Category: announcements

Upcoming Sleep Curricula

My research currently centres on sleep as a nexus for thinking about energy transition, low carbon pleasure and chronodiversity (the way our circadian rhythms differ).

Tomorrow I’m giving a talk titled Our Amazing Bed Is the Future Garden: The Poetics of Dream Ecologies. It emerges from a chapter in my DFA thesis which will form part of a book forthcoming with NoUP Press next year. If you would like a Zoom link please drop me an email at maria.sledmere[at]strath.ac.uk.

This autumn I’ve got three upcoming workshops, two of them with the brilliant experimental composer Kevin Leomo.

Civil Twilight: Carving Dreamtime – workshop with Kevin Leomo and Maria Sledmere
14th October at 5:30pm, Civic House, Glasgow

Get your brain sticky in the pumpkin meat of the circadian and join Kevin Leomo and Maria Sledmere in carving dreamtime as an expression of creativity and low carbon pleasure. As the nights draw in and the clocks go back, we’ll be thinking about how darkness affects mood and slumber. Civil twilight is the brightest of the three twilight phases, where stars and planets might be seen in the sky as the sun dips just below the horizon. By attending to the ‘nocturne’ as a form in poetry and music, we’ll dwell in the possibilities of liminal experience for cultivating ecological imaginaries.
Please bring: Preferred writing materials, If you have one, a reusable coffee cup, headphones and phone.
Tickets are offered on a slide scale: £15 / £10 / £5.
Part of Civic Harvest at Civic House – an Autumn themed day of family friendly activities, workshops and market stalls with lunch from Parveen’s and seasonal cocktails at Civic House Bar!
Tickets

😴

Design your own sleep demon – workshop with Kevin Leomo and Maria Sledmere
24th October at 5:30pm, Advanced Research Centre, University of Glasgow
While sleep is a source of rest and recovery, many of us wrestle with disturbed sleep. If you’ve ever had nightmares or found yourself sleepwalking, you’ve encountered oneirodynia. The word comes from the Greek oneiros, meaning ‘dream’ and odyne, meaning pain. Sleep disturbance may be caused by a number of factors: from stress to stimulants, environment, illness and temperature. The eponymous protagonist of Donnie Darko is often found sleepwalking or experiencing some kind of nocturnal anguish. In this workshop, which serves as a primer for the film’s upcoming CinemARC debut, we’ll explore hypnagogic states between wakefulness and sleep as premonition, vision and disturbance. Together we will produce a ‘sleep bestiary’ of our (least) favourite nocturnal nasties, and present our findings before the screening on Friday.

Tickets

😴

The Poetry of Somnolence – weekend double workshop with Maria Sledmere and Beyond Form Creative Writing
11th and 12th November at 1-4pm (GMT), Zoom

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.

Tickets

Kevin and I have also been working on this somnolent playlist for your melatonin delectation:

Weekend workshop: The Poetry of Somnolence

Hey pals!

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

​😴

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.

For more info, price and enquiries head here.

Upcoming events – June/July 2023

20th June, 7pm – Dyke Magic zine launch (Bonjour, Glasgow)

21st June, 6pm – Poetry & Food workshop with Colin Herd (The Alchemy Experiment, Glasgow)

22nd June, 9:30am – Performing your research: a poets theatre workshop at SGSAH Summer School (The Studio, Glasgow)

23rd June, 7pm – Launch for An Aura of Plasma Around the Sun with Briony Hughes, Ivy Allsop and Isaac Harris (The Alchemy Experiment, Glasgow)

2nd July, 4pm – Fundraiser for ‘Kindness Street Team’ with Pleasure Pool, Gabo, J. D. Twitch, Sofay, Leo Bussi, DJ Michael (Queen’s Park bandstand, Glasgow)

5th July, 7:30pm – Glasgow Review of Books (re)launch (The Old Hairdressers, Glasgow)

7th July, 9:45am – Somnolent Cartographies: The Sonic Ecologies of Sleep all-day workshop (Civic House, Glasgow)

An Aura of Plasma Around the Sun

£12.00

RELEASED 19TH JUNE 2023

FROM THE PUBLISHER:

Blending oneiric memoir, experimental fiction and glitched verse, An Aura of Plasma Around the Sun swirls narratives of adolescence, occulted textual topographies and Scotland’s pandemic lockdown. Sweet, funny, heartbreaking, clever and ridiculous, often sentence-by-sentence, Maria Sledmere doesn’t guide readers through these whirlwinds so much as throw them in. Yet her spliced reveries and decadent languages are always underpinned by a celebration of community, as radiant and permeating as the sun. 

198 x 129 mm / 254 pages with illustrations and photographs

Preorder from Hem Press

New summer school workshop series: Experimental Ecopoetics

Excited to deliver this four-part workshop series in August for the87press, alongside two other courses by the brilliant Verity Spott and Jessica Widner. These will be cosy sessions on Zoom and feature a range of small press poetries, which we will read, write from and discuss in two hour workshops.

About the Course

Ecopoetics is a capacious term, meaning something like ‘the incorporation of an ecological or environmental perspective into the study of poetics’ (Kate Rigby). As both a creative and critical practice, ecopoetics explores the relationship between literature and the more-than-human world, often in curious, radical and transformative ways. Ecopoetics offers a fieldwork, site of experiment and a tool for (un)dwelling: tuning into ideas of environmentalism, activism, climate crisis, landscape, documentation, dreamwork and lyric. Ecopoetics is not just witnessing; it is an active engagement with habitats, affects, sensing, solidarity and politics — including questions of gender, race, sexuality, land rights and embodiment. On this course, we’ll stray from dominant canons of ‘green’ literature and onto alternative pastures: offering a broad introduction to ecopoetics through particular focus on Anglo-American small press poetries. Each session, structured as a combination of seminar and workshop, will involve reading, discussion and writing activity around themes such as everyday life, elemental thinking, dream and radical ecologies. We’ll investigate key terms such as animality, weather, nature, landscape, energy, the body, time and coexistence through works that expand our notion of who or what speaks in a poem, and where or what is ‘Nature’. Open to anyone with an interest in poetry and ecology, the sessions presume no prior experience with writing workshops, and sharing work in class is not required. A core reading list will be provided freely in the form of electronic extracts, with further suggested reading also listed.

Sign up here.

April Reading Groups

Pleased to be running two reading groups as part of the #ARCSpringFling 2023 at University of Glasgow. Open to anyone with an interest with plant ecologies, mushrooms and creative-critical approaches to environmental thinking, please sign up and come along with your questions, threads of thought and other entanglements!

We will be looking at

Admission is free.

New website!

At long last, I built a website: kaleidoscopic arcadia for keeping up-to-date with current work in the terrain of the written and visual. It’s still under construction, perhaps in a permo state of flux, but otherwise functional. I’ll keep the website updated with records of publications, workshops, teaching and the like. It’s also the home of a micro-publisher, Mermaid Motel, and various prints, publications and other artworks will be available for sale there. I’ll still be using this blog for BLOGGING PURPOSES (<3) but please check out the website for other things. :’)

Visit me: mariasledmere.com 🌐