In 2018, I started a Doctorate of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow. I also started a new diary. In October, the month it all started, I wrote about duplicate footsteps and permanent landfills. I wrote of lacking the energy to dance, being lost in the forest, looking for safety among swirling leaves. Can’t remember if the forest was real or metaphorical. I wrote seemingly in lieu of being able to actually venture beyond the confines of my working life. Over three years and three months, I went through multiple iterations of research focus. I looked at foam, clouds, technicity, glitter, quotidian measures, fire and cinders. I fell asleep on coaches circling lochan sunsets. I produced a list of figures for how we might conceptualise this project. It was a sort of Escherian dollshouse, a self-deconstruction of building this place to think. I thought about Bhanu Kapil dropping her book in the river. I thought about doing a writer’s residency within the confines of a square-shaped digital platform. I wrote of ‘An angel tossing her gunpowder sequins’ and ethical eating, ‘how so often you are so paralysed between two choices that you just don’t eat at all’. I wondered what kind of home this work would make for me. This was a material question: thanks to the Scottish Graduate School of Arts & Humanities, it was a funded period. It paid me through Covid-19.
These were my original research questions:
- How can creative and critical writing interrogate and depict the apparent tensions between the Anthropocene’s deep-time and the quotidian context of our ecological orientations?
- What hybrid critical-creative forms might open up possibilities for a future ecological art, one which builds productive ways of ‘tuning in’ to a non-anthropocentric experience, with reflexive attention to the artistic and technological media involved in this process?
- How might ‘the everyday’ provide a temporal and formal mode through which to develop a critical, interdisciplinary Anthropocene aesthetics, negotiating ecological questions of affect, sensory relations, ethics and responsibility at scales both macro and micro, human and nonhuman?
It is up to the reader to decide how far the end result fulfilled or strayed from these lines of enquiry.
Six years on, having graduated from being a baby scholar-poet, I am really thrilled this project has found a dream home with No University Press, a new imprint from Tenement Press. The ‘no’ of refusal feels appropriate to this project, which very much concerns the affordances and limits of an academic and institutional mode when thinking through (im)possible questions of ecological thought and living on. Working with Benjamin Pickford and Dominic Jaeckle, editors at Tenement, I was able to bring the project’s creative detours and modalities to life in its final book form: Midsummer Song (Hypercritique). This is definitely the most ambitious work of my life. It’s 469 pages of critique, poetics, meadow work, illustration and elegy. I see the whole book as a big song, a study, an architectural attempt at making an ecological home in lyric.
Somewhere between an academic monograph and performative dreamwork, poetry and poetics, conceptualism and the commonplace.
You can order the book direct from Tenement here or from Asterism here.
You can read a full description of the book and access endorsements, sample poems and other materials here.
I will be touring the book at some upcoming dates in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Manchester and London:
09.11.24 Peter Barlow’s Cigarette /
with Maria Sledmere,
Harriet Tarlo & Lucy Wilkinson
The Carlton Club, Whalley Range
Manchester
See here.
05.11.24 Midsummer Song / Readings & Discussion
Maria Sledmere,
David Farrier
& Colin Herd
Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh
See here.
26.10.24 Midsummer Song / Readings & Discussion
Maria Sledmere,
Chris McCabe
Small Publishers Fair
Conway Hall, London
See here.
22.10.24 Midsummer Song / Readings & Discussion
Maria Sledmere,
Carl Lavery
& Colin Herd
Advanced Research Centre,
University of Glasgow / (Online via Zoom)
See here.
mariaology 