Our home is on fire and our houses unmade. When climate change is also (as Margaret Atwood puts it) ‘everything change’, how might poetry reckon with the far-reaching implications and existential contradictions of environmental crisis? In this panel discussion, we ask what tools exist for poetry to retune our senses, coexist with multiple species, tell stories of deep time while envisioning resilient and resistant communities. Our three poets will explore key strands into a climate-responsive poetics: elemental, collaborative, mindful, wild. With close attention to form and language, we discuss practical, ethical and poetic interventions in ecological thought.
I spent the weekend in Zoomland with a group of really brilliant practitioners musing on the affordances of sleep and dreaming in our writing. We took the opportunity to discuss chronotypes, insomnia, hypnagogic poetics, oceanic feeling, nocturnes, dwelling and dreamwork among other things. Everyone has a relationship to sleep and what I love about these workshop spaces is the way so much is unlocked by paying attention to the liminal moments in the day. I really enjoyed hearing about how modifications to one’s writing environment (turning the lights off, going outside, changing the light temperature on your writing device) an affect what we write. We thought about darkness as discovery. We considered the lullaby. Sleep as a transformative force, sleep as anti-capitalist, sleep as a process of (un)becoming, sleep as trip and trance. Sleep and caregiving, sleep and safety, sleep and homemaking, sleep and the more-than-human.
Thanks to everyone who attended ❤
More events and work on sleep & somnolence will be announced in the new year!
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
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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.
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.
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.
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.
A workshop exploring Strathprints through creative practice with Dr Maria Sledmere (School of Humanities) & Dr Karen Veitch (Scholarly Publications and Research Data).
Was really fun jumping into the Strathclyde repository on Monday with Karen and students from across the university. The whole worksheet accompanying the workshop is now available open access via Strathprints. We looked at the relationship between open access and open forms, ecopoetics and recomposition, collage, cut-up, erasures and wildcards – with examples from Chloë Proctor, Caleb Parkin, Caroline Bergvall, Kendrick Loo and others.
Thrilled to announce I’ll be working with Beyond Form Creative Writing again this autumn to offer two new workshops. The first, Epistolary Experiments, begins on 28th September and is a monthly, four-part series designed to explore the arts of letter writing and correspondence across different forms. We’ll be thinking about how the work of address, posting, description and all its intimacy and triangulation can tell a story, evoke fantasy scenarios or perform an expansive, relational lyric. The second, Pop Matters: Our Songs, is a one-off workshop on 23rd November and offers a warm and upbeat ‘studio’ for musing on the relationship between creative practice and pop music. How do we write through and towards pop with all our devotion or ambient dwelling in its neon glow? Both workshops will involve a mix of reading other work, discussion and structured individual writing activities. There will never be any pressure to share work, although you will have access to the workshop threads on Experimental Creatives Collective, a closed forum space where further discussion and sharing can take place if anyone wishes.
For both workshops, there is both a full price and two concession rates.
Epistolary Experiments
4 Sessions Starting Wednesday September 28th
6-8:00pm (GMT) via Zoom
‘I write you a letter to make eyes at a reader I don’t know from Adam’ (Kay Gabriel). From Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) to Sean Bonney’s incendiary Letters Against the Firmament (2015), letter-writing or ‘the epistolary’ has inflected all kinds of writing, including novels, poetry and manifestos. Taking cue from Kay Gabriel’s ‘The Purloined Lyric’, we’ll explore the possibilities of letters, address and communication in all kinds of writing, practice and performance. While the literary letter has an established tradition, we’ll look at contemporary artists/authors who shake up the form of correspondence and in turn reframe desire, play, identity, sex, intimacy, domesticity and the political.
In this four-part, monthly series, we’ll look at several key areas: the love letter, the political letter, the fantasy letter and the postcard. A letter can triangulate writer, addressee and reader in endlessly generative ways, not to mention the origami of folds between art, life and writing, and this series is designed for creatives of all kinds to think about the epistolary genre in their own practice. Whether you want to incorporate the letter form directly into your work as source material/form, or simply use it as an extra tool in your research, reflection and development process, this series offers a generative starting point. Workshops will combine reading and reflection with individual writing activities, with some opportunities for collaboration including optional pairing of participants as ‘pen-pals’ for the duration of the course.
Open to all skill levels and writers and creatives of all mediums. You can sign up for all or just some of the weeks!
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Session 1 September 28th: The Love Letter
An iconic motif in the history of film and literature, the love letter conveys acts of noticing, clandestine reflections, confessions, embarrassment and desire. The love letter might be a plot device, a poetic ode, a pop song, a frank or coded material expression. The love letter tells a story, obscures a truth, embodies connection; it might concern romantic, platonic or comradely love. Sometimes a love letter goes beyond the intended beloved and forges all sorts of new energies and worlds. We’ll write into all these intimacies and frictions.
Key writers include John Keats, Jane Campion, Kay Gabriel, Jo Barchi, Diana Hamilton, Frank Ocean
Session 2 October 26th: The Political Letter
By reading unsent letters, letters to everyone, letters to no one, we’ll consider how the art of writing letters is a radically social form. Playing with the art of address and description, this workshop explores how the letter form can explode and disseminate ideas of presence, identity, desire and political (im)possibility.
Key writers include Bernadette Mayer, Fred Moten and Sean Bonney
Session 3 November 30th: The Fantasy Letter
Sometimes we write to someone who might never read our letters. We write to fictional characters, other writers or artists — some of them lost to time. These epistles might take the form of fan letters, speculative letters, epistolary letters or fantasy missives — defying the limits of time, space, the living and dead. In this workshop we’ll engage with such letters to consider voice, the intimate arts of reading, communication between forms, the body and queer temporalities.
Key writers include Dodie Bellamy, Vahni (Anthony Ezekiel) Capildeo, Jack Spicer
Session 4 December 14th: The Postcard
‘A giving which gives only its gift, but in the giving holds itself back and withdraws, such a giving we call sending’ (Derrida, The Post Card). What does it mean to send, or be sent? This final workshop takes the pithy form of the postcard as a figure for the literary possibilities of posting. What temporality does a postcard hold? What happens in the relationship between word and image, expression and constraint, public and private? Could we write postcards to the past or future, to the more-than-human? Can thinking postcard help us rethink other kinds of ‘posting’ and (un)delivery in our daily and writerly lives?
Key writers include: Postcards from the Anthropocene project, Jacques Derrida, Kiraṇ Kumār
Building on the success of the 2020 Pop Matters series, this workshop offers a warm and upbeat ‘studio’ for musing on the relationship between creative practice and pop music. We’ll focus mostly on pop music and love/devotion, making space for writing which borrows from the form of pop music or writes to specific pop artists. We’ll consider how pop can offer the emotional and structural inspiration for other kinds of creative output, the role of pop in everyday life/life-writing and the mythologies we give to pop icons in writing. Designed for anyone who wants to flirt with a bit of pop in their practice, this workshop will feature music, free association, reading and stimulating activities for writing.
Key writers include: Kevin Killian, Dana Ward, Anne Boyer, Ian Macartney
In Glitch Feminism (2020), Legacy Russell hones in on the sudden error of the glitch as ‘a form of refusal’. As our social, intimate and professional lives become increasingly directed by the commercial algorithms of everyday media platforms, how can poetry intervene in the cognitive minefield of Web 2.0? Playing with text-mixing, collage and procedural forms, we’ll consider ways of glitching between interfaces of browsing/writing in virtual space and print, with time for questions and discussion.
Through cookies, advertisements and terms and conditions, digital capitalism constantly demands that we affirm the ‘yes’ of its systems. In this workshop, poetry will offer something alternative. We’ll break through the junk space of virtual realms and create innovative works within and beyond them, while exploring the world of SPAM Press. Asking what it means to be post-internet, to write from error, to envision the poem as an interactive environment. Let’s glitch!
This event will include: group discussions, reading out loud, reading alone, writing, sharing work that has been created in the workshop.
Last week I taught a seminar and workshop at the University of Glasgow’s Summer School: Urban Arcadia: Mythologies of the Mall. We explored how malls represent liminal spaces of urbanism and suburbia, public and private, the civic and surveillance. We reflected on the decline of malls in recent years, on the deadmalls archive project, on malls as institutions, infrastructures and emblematic locales of capitalism. I once wrote a phenomenology of my local mall, a shopping centre in Ayr, the site of teenage loitering, toil and trouble. I asked the students to write manifestos or plans towards new malls: public sites built into or out of a failing mall building. The more I write mall, the more I fall into it. The idea of plenitude. One student said malls are so prevalent in post-apocalyptic fiction because that’s where the resources are pooled. It’s only natural that when capital eats itself we go back to its crumbling temples to eat. Malls are for raiding, free-running, skating, squatting, paying disrespect to statuesque disgrace of billionaires, wishing in fountains, abolishing, raving, growing plants in greenhouses. Malls with solar panels, malls with turbines, malls with open canteens, malls where you take what you like. I want malls to metabolise the brilliance of dreaming the billioning of a generous elsewhere that yes could be ours, not like in adverts but actually in our hands, sticky with bricks and mortar and molten pennies the fountains spat back as lithium rainbows in the battery acid of plurality, nothing pristine, our shattering. It’s so infinitely worthless, warm and deplorable. The lyric I is a mallwalker. All of them. Open doors.
You have been tasked with reviving a so-called dead mall in your local town or city. The budget is limitless! In pairs, come up with a manifesto for how you would rebuild the mall or put it to new uses. You might want to share the different contexts of how retail works in your local area and think about a ‘solution’ that works for both of you. What values do you find important in urban architecture? How should public space be used in the twenty-first century and beyond? Is this mall just for human people or other creatures? What would the mall need to serve, withstand or endure?
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