourist after, maybe not.
And here, a bird with a broken neck, bright feathers catching sun, dead eye pinned to the sky perhaps homesick. If she could only speak to others as this bird speaks to her, say all that matters, ever matters, is to honour the world before you.
Originally published The New Shetlander
-Maxine Rose Munro
STRAY DOG IN THE RAIN
It has been wet for days. The sun is a fading memory, squeezed beneath these swaddling clouds. Compressed,
her outline smudges blood and mud across the sodden sky. Her skin turns black and blue under the violence of the storm.
The weather is dictating terms. Invading ocean roars, heaves its bulk onto the land, drowning out the little cries of birds.
Her throat shapes anxious sounds beneath her tattered coat. No-one here will hear her prayers. Stone deaf in its rage,
the supine land will lie in wait. Soon it will have its say. It coils its spring. It does not care what becomes of her.
-Clare O’Brien (First published by Lunate, March 2020)
TO A SINGER, FROM HER SONGS
You have driven us for years. Counting our notes like sheep, urging us over storm-weathered hills.
Our cries are nothing to you. Some you catch, stretching them beyond your rhythm, into the dark.
Some of us you call, softly at first; Some you flay alive, the sound reverberating as you feed.
Sated, you are tender then; caressing our bones, draping our wet skins over the chords to dry.
-Clare O’ Brien (first published by Nightingale & Sparrow, May 2020)
-Jane Rosenberg LaForge from her collection, Medusa’s Daughter, Animal Heart Press
(untitled)
I’ve strayed too far from this mud, this earth to which we all belong, I will plunge my hands into the cool soil and feel fresh roots strike forth from my fingertips anchoring this trembling heart deep within the land.
-Charlotte Olivet
I Create
Something to care for, saved on this blessed earth. A poem’s words walk into wilderness. A painting is a deep focus, unearths details, how trees frame, repairs brokenness.
Folk in my head seem quieter in woods, and in the cemetery. I usually only hear the loud mouthy ones, the no goods. Now, I listen to quiet ones slowly.
Some are no goods too, but most, not. Listen, They tell me woodland air is sacredness. Keen, I write and sketch, all senses sharpen. I never knew here, in my inwardness.
Outside of myself there are outside selves. Too many is a burden, all is wealth.
-Paul Brookes
Bios and Links
-Jane Rosenberg LaForge
writes poetry, fiction, and occasional essays from her home in New York. She has published four chapbooks of poetry and three full-length collections, the most recent being MEDUSA’S DAUGHTER from Animal Heart Press. Her novel, SISTERHOOD OF THE INFAMOUS from New Meridian Arts Press, was inspired by the life of her sister, a one-time punk rocker and prodigy in mathematics. She also is the author of the novel, THE HAWKMAN: A FAIRY TALE OF THE GREAT WAR (Amberjack Publishing 2018) and an experimental memoir, AN UNSUITABLE PRINCESS (Jaded Ibis Press 2014). More information is at jane-rosenberg-laforge.com
-Jo Fearon
Is Public Sector Administrator and hobby poet. Second of Ian McMillan’s guest Hear My Voice Sonnets on You Tube. Soon to be published in HMV Barnsley 2020 competition anthology. Passionate about live music especially rock/blues/punk. Aiming to devote more time to what I love. Rediscovered love of writing the past 2 years.
-Maxine Rose Munro
writes in English and her native Shetlandic Scots. She is widely published in the UK and beyond, both in print and online. She runs First Steps in Poetry, which offers feedback to beginner poets. More here http://www.maxinerosemunro.com
—Kathryn Southworth was born in Blackpool, Lancashire, and now lives in Camden Town, London and Prinknash, Gloucestershire. She is married with three surviving children and three grandchildren.
She has always written poetry but returned to it in earnest only after a long career as an academic in midlands universities. She was a founding fellow of the English Association, Head of English and Cultural Studies at the University of Wolverhampton and held senior management posts there and at Newman University and also worked for the Quality Assurance Agency. She has been a governor of the Camden and Islington Mental Health Trust and is currently a governor of Rose Bruford College of Drama and Theatre Arts.
She has published poetry and reviews in several magazines and anthologies and reads at a number of London poetry venues, including the Poetry Café and Torriano Meeting House. The literary canon informs her writing, as does her Catholic faith, surreptitiously.
-Dr Sara Louise Wheeler
has Waardenburg Syndrome Type 1, a genetic condition which affects her physical appearance as well as her hearing. She writes the column ‘O’r gororau’ (from the borders) for Barddas Welsh poetry magazine and her poetry, belles lettres and artwork has been published by Unique Poetry Journal, Dark Poets Club, Fahmidan Journal, Cloverleaf Zine, and 3am Magazine. Sara is currently writing an autobiographical bildungsroman opera called The Silver Princess, funded by Theatr Genedlaethol Cymru. Originally from Wrecsam in North East Wales, she now lives on the Wirral peninsula with her husband Peter and their pet tortoise Kahless
The holiday hike arrested as slow treacle time drips down leaves, oozes over boulders. Held by cessation, embracing abandonment, you entered and left yourself behind. You sit in forgotten worlds that do not see you become lost in the vastness of how small you are.
-Maxine Rose Munro
Wombwell Woods by Paul Brookes
The Void
I take a look, see myself in the void. So I resolve to walk in Wombwell Woods. Ancient forest. Once called dark and devoid of kindness. Home to killers, thieves no goods.
I can handle ghosts. Real folk do my head. I find a regular track. Don’t want to be lost. Uphill patched with cobbles leads to spread Of water, folk call the res where anglers boss
their lines, I wend the other way through bird talk, twigs snap underfoot. I am elsewhere, home. Things float in spring sunbeams as I slow walk Intoxicated, bathing in trees dome.
This is not a void, this is substance, worth. Something to care for, saved on this blessed earth.
-Paul Brookes
Bios and Links
-Jane Rosenberg LaForge
writes poetry, fiction, and occasional essays from her home in New York. She has published four chapbooks of poetry and three full-length collections, the most recent being MEDUSA’S DAUGHTER from Animal Heart Press. Her novel, SISTERHOOD OF THE INFAMOUS from New Meridian Arts Press, was inspired by the life of her sister, a one-time punk rocker and prodigy in mathematics. She also is the author of the novel, THE HAWKMAN: A FAIRY TALE OF THE GREAT WAR (Amberjack Publishing 2018) and an experimental memoir, AN UNSUITABLE PRINCESS (Jaded Ibis Press 2014). More information is at jane-rosenberg-laforge.com
-Jo Fearon
Is Public Sector Administrator and hobby poet. Second of Ian McMillan’s guest Hear My Voice Sonnets on You Tube. Soon to be published in HMV Barnsley 2020 competition anthology. Passionate about live music especially rock/blues/punk. Aiming to devote more time to what I love. Rediscovered love of writing the past 2 years.
-Maxine Rose Munro
writes in English and her native Shetlandic Scots. She is widely published in the UK and beyond, both in print and online. She runs First Steps in Poetry, which offers feedback to beginner poets. More here http://www.maxinerosemunro.com
—Kathryn Southworth was born in Blackpool, Lancashire, and now lives in Camden Town, London and Prinknash, Gloucestershire. She is married with three surviving children and three grandchildren.
She has always written poetry but returned to it in earnest only after a long career as an academic in midlands universities. She was a founding fellow of the English Association, Head of English and Cultural Studies at the University of Wolverhampton and held senior management posts there and at Newman University and also worked for the Quality Assurance Agency. She has been a governor of the Camden and Islington Mental Health Trust and is currently a governor of Rose Bruford College of Drama and Theatre Arts.
She has published poetry and reviews in several magazines and anthologies and reads at a number of London poetry venues, including the Poetry Café and Torriano Meeting House. The literary canon informs her writing, as does her Catholic faith, surreptitiously.
-Dr Sara Louise Wheeler
has Waardenburg Syndrome Type 1, a genetic condition which affects her physical appearance as well as her hearing. She writes the column ‘O’r gororau’ (from the borders) for Barddas Welsh poetry magazine and her poetry, belles lettres and artwork has been published by Unique Poetry Journal, Dark Poets Club, Fahmidan Journal, Cloverleaf Zine, and 3am Magazine. Sara is currently writing an autobiographical bildungsroman opera called The Silver Princess, funded by Theatr Genedlaethol Cymru. Originally from Wrecsam in North East Wales, she now lives on the Wirral peninsula with her husband Peter and their pet tortoise Kahless
Peter Larkin has been publishing poems about trees for almost 40 years, yet with each new collection he brings fresh perspectives. This arises in part from his close attention to trees, an attention which he invites us as readers to share. It is also nourished by his interest in scientific research into trees and forests, and recent philosophical debate on the non-human and our relationship to it.
In his latest volume,Encroach to Resume, ‘Bodies the Trees of’ is a good example of the way science informs the poetry. The poem takes as its principal sourceThe Body Language of Trees: A Handbook for Failure Analysisby Claus Mattheck and Helge Breloer, a book given to Larkin by J H Prynne. The handbook is focused on the hazards that trees can pose: how they break, why they break, and why sometimes they break when we don’t expect them to…
One stone for every day she is ok. This one is from a loch.
She reached into cold water and took it home, the first, her chosen
foundation. It sparkles darkly. The second came from a hill.
Under uprooted Ash, between exposed roots that fed still-living tree,
broad, flat, and coloured earth. Her third a broken, river-rounded
section of tile, taken from a garden. Terracotta, pitted
yet smooth to feel when held against cheek. Next, reddish slate
from a shore below castle, slipped from turret above, part of the roof.
Its fall shaped it into a heart that echoes her own
romantic notions. One day she will find a stone belonging to the sky,
it will be blue. Or white. Her tower will be done. She will rest.
-Maxine Rose Munro
Happens
You can’t plan it. Get out. Breathe. It makes sense. I fetched in wild as postcard from nature. greetings and wish you were here. Some intense rock from a Wombwell charity shop shares
space with unpainted pine furniture, grain and knots need to be seen, to lose myself in swirls, still rivers whose eddies are tamed in these marble bookends split whole length
reveals metamorphic designs pressured heated limestone packed with coloured crystals formed from impurities. Beauty impured. I am not pure. Who split me ogles.
When nature is a mirror I avoid, I take a look, see myself in the void.
-Paul Brookes
Bios and Links
-Jane Rosenberg LaForge
writes poetry, fiction, and occasional essays from her home in New York. She has published four chapbooks of poetry and three full-length collections, the most recent being MEDUSA’S DAUGHTER from Animal Heart Press. Her novel, SISTERHOOD OF THE INFAMOUS from New Meridian Arts Press, was inspired by the life of her sister, a one-time punk rocker and prodigy in mathematics. She also is the author of the novel, THE HAWKMAN: A FAIRY TALE OF THE GREAT WAR (Amberjack Publishing 2018) and an experimental memoir, AN UNSUITABLE PRINCESS (Jaded Ibis Press 2014). More information is at jane-rosenberg-laforge.com
-Jo Fearon
Is Public Sector Administrator and hobby poet. Second of Ian McMillan’s guest Hear My Voice Sonnets on You Tube. Soon to be published in HMV Barnsley 2020 competition anthology. Passionate about live music especially rock/blues/punk. Aiming to devote more time to what I love. Rediscovered love of writing the past 2 years.
-Maxine Rose Munro
writes in English and her native Shetlandic Scots. She is widely published in the UK and beyond, both in print and online. She runs First Steps in Poetry, which offers feedback to beginner poets. More here http://www.maxinerosemunro.com
—Kathryn Southworth was born in Blackpool, Lancashire, and now lives in Camden Town, London and Prinknash, Gloucestershire. She is married with three surviving children and three grandchildren.
She has always written poetry but returned to it in earnest only after a long career as an academic in midlands universities. She was a founding fellow of the English Association, Head of English and Cultural Studies at the University of Wolverhampton and held senior management posts there and at Newman University and also worked for the Quality Assurance Agency. She has been a governor of the Camden and Islington Mental Health Trust and is currently a governor of Rose Bruford College of Drama and Theatre Arts.
She has published poetry and reviews in several magazines and anthologies and reads at a number of London poetry venues, including the Poetry Café and Torriano Meeting House. The literary canon informs her writing, as does her Catholic faith, surreptitiously.
-Dr Sara Louise Wheeler
has Waardenburg Syndrome Type 1, a genetic condition which affects her physical appearance as well as her hearing. She writes the column ‘O’r gororau’ (from the borders) for Barddas Welsh poetry magazine and her poetry, belles lettres and artwork has been published by Unique Poetry Journal, Dark Poets Club, Fahmidan Journal, Cloverleaf Zine, and 3am Magazine. Sara is currently writing an autobiographical bildungsroman opera called The Silver Princess, funded by Theatr Genedlaethol Cymru. Originally from Wrecsam in North East Wales, she now lives on the Wirral peninsula with her husband Peter and their pet tortoise Kahless
The Wombwell Rainbow 