We are currently 104% funded for our Joy//Us Crowdfund! with 30 hours to go. This means we can order the books, pay our editors, and keep the price at £9.99! Anything we receive from now until midnight on thursday 29th February, will go towards touring expenses for our poets.
Thank you to everyone who has contributed so far!
One of the things an anthology editor needs is a BIG table. This is the ‘finalising’ table for Joy//Us – Me shifting poems from pile to pile, while Jeremy took this picture. We spent two days at this, got through a lot of cups of tea and biscuits, and with breaks for me to have a sleep and Jeremy a walk.
The first day we chose the poems, and the second day sorted out the order, and added back a couple we had initially sidelined, and took them out again, and put them back again… Shaping an anthology is all about how poems play off each other – if you read this one first, what does it then say about this one?
As you can see we ran out of space, and my laptop is precariously close to my foot! I managed not to stand on it. The piles were broadly by subject -we got a LOT of dancing at Pride poems, and a lot of first love, and it was a question of which were the best of those, and which were so strange and original that they had to go in. I can’t be certain now but I think the largish pile on the floor far left are the ones that were great poems (they had already be shortlisted) but just weren’t joyful. So many poems were twelve lines of grief and angst with a final cheerful line. Almost a category of their own.
We also had a ‘yes, with an edit’ pile, I think those are the ones folded into my laptop. Not every poet is willing to edit, and Jeremy tended to ‘keep it anyway’ and I tended to ‘lose it anyway.’ We hardly disagreed at all, which was part of the fun. There were a couple of emails later, me saying I don’t remember why this one didn’t go in, Jeremy saying, are we sure about that one? but ultimately the right poems find their way into the final selection.
We are 50% funded for Joy//Us, and need to hit an average of £80 a day to meet our all or nothing target on our kickstarter. If you can help it’s right here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1477491501/joy-us-poems-of-queer-joy-anthology
Part two of our meet the Joy//Us poets feature
Normally I wouldn’t be plugging the book-after-next so soon, but with the crowdfund going, I’m sharing info on there, and thought I’d share it here too!
(Without the crowdfund it will be difficult to market the book and that makes it harder to sell, and makes it harder to stay in business.)
These are the poets in Joy//Us who we have published before, although not necessarily poetry!
Alexander Williams is a jazz singer, and host of the popular Dial Up Open Mic Events. In addition to his regular open mics, he stages an LGBT+ History Month open mic every February, and a Black History Month open mic every October. He is author of Secular Verses, a collection of humanist poetry featured monthly in Humanistically Speaking magazine.
Cherry Potts is the Director of Arachne Press, for whom she is editor/co-editor of most of our anthologies, and runs the annual literature and music festival Solstice Shorts. She is the author of a Lesbian fantasy epic and two collections of short stories, and winner of the Quill LGBTQ+ Prose award 2023
Conway Emmett is a fat, queer, nonbinary, neurodivergent poet who was born and lives in South Wales. They worked in higher education for many years, and later as an independent consultant, researcher and writer. They recently came back to creative writing after a couple of decades away. They often use their writing as a way to understand themself, their experiences, and the social world.
Dean Atta is an award-winning Black British author and poet of Greek Cypriot and Jamaican heritage whose works have received praise from Bernardine Evaristo and Malorie Blackman. His novel in verse, The Black Flamingo, about a Black gay teen finding his voice through poetry and drag performance, won the Stonewall Book Award and was shortlisted for numerous further prestigious awards. His poetry collection, There is (still) love here, explores acceptance, queer joy and the power of unapologetically being yourself and fully embracing who you are.
Jane Aldous is an Edinburgh based poet who returned to writing poetry later in life. She has been commended in several competitions and her poems have been widely published in magazines and anthologies. She has had two collections published by Arachne Press, the second of which was a lesbian love story set in 1960s Edinburgh told in 70 poems. She is currently working on a third series of poems which tell a more contemporary and mysterious tale.
Jeremy Dixon is a poet and maker of Artist’s Books. He was born in Essex and moved to the Vale of Glamorgan as a teenager, living there for over 45 years. His poetry has appeared in Butcher’s Dog, Found Poetry Review, HIV Here & Now, Impossible Archetype, Lighthouse Journal, Anti-Heroin Chic, Roundyhouse and other print and online magazines. He has been published several times by Arachne Press, including his debut pamphlet IN RETAIL (2019) and in the recent bilingual Welsh/English anthology, A470: Poems for the Road/Cerddi’r Ffordd (2022). We published Jeremy’s first full collection, A Voice Coming From Then in August 2021 and it WON the poetry category for Wales Book of the Year English Language Poetry…
JP Seabright (she/they) is a queer disabled writer living in London. They have four solo pamphlets published and two collaborations, encompassing poetry, prose and experimental work. They have been widely published and anthologised, and nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Forward Prize.
Kate Foley is a widely published, prize-winning poet who has read in many UK and European locations. She was president of the Suffolk Poetry Society until 2022. Her first collection, Soft Engineering was short-listed for best first collection at Aldeburgh. Her working life has ranged from delivering babies to conserving delicate archaeological material, and she also became Head of English Heritage’s scientific and technical research laboratories. Although she has always written poetry it wasn’t until Kate gave up the day job that she began to publish more widely. She now lives with her wife, between Amsterdam and Suffolk, where she performs, writes, edits, leads workshops and whenever possible works with artists in other disciplines.
Once voted “most likely to start the revolution” Rick Dove is a progressive poet and activist from Southwest London. Arriving on the spoken word scene in 2015, Rick has performed across the UK and internationally, with performance credits including The Wandsworth Arts Fringe, the Edinburgh Fringe, Greenbelt Festival, and Shambala Festival.
Dubbed “one to watch” by TS Eliot Prize winner Roger Robinson, Rick has published two collections with Burning Eye Books, Tales From the Other Box (August 2020), and Supervillain Origin Story (Coming May 2023), and was crowned the Hammer & Tongue UK Poetry Slam Champion at the Royal Albert Hall in July 2021. Equally at home on a stage, a page, or on a march, Rick has a vision of a fairer world and he wants to take you with him.
Normally I wouldn’t be plugging the book after next so soon, but with the crowdfund going, I’m sharing info on there, and thought I’d share it here too!
You might like to meet some of the poets, and I’ll start with those who have contributed a reward for the crowdfund. I will introduce more poets around another theme as we go along.
first up: Becky Brookfield, Joy Howard, K Angel, P Burton-Morgan, Rab Green and Steph Morris
Becky Brookfield is a Northern poet who writes about class, gender and nature. Recently she has been writing and teaching in Cairo. In 2018 she published ‘All the Heavens are ours’ in October 2018 Patchwork Magazine – Mental Health Edition. She has been a featured poet at a variety of performance events in Merseyside. She has been a contributor for the People and Dancefloors Project both as a poet and on one of their podcasts as a reviewer in 2020 and 2021.
Becky is offering a hand-illustrated copy of her poem Moon, or a personalised recording. here’s a taster:
I want the moon in my sky to wane over my lips…
Joy Howard has been writing poetry for over 40 years. It was coming out as lesbian that set the ball rolling. Her collection Exit Moonshine charts the ups and downs of what followed. She has run Grey Hen Press since 2008, publishing themed anthologies (23 so far) showcasing older women’s poetry.
Her own poems have appeared in several poetry journals, been widely anthologised and can be seen online at www.poetrypf.co.uk . She has three collections: Exit Moonshine (Grey Hen Press 2009), Refurbishment (Ward Wood Publications 2011) and Foraging (Arachne Press 2016) and we have published her in several previous anthologies.
Joy is offering a copy of her poetry collection that explores coming out in the 80’s Exit Moonshine.
Joy’s poem in Joy//Us is Don’t
don’t
tease you no okay
don’t make you laugh I’ll try…
K. Angel (they/them) has been published with the Tin House Open Bar, PANK, the New Flash Fiction Review, and elsewhere. A two-time participant in the HBMG Foundation’s National Winter Playwrights Retreat and shortlisted for the Virago FURIES Competition, their projects straddle many forms and genres, with a persistent fixation on consent, desire, intentional community, and metamorphosis interruptus. They live in London, where they sometimes perform as the singing country drag king TrucK.
K is offering a fiction manuscript review
their poem in Joy//us is Flint Knapping is Queer Now
These days I carry a rock in my pocket
that I found with you that day we walked
from Margate all the way around that hump
of worn coastline that former island
those beaches and cliffs…
P Burton-Morgan is a non-binary writer & director based in rural Somerset. In 2005 they founded Metta Theatre and have written/directed over 40 productions to date. They won the 2020 WGGB award for musical theatre book-writing on In The Willows. Their first verse play You Lay Your Hand Backwards on My Heart was shortlisted for the Bolton Octagon Prize in 2016 and later turned into an audio drama, and in 2022 they wrote a long form narrative poem to accompany Handel’s Messiah in the West End’s Drury Lane Theatre. This is their poetry publishing debut.
P is offering a personalised poem
their poem in Joy//Us is When I am Twelve a New Girl Joins Our School
tall girl
with caramel hair
will you be my friend?
Rab Green is a Scottish writer and artist based in London. He can be found at rabgreen.co.uk
Rab is offering a play script review.
Rab’s poem in Joy//Us is Probably Won’t Be a Church Service
I thought
about what I’d leave behind when I die, what would be said at my funeral,
my accomplishments all summed up: …
Steph Morris‘ poems have been published in his pamphlet Please don’t trample us; we are trying to grow! (Fair Acre Press) and in Rialto, Ambit, Ink Sweat & Tears, Under the Radar, Finished Creatures, The North, and in various anthologies and gardens. He was longlisted for the 2021 UK National Poetry Competition. His poetry translations have appeared in MPT and on no-mans-land.org and he translated Ilse Aichinger’s collection Squandered Advice (Seagull). In 2021 he was awarded an Arts Council England grant to develop his visual poetry, seen in Beir Bua Journal, Streetcake, Mercurius, and on various walls. He is an RLF fellow at Greenwich University.
Steph is offering riso prints and stencil prints of concrete poems.
Steph’s poem in Joy//Us is Legacy
Early days, and I found we were sitting out
on the street in the sun with a coffee,
holding hands, my love in pyjamas still,
alongside marigolds in pots…
I’d like to thank all these poets for their support for the crowdfund, and everyone who has backed us so far.
More poets and poems later in the week!
We are so excited about Joy//Us, Poems of Queer Joy and so disappointed that our bid to Arts Council England was unsuccessful. But we aren’t going to let that stop us celebrating LGBTQ+ writers, poetry and community. Joy//Us covers everything from first love to the joy of really good bread. For happiness in small or enormous quantities, this is the book for you.
So throughout February (which is, after all, LGBTHM- Lesbian Gay Bi and Trans history month) we are crowdfunding.
We have rewards for backers:
From these modest badges using elements of the cover design, for £3 (that badge making kit is so earning its keep)
right up to manuscript feedback for £100
by way of copies of the book (obviously) which will be shipped ahead of publication day, and original artwork (Concrete Poems) and personalised poems by our talented contributors, and your name in the acknowledgements page
Art by Steph Morris
I’ll be posting in more detail on each reward through the month.
We’ve been live for 4 days and have already hit 14% of our target, which is great (thank you to the 10 backers who have already helped), but we’d love to really zing through our milestones. We are really hoping to achieve stretch goals (crowdfund terminology for what you do if you get more than you ask for) which will pay for poets to travel to events around the country, an audiobook, and maybe even a hardback! We’ve never done a hardback before.
We’ve had loads of enthusiastic support from our sales partners at Inpress, who are providing postcards to independent bookshops, and The Poetry Book Society who mentioned our crowdfund in their newsletter, and we might be doing something rather special with The Poetry Pharmacy.
This isn’t a pitch to get you to contribute, though of course, if you want to, we won’t say no. (Of course it is, but we understand if you can’t!) What we would also like though, is if you could share the link with everyone you know, now that would be JOYOUS.
here’s the link https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1477491501/joy-us-poems-of-queer-joy-anthology and the video…
To conclude our #LoveAudio blog series, here is an extract from the remarkable poetry collection, This Poem Here by Rob Walton.
Arachne Press Director, Cherry Potts, recently said of This Poem Here: “At the start of lockdown, Rob Walton was responding to the anxieties and absurdities of the Corona Virus crisis by writing poetry. He published a lot of these poems on social media, as real-time responses to the latest news. Watching and enjoying them from afar, I approached Rob to publish them as a book. We were in conversation about this project when Rob’s dad sadly died from Covid. The poems in the collection then took a radical turn, delving into rage, sorrow and grief. I can’t imagine a more appropriate collection to have published in this ‘you-couldn’t-make-it-up’ era.”
Full of tears, laughter, biting political satire and Geordie grammar, these are poems that are meant to be read aloud. Here is ‘And in Lockdown’:
You can also watch Rob Walton reading some of the collection in the video from the online launch of This Poem Here: https://youtu.be/sNijjLH4zB0 (be warned, he made many of us cry!).
#LoveAudio is the Publisher’s Association annual week-long digital celebration of audiobooks is designed to showcase the accessibility, innovation, and creativity of the format. Follow the hashtag on twitter.
“A fascinating and imaginative vision of the future, built on the foundations of our current climate crisis. You get to follow the overall story from multiple view points which allows multiple other issues to be delicately explored through a variety of characters.
A really pleasant surprise from a book I hadn’t heard of! I would recommend it to anyone wanting an interesting, entertaining and thought provoking read.” Audible Review
Our #LoveAudio post today is an extract from the audiobook of Accidental Flowers, a novel in short stories by Lily Peters.
This title was another multi-voiced audiobook. The clip above is narrated by Beth Frieden and we also got to work with several other fantastic voice actors and narrators, including Tigger Blaize. Tigger said:
“I loved playing Robin [in Accidental Flowers]! With each role like this, we get closer to having a trans cannon of stories and characters. It’s a brilliant book with a real mix of voices.”
#LoveAudio is the Publisher’s Association annual week-long digital celebration of audiobooks is designed to showcase the accessibility, innovation, and creativity of the format. Follow the hashtag on twitter.
One of the most interesting things about publishing our titles as audio books is when we are working with anthologies and collections that need a multi-voice approach. This creates the challenge of finding authentic, representative voices for each story or poem within the collection – without having to recruit a cast of thousands!
Today for #LoveAudio week we are sharing an audio excerpt from one of the most multifariously voiced books we have ever published: 100neHundred by Laura Besley is a collection of 100 stories, each of exactly 100 words. We’re delighted to share two stories from this brilliant book, one read by Cornelia Colman and one by Shubhita Chaturvedi:
“The book gives the reader the feeling of voyeurism as if we are taking a glimpse behind the curtain of lives unraveling, of decisions being made behind closed doors, of peeking at the most intimate of moments. It’s melancholic, heartrending, hard hitting and joyous all in one!” Ross Jeffrey
#LoveAudio is the Publisher’s Association annual week-long digital celebration of audiobooks is designed to showcase the accessibility, innovation, and creativity of the format. Follow the hashtag on twitter.
Jane Aldous introduces her poem Sirius which will be performed at Solstice Shorts Festival 2020, Tymes Goe By Turnes on 21st December, and published in the book of the same name, we are crowdfunding – only a few hours left!
C L Hearnden introduces her poem 179cm which will be performed at Solstice Shorts Festival 2020, Tymes Goe By Turnes on 21st December, and published in the book of the same name, we are crowdfunding – only a couple of days left! https://bit.ly/3luCRUx
