Sealey Challenge!

Just a few days to go until the start of The Sealey Challenge, which is to read a book of poetry a day throughout August.

Although the idea of my hammock under the apple tree and a pile of poetry books is very appealing, I don’t think I can actually achieve that while working – not if I’m going to read properly and take in what I am reading with the proper attention – so I’m planning re-reading for some of these slots.

Rather than just randomly pick up poetry books, I am focussing on books by poets we have published at Arachne Press, which have been published elsewhere.

I’ve got 34 (I think!) to choose from, and if you are inspired to join in, here’s a link to our Bookshop.org page where you can buy most of these listed, and the books we have published by these poets, and a handful of others that I don’t actually own (yet) – Where they aren’t listed, it is because they are out of print, not stocked by the wholesaler that Bookshop.org use, or only available from the publisher.

OR…!! you can go to our webshop and get 10% off poetry collections and anthologies, and hybrid anthologies (poetry and short fiction) with code SEALEY until 31st August.

OR…!!!!

you can buy our poetry books as ebooks, and a handful as audiobooks, on our ebookstore after all, you Sealey Challenge doesn’t HAVE to be in print.

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We mostly found these poets through open calls for anthologies, and I’ve grouped them by where we first published them (not always poetry!), or if we have published a collection with them subsequently. Some of these poets were well known at the time we published them, some it was their first outing in print, and every possibility in between.

I’ll be posting about the books daily on Twitter and Instagram, and weekly here.

Here’s the list…

Poets with whom we have published collections

Claire Booker: The Bone that Sang/ Later There Will be Postcards (Arachne Collection: A Pocketful of Chalk)

Jennifer A McGowan: The Weight of Coming Home/ Still Lives with Apocolypse (Arachne Collections: With Paper for Feet and How to be a Tarot Card (or a Teenager)

Kate Foley: I own Kate’s entire works, but I really want to re-read A Fox Assisted Cure (Arachne Collections:The Don’t Touch Garden, A Gift of Rivers, Saved to Cloud)

Ness Owen: Moon Jellyfish can Barely Swim (Arachne Collection: Mamiaith)

First published by us in A470 Poems for the Road/ Cerddi’r Ffordd

Angela Graham: Sanctuary

Christina Thatcher: How to Carry Fire

Kevin Mills: Zeugma

Matthew Smith: Keeper of Aeons

Rae Howells: The Language of Bees

Stephen Payne: The Windmill Proof

 

First published by us in Departures, and contributed to The Story Sessions (Live literature)

Zoë Brigley: Hand and Skull

 

First published by us in Lovers’ Lies

Tania Hershman: Terms and Conditions

 

First published in one of our Solstice Shorts Anthologies

Jenny Mitchell: Her Lost Langauge

Julian Bishop: We Saw It All Happen

Lisa Kelly: The House of the Interpreter

Martyn Crucefix: The Lovely Disciples

Olivia Dawson: Unbottled

Paul Deaton: A Watchful Astronomy

Sarah James: Blood Sugar, Sex, Magic/ Plenty-Fish

 

First published by us in The Other Side of Sleep

Adrienne Silcock: Of Gardens and Witches

Bob Beagrie: Leásprung

Brian Johnstone: Dry Stone Work

Inua Elams: The Actual…

 

first published by us in We/She

Elizabeth Stott: The Undoing

 

First published by us in What Meets the Eye

Raymond Antrobus: The Perserverance

 

First published by us in Where We Find Ourselves

Alexander Williams: Secular Verses

L. Kiew: More than Weeds

Selina Nwulu: A Little Resurrection

Sundra Lawrence: Warriors

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Crab Pots and Coffee: Writing The Arctic Diaries

As publication of The Arctic Diaries approaches, we spoke to poet Melissa Davies to ask about the inspiration for her debut collection and her experiences on Sørvær – a tiny island in a remote Norwegian archipelago.

Here we are, The Arctic Dairies is about to go out into the world and what am I feeling? 

In this moment, I find myself thinking often about the people living on Fleinvær. The handful of residents, the weekenders and friends I’ve spent another winter with. I picture them reading it and try to imagine what they will feel. After all, every poem sits in their landscape, not mine.

Listen to Melissa Davies read ‘Bird Wife’, on location in Norway

The Arctic Diaries truly started in the spring of 2017 with a Facebook post asking ‘Do you want to live and work in the Arctic?’ to which I replied yes! Months later a Skype call with the jazz musician who founded an artist retreat on Sørvær (one island in the archipelago of Fleinvær) and in November 2018 I was on a plane to the north of Norway to run The Arctic Hideaway for two months….which turned into six. My husband and I landed in the middle of an arctic storm to quickly learn the way of life here: weather rules winter and it is futile to resist that fact.

Sørvær is one of two year-round inhabited islands in the archipelago and during that first winter we spent many of the cold afternoons of polar night with the only other couple overwintering there. It was over kaffe, lefse and boknafisk (semi-dried cod) that I heard the tales that eventually became The Arctic Diaries. The book really began to form when I realised that many of these stories—eroded through family retelling—would disappear with the passing of the people we came to call friends. Not just traditional or folk tales but vocabulary unique to the landscape, ways of living and happenings that continue to tell us how it is to be here.

However, I don’t see The Arctic Diaries as an archive. The characters I’ve written are fictional, they are not two dimensional drawings of the people I met, I could never do them justice. Instead, I hope that readers will take from each poem what they need, along with a raised awareness or reminder of what we are losing as industrial fishing and fish farming continue to devour Norway’s coastline.

Having said that, the book is also a diary of my first winter on Fleinvær. An exploration of being ‘other’ and the personal demons I was facing at the time so I kept the diary title, structure and dates.

As someone from rural Cumbria, it was interesting to see so many of the difficulties facing Fleinvær and wider Nordland county reflected in the issues facing my own home. I write about the coastal Arctic because it’s the landscape that speaks to me but many of the poems sing a mourning song familiar to the fells too. So as you dive into sea orms, crab pots and eider nests please remember, The Arctic Diaries is only the first chapter in a project that has more to give, especially as art cements a place in the forward momentum of climate activism and Europe swirls with questions of borders and migration.

Pre-order a copy of The Arctic Diaries through our shop.

For the Spring Equinox, looking forward to Byways

We will be publishing Byways, an anthology of poems and stories that take us off the beaten track this time next year, for the Spring Equinox, a time for getting the caked mud of winter off your boots and getting out for a walk!

Here are our contributors, mainly from the UK and USA, including a handful of poems in Welsh.

Adele Evershed
Amelia Foster
Angela Arnold
Annemarie Cooper
Annie Kissack
Attalea Rose
Cath Humphris
Des Mannay
Diana Powell
Eabhan Ní Shuileàbhain
Em Gray
Gloria Heffernan
Gregory McGreevy
Gwyn Parry
Heather Lane
Helen Campbell

Jane McLaughlin
Jeff Phelps
Jonah Corren
Josie Levin
Judith Mikesch-McKenzie
Katie Harrison
Katie Margaret Hall
Kelly Davis
Laura Besley
Lisa Farrell
Lizzie Lovejoy
Mab Jones
Maddie Price
Marcus Smith
Michael Shann
Michelle Penn

Mitzi Dorton
Nicholas McGaughey
Phil Wood
Raymond Luczak
Rhys Owain Williams
Ros Woolner
Sara Louise Wheeler
Seth Crook
Simon Chandler
Sue Burge
Sue Moules
Thea Smiley

Rhiya’s Routes – Ba

The release of Rhiya Pau’s upcoming poetry collection, Routes marks fifty years since her family arrived in the U.K. Routes began as an attempt to chronicle the history of Rhiya’s family, and her community, and much of the collection draws on the experience of Rhiya’s grandparents – her Ba and Bapuji.

We asked Rhiya about her favourite poem in Routes, and she chose ‘Enough’, which paints a portrait of her grandmother, through her well-stocked kitchen cabinets:

My grandmother houses gods in her closet
among tower blocks of cereal boxes and canned
chickpeas so we may always know enough.

“Enough paints a portrait of my grandmother and her ability to be in two places at once. How she can know about the miners, the tower blocks, the Post Office – live in this country for fifty years and still not feel British enough. It’s about longing and belonging, the sacrifice of the mother tongue, and how even in the absence of language we find ways to love.

Over the past two years, I have been on my own migratory journey, trying to obtain a visa to live and work in the USA. This poem is a favourite of mine because it articulates an enduring sense of displacement that has only been amplified for me as I move back and forth between places.”

Watch Rhiya Pau reading Enough:

Routes will be published on 24 November 2022. You can pre-order your copy now. 

Join us for a free event with Rhiya Pau and author Anna Fodorova at Forest Hill Library on Wednesday 23 November. Details and tickets.

Rhiya’s Routes – Bapuji

This month we are delighted to be launching Rhiya Pau’s debut poetry collection, Routes, almost exactly a year since we published Rhiya’s first poem ‘Departure Lounge’ in our Where We Find Ourselves anthology.

Routes chronicles the migratory histories of Rhiya’s ancestors and explores the conflicts of identity that arise from being a member of the South Asian diaspora. Ahead of publication, we asked Rhiya about the inspiration behind the collection:

“In many ways, my grandfather has been the inspiration behind Routes. Bapuji was born in Kenya but moved to India in the 1940s to become a freedom fighter in the Independence movement. He participated in marches and sit-ins, and was laathi-charged several times by British soldiers for his disobedience. In one instance he was even shot in the leg. Later in life, after moving to the UK he was awarded Membership of the British Empire by the Queen for his community work, an accolade he was incredibly proud of. I created Routes as a space in which to document the migratory history of my family and community and explore the conflicts of identity that emerge. The release of this collection reflects on the fifty years since much of our community moved to the UK, following the expulsion of the Asians from Uganda.

My grandfather was a salt-march pilgrim
in a fleeting incarnation of this nation.
Now how do I wash the blood from his flag?

Bapuji is remembered as a bold and principled man, who was unafraid to stand by his convictions in the face of disapproval. He believed this to be a necessary act in service of societal progress. In Routes I hope to pay tribute to his legacy. It is only by examining our history that we can begin to answer – what is worth holding on to? What memories, what stories, what truths? When we piece these together, what is the narrative we choose to tell? And how are we going to address the silences that remain?

Routes will be published on 24 November 2022. You can pre-order your copy now. 

Join us for the in-person launch of Routes at Keats’ House on 24 November, from 6.30pm. Details and free tickets.

Discovering ourselves in soil and sky on National Poetry Day

It’s National Poetry Day and the theme this year is The Environment. To celebrate, we asked poet Claire Booker about her relationship with the natural world, and the way she represents it in her new collection, A Pocketful of Chalk:

I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t in awe of the natural world: its endlessly creative
hutzpah; the refreshing disinterest it has in our little human concerns.

A Pocketful of Chalk came together from what I could see was a build-up of poems
connected to natural phenomena. By nature I also include the dream world, which arises
from our inner natures. Dreams are forces inside us which we ignore at our peril, just
like the forces outside us.

Five years ago I moved to the village of Rottingdean just outside Brighton in East
Sussex. I’d spent three decades living and working in south London, which is
particularly blessed with woodland and open spaces. Urban nature is a force for change,
because it offers millions of people a relationship with the wild which they wouldn’t
otherwise have. By virtue of its fragile hold within the city, urban nature is also a potent
symbol of what we’re losing.


Moving to a rural, farming area, placed me right in the middle of wildness (it can get
pretty wooly up there on the Downs if a storm’s coming!). But even this wildness is
under threat. During this year’s drought, the wheat fields were scorched, newly planted
woodland saplings dropped their leaves, there were tiny, misshapen black berries. Then
the rains came in biblical proportions, and top soil was lost.

As humans, we’re in a unique position. We’re part of nature, but also the enemy outside
its gates.

So what, as a poet, can I do about this? Very little, in reality, but even that little is worth
going for. Poetry can take you to the heart-beat of emotion. It can remind people of
what they’ve lost, or fear losing, or want to fight for. Above all, poetry offers quiet
contemplation, an enrichment of understanding – questions that could do with answers,
answers that need questioning.

The environment is us, it’s our relationship with each other, made manifest. We live in a
rushed, frenetic, some might say, frantic world. Poetry can help us draw breath, stop,
consider, appreciate. I find that by simply walking along the sea front, or up on the
Downs, the world starts to unravel a little. I get to see the same places over and over
again. But of course, they’ve never the same place more than once. And when I feel a
poem start to pupate, I pick up my pen. Learning about the planet, is learning about
myself.

So in A Pocketful of Chalk, there are poems about evening shadows on the Downs, and
how we can be stretched by light. There’s a poem about drought and how the loss of
plants is like losing children. There’s a young child who is impatient with her little
radish patch, but then flings herself onto the soil to listen to the seedlings grow. There
are poems that are fantastical, apocalyptic, about a drowned world, and others that look
at rain as a flow of emotions. Some of the poems are persona poems where I imagine
what it’s like to be a wild creature. I find it fascinating to try and enter a world without human parameters. After all, the best poetry leaves ego behind, and that’s always worth
striving for.

At times, in the face of the night sky, or mesmerised by a murmuration of starlings,
even the idea of writing can seems absurd. The very first poem in the collection,
ironically, is about just that. When you’ve seen the “the impossible exactness” of a
Marbled White butterfly, words can seem a pointless add-on. As Ted Hughes wrote in
Poetry in the Making: “It is not enough to say the crow flies purposefully, or heavily, or
rowingly, or whatever. There are no words to capture the infinite depth of crowiness in
the crow’s flight.”

So that’s the challenge. To be part of nature, yet at the same time its observer and
protector. Poems live as much between the lines as in them – surely an ideal medium for
expressing such a paradox?

Not crows, but herons… watch Claire Booker reading Grey Heron at the launch of A Pocketful of Chalk:


#NationalPoetryDay is the annual mass celebration on the first Thursday of October that encourages everyone to make, experience and share poetry with family and friends. www.nationalpoetryday.co.uk

Writing the Diaspora, A Conversation

Join Arachne Press poets to talk about diaspora experience and the power and significance of creative response

Tickets free/donation/with book

Chaired by Nikita Chadha, our panel will include Alexander Williams, Gita Ralleigh, Seni Seneviratne, Des Mannay, Marina Sánchez and Catherine Okoronkwo. The panel will consider questions such as: How important is your diaspora identity to your writing? and As a writer, where do you feel like you belong?

This is an open event – we want to hear your voices too and there will be plenty of break-out and Q and A time, to encourage you to share your thoughts, reflections and experiences – and, if you would like, to write about them.

Different breakout rooms will allow time for shared conversation and deeper exploration of the ideas raised by the panel or provide an opportunity to attend a short writing session/ workshop.

This is an online event on Zoom. We will use auto captions.

 

Lesbian Visibility Week

Phew, a bit late in the week, but let’s fly the flag here, before I go back to the emergecy fund application to ACE, refreshed with reminding myself why I do this.

We publish everyone. (Except people who aren’t writers, obviously).

But my first publications as a writer were with a lesbian press, and while we aren’t a lesbian press we are a lesbian-owned press, and we can still use that visibility.

So in celebration, here are our lesbian authors and poets, together with the books they are in, all of which are available from us direct, and from intrepid bookshops, and as ebooks from your usual supplier. There are probably more, but if they don’t tell me, I can’t celebrate them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lockdown Interviews No2 Sarah James interviews Jane Aldous

Second in a series of author-to-author interviews to distract them, and you, from lockdown torpor.

Sarah James

Sarah James

Sarah James (Vindication, Shortest Day Longest Night) aka S.A.Leavesey interviews fellow poet, Jane Aldous (Let Out the Djinn, Noon, An Outbreak of Peace, Time and Tide, Dusk)

Jane aldous

Jane Aldous

Sarah:   What are the main motivations and influences for your writing?

Jane:     Like you, I started writing very early in life, having been influenced and inspired by diverse writers such as Shakespeare, Brecht, Patten, Keats. I write because it feels like the best form of play I can think of. No-one tells me to do it, it’s just down to me. But writing is also the hardest thing I choose to do, and it gives me huge pleasure and pain!
My influences these days are many and varied and include many poets and writers whose books are crammed onto my bookshelves including Kathleen Jamie, Jacob Polley, Elizabeth Bishop, Robin Robertson, Tomas Transtromer and Tove Jansson. But I’m also influenced by nature, artists, musicians, architecture and archaeology in very eclectic and spontaneous ways.

Sarah:   What is your own favourite poem in your collection Let Out the Djinn and why?

Jane:     I think it has to be Doggerland.  Doggerland fascinates me hugely, and when I first read about this ancient land beneath the North Sea, my imagination became fired up and I knew I wanted to attempt a poem from the perspective of a hunter-gatherer, that tried to do justice to the immensity of the place and its eventual fate. There’s still more I’d like to write about Doggerland, its story is not just ancient history, there are many modern resonances too, such as climate change and mass extinctions.

Sarah:   You also have work in Time and Tide. Are water and time big themes in your poetry generally? If so, how and why do they fascinate you? If not, how did you find a way into the theme?

Jane:     I messed about in boats as a kid and when I moved up to Scotland over 30 years ago, I said I wanted to live beside the sea. Well in a way I do. Although we live in the suburbs of Edinburgh, the Firth of Forth is never far away and under normal circumstances, we go to the East Lothian coast and the NW Highlands very regularly. Water does feature in some of my poems such as Dave off in Five, With Meme on Mellon Udrigle Beach and Eel Ghazal, and whether it’s a river or loch, waterfall or incoming tide, I’m always drawn to watch. But I’m also aware of the theme of time in my poetry. Many of my poems are set in the past and are concerned with loss, love, death and memory. However, I think I made heavy weather about writing my Time and Tide poem. In fact I wrote two poems. The first based on a Clearance clachan or hamlet beside the sea in West Ardnamurchan was rejected. The second was based on a fictional character, a female ghost, who had once lived in 18th Century Leith, Edinburgh’s main port. I wrote it to accompany an embarrassingly bad film poem (quite rightly rejected). Thankfully the poem In the Shadows, on the Shore, Leith made it into the anthology.

 Sarah:  If you could change something, or learn one new thing in terms of how you work, or what you write about, what would it be and why?

Jane:     I’d love to be able to write and present a film poem. I think my best poems are the ones that began as a strong visual experience and I’d love to be able to learn about the process of making a poem come alive in a visual sense as well as on the page and in the mind.

Sarah:   What are your favourite reading, writing and performance spots?

Jane:  I love writing on our kitchen table. Although our kitchen is quite a busy space, with cooking and washing happening plus our cat bouncing around, I love it. I can look out onto the garden, listen to the radio and I’m happy!
I love reading in the kitchen too, but I also have a very comfortable chair in the lounge which is perfect for settling down with a good book.
In the summer the garden bench is a brilliant place to muse or read or write surrounded by birdsong and bumblebees.
In my very limited experience of performance, I’d say that The Lighthouse Bookshop, Edinburgh where I launched my debut collection Let out the Djinn and read at an open mic is a lovely welcoming space.

You can buy all the books mentioned from our webshop, we will post them out to you.

If you would prefer eBooks, all these books are available from your usual retailer. we recommend Hive for ePub.

 

#IWD2020- Photos

Until I get round to editing the video files, here are some photos from Sunday’s event, where we launched Emma Lee‘s new collection, The Significance of a Dress, and thoroughly celebrated International Women’s Day with poems and flash from Laila Sumpton, Claire Booker, Sarah Lawson, Jenny Mitchell, Julie Easley, Cherry Potts, Michelle Penn, Shamini Sriskandarajah, and Emma Lee!