Announcing a 2-part weekend workshop ‘The Poetry of Somnolence’ with Beyond Form Creative Writing.
Take this workshop to explore the radical, rhythmic & world-traversing poetics of sleep, whatever your creative practice!
Saturday and Sunday November 11th and 12th
1-4pm (GMT) via Zoom
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This 2 part series of afternoon workshops prioritise the relationship between writing and sleep. Exploring cross-genre writing, visual and sonic art, we will look at how daily writing practice can recentre our circadian rhythms. From hypnagogic poetics to dream writing, nocturnal missives, dawn songs and notes on twilight, we’ll consider experimental approaches to writing somnolence. All creatives welcome.
Workshop format will combine reading, writing, listening, optional discussion and two nap breaks. Reading will be provided in digital format (pdf or weblinks) ahead of the session.
Lately they’d been doing this thing of pretending they were walking the dog. Which dog? Obviously the dog. The dog would appear alongside them kind of grown from original emoji like those tiny dinosaurs, flowers or anime characters you used to get in stockings at Christmas, the ones you add water to then they expand with superabsorbent polymer to become a whole other thing. Idk what the dog was expanding with, some air of affection. It was lonely to walk around the abandoned railway lines and through underpasses and along by the retail park and up by the meadowing verge of the motorway. It was lonely to eat litter. It was lonely to squish shadows into predators and gull cries into opulent music. Having a dog you were present and obvious. People stopped to say the dog was beautiful and so were you, pet.
Cats cry in the mouths of children and follow them home. They take the canal route without listening to father and collect tiny yellow flowers so to eat bitter all the more sweetly. Cats had a feel for waywardness. Poised for the kill. Whispered: don’t work. Cats hated the water and their orientation was always away from the canal and towards the city. Cats took upon the gulls at night, like the mushroom controlling the ants, and this is how they learned how to fly. You’re a child right? Ofc you’ll follow.
homesick for impossible places I found a £15,000 house for sale on Zoopla in the town I grew up for eighteen years not really a house but a cosy one bed on Castle Street, council tax band unavailable Scott says that’s a sign the property is cursed I have no idea about freehold tenure but I’m a bitch at auctions last sold for £24,000 in 2014 you have to assume the place was on fire insane wallpaper stripped to the tune of severe black mould all slutty lilac underneath lots of free rubble demons living in the wiring and slugs come out the plug sockets I could afford to buy this flat which is twice the size of my current home if I paid it off at £82 a month over 25 years working my ass off as a journalist by which point I would have ensconced myself in the licentious ivy of the outsideÂ
I awoke to a singular bleep that seemed to come from the membrane between wakefulness and sleep, a state where perceptual phenomena cannot be traced to either realm. I checked my carbon monoxide alarm, inspected the boiler (for what, idk, a desperate mechanical groan). Side effect of anosmia is you don’t know if you are going to perish by smoke (this came to light when the building next door to mine was on fire, there were trucks of firefighters hosing it down with water, I couldn’t smell anything even with the window open), let alone gas. Carbon monoxide is pretty much odourless anyway. You have to rely on your landlord’s possibly obsolete detection technology. I flung open all the windows. I had Covid again last week and tried to remember the last two times I was quarantined in the same flat: long phone calls pacing around, screaming every time I had to sit down because of the muscle pain in my legs, watching German television shows about drug-loving teenagers, getting the same results.
I don’t understand what’s happened to my sense of smell. The doctor prescribed regular Beconase nasal spray, the shit I’ve been using all my life for hayfever. Daily use over several months led to nosebleeds and headaches. I tried salt water rinsing, voluptuous inhalations of the steam exhaled by menthol crystals. Yesterday, I was walking through Shawlands and stopped to rub lavender between my thumb and forefinger. Brought fingers to my nose with the tenderness of someone first applying the buttercup method, somewhere else. I could smell the lavender. Just about.
When I was small, we’d sneak in the back way to a big National Trust park where you could go to the Walled Garden. Mum would point at the various herbs and name them. She’d say to rub them between your thumb and forefinger and we’d do that to save picking them and being caught. Sometimes I’d press them between pages of notebooks. Mint, basil, rosemary, thyme. We had a lot of lemongrass in the garden. I would steep it for tea. I would go through puberty and try to smoke it.
Maybe it’s the smells with memories that remain. I should’ve drunk more coffee as a baby.
Is there a method for coaxing cellular repair? I buy cut-price little boxes of salad cress from Asda and plunged my nose in them. I pick up an antique book about keeping illustrious shrubberies, and the seller advises me that the kinds of pesticides mentioned in the book should remain in the early twentieth century. My heart aches. I’m a very tiny garden.
mariaology 