New workshops: Epistolary Experiments and Pop Matters

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!

​♡

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

Register

Pop Matters: Our Songs

Wednesday November 23rd

6-8:00pm (GMT) via Zoom

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 

Register

Infinity States: The Palace of Humming Trees

A few weekends ago marked a whole year since my exhibition with Jack O’Flynn, The Palace of Humming Trees, curated by Katie O’Grady. It was the height of summer, electrified by lightning storms and rain showers which sent the city streets flooding my ankle boots. I sat in the exhibition watching the auras of animals, drifting in and out of presence, doodling, planning short fiction I’d never write. The rain came down through the ceiling, just a little, and caught in a bucket. I texted in streams.

Something of the exhibition magicked itself into existence. We were all ’93 babies. Making things happen felt so easy. There were synchronicities and invincibilities. When Katie and I hung out at Phillies, we won the quiz. Jack and I wove this hyperplane of fantasy from the gestures of clay and line, whittling and glitter cast wide across floorboard and spiderweb. It was a strange time, the summer of 2021. I was also partially in the numb haze of grief. There was a delta wave but not like the deep sleep of the sea. People brought champagne and flowers to the opening. I wore a long white dress and wished the days were as long as they used to be. The Earth spins too fast.

Partly I wanted to write in the choral voice of many creatures speaking to one another. The process felt like a lyric surrender to this collective, their hyperintelligence of humming and stammer that spoke through pores, chitin, liquid. I don’t know where they learned all this. There was a sun virus in the emails we sent the summer before it. Time freckled on my arms. I could draw out the muscle ache from cycling more. It was possible then.

Anyway, about this experience of writing. A porous voice. Here’s an artist’s talk from a recent conference.

First delivered at Hear them speak: Voice in literature, culture, and the arts
10th June 2022

K Allado-McDowell, ‘And they showed me that their life was a pattern of hyperspace’

Who might be the ‘they’ in K Allado-McDowell’s statement? Taken from Pharmako-AI, published in 2021 and the first book to be co-authored with the neural network GPT-3, a system trained on extensive web data (from Google Books to Wikipedia), the quote suggests voice, presence and identity are questions of patterning, replication, weaving, plurality. Recurrent in Allado-McDowell’s book is the figure of the spider and its web, in a kind of constant movement like thought itself.   

I was travelling north on a train when I began writing The Palace of Humming Trees, a book-length exhibition poem which forges energy fields of dreamy relation between many species of animal, mineral and element. Late spring and the fields I could forget about, texting myself more poem. The motion of the train according inverse to the downward scroll of the document. All the while seeing spiders in the corner of my vision, emitting great clots of silk. Commissioned by curator Katie O’Grady and made in collaboration with the artist Jack O’Flynn (both from Cork, Ireland), the exhibition was to offer something of a ‘hyperspace’ to its viewers: somewhere in which voices coalesced, formed new modalities of being and relation, new webs. In a Tank Magazine interview with K Allado-McDowell, Nora N. Khan notes that hyperspace ‘is an abstract space in which we perceive patterns of information and then shape them in language in order to communicate’. Having a big, serial and open field poem adjacent to visual work premised on bold, ecstatic colour and texture was to perform multiplicities of voice within an otherwise abstracted work. Inspired by Timothy Morton’s ideas of ‘dark ecology’, adrienne maree brown’s ‘pleasure activism’ and Ursula Le Guin’s ‘carrier bag theory of fiction’, I wanted to think about that communication as a form of attunement through which we gather, desire and coexist as ecological beings. 

In The Palace of Humming Trees, the lyric voice is taken as that trembling spider silk assembling worlds. Spider silk is a protein fibre which embodies the inside of the spider woven on the outside for shelter, cocoon, courtship or the trapping of prey. It’s five times stronger than steel and is now being synthesised to make everything from body armour to surgical thread and parachutes. I began imagining the twangling of droplets on silk strands as the visualisation of a deep vibration, perhaps the wood wide web – something humming in and between trees. The world of the exhibition was inspired by the Irish folktale, The Hostel of the Rowan Trees, also known as Fairy Palace of the Quicken Trees. In the story, trees of scarlet fruit provide refuge, but the fruit itself (the quicken berries) are highly desirable to the point of despair. The rowan was brought from the land of promise, and its berries offer rejuvenation. With these symbolic undertones of danger and desire in mind, we wanted to explore a mythic ‘palace’ which merged the digitality of hyperspace with the organic textures of woodland and the chromatic intensity of dream, fantasy and ethical relation.

At the heart of our project was a notion of infinity. Hyperspace suggests that our ecological sense of world, surrounds, habitat, umwelt is always being reassembled. I wondered if infinity could somehow be voiced in a way that wasn’t just postmodern recursion or echo. What does it mean to be open to a state of infinity? To let many worlds pass through you all at once, making diamond-like instants and gossamer patterns of prosody? 

Infinity became our figure for ambience. As spider silk is densely structured, and the neural net densely layered, so the notion of ambience captures, in Brian Eno’s words ‘many levels of listening attention’. To walk through the door of The Palace of Humming Trees was to enter a portal of multiplicity. You could take any route you liked around the room, moving between sculptures of hyperfoxes and sparklehorses, lichenous forms, ceramic butterflies of psychedelic hue and illustrated groves where trees shimmered green, orange, purple and blue. You could also scan a QR code and choose to listen to a recording of the poem, voiced by Jack, Katie and I and accompanied by Dalian Rynne’s sonic dreamscapes. To hear something ‘humming’ is to sense its presence, even if you can’t wholly understand it; humming implies electromagnetic vibration, birds and bees, a weather event or tectonic movement. We weren’t interested in translating the more-than-human voice so much as bringing it into the forcefield of lyric poetry, and through that expansive patterning achieve ‘infinity states’ of reassembled meaning, of felt experience that could not be crystallised into singularities of being. Visitors took pictures, sketched Jack’s sculptures, ran their fingers through the luminous plaster dust, placed to highlight the debris or excess of our clay animals. Something always in the process of creation or decay, incomplete. Corporeal, yet infinite. 

One of the many voicings of this project was Letters from a Sun Virus, a correspondence between Jack and I that occurred over the first Covid lockdown, documented at the back of the exhibition book. While the email exchange had distinct senders and receivers, the you and I, over time in collaborating and sharing work between the visual and textual, our voices were beginning to mingle. Sometimes this co-voicing was painterly; other times musical, inflected with the characteristic intonation and energy of our respective speech patterns, moods, expressions. An entry from April 2020 reads: ‘…the wateriness of the poem. I had completely forgotten about all that blur. It’s like all the brush of the ocean and one which seems the idea to spill that way. Almost like a pressure, lines that go on and hair turning into the sea, each one of kinetic energy then finds all these points’. To assemble the correspondence for publication, I plugged it through text remixers, copying, pasting and rearranging phrases to enhance that sense of two voices repatterning one another. A ceaseless quest for points; for elements acting upon objects, emotions. Denise Riley has written of ‘inner speech’ as a strange oxymoron, where one hears voice at the moment of issuing voice inside us – a kind of running commentary that hums without actually humming. The letters suggest a kind of inner voice infected by the anticipated response of the other, rendering intimacies of collaboration which form a sticky substance, sentences and mobius formations holding time’s play and repeat – ‘Unending loop of my dream resins / not to complete the palace infinity of these trees’. Imagining the many of them speaking.

In Texts for Nothing, Samuel Beckett writes:

Whose voice, no one’s, there is no one, there’s a voice without a mouth, and somewhere a kind of hearing, something compelled to hear, and somewhere a hand, it calls that a hand, it wants to make a hand, or if not a hand something somewhere that can leave a trace, of what is made, of what is said, you can’t do with less, no, that’s romancing, more romancing, there is nothing but a voice murmuring a trace.

To ask whose voice in The Palace of Humming Trees is to hear sound bouncing as light, romancing, refracting in what Katie, the curator, calls a many-panelled ‘vivarium of humming thought’. To say ‘there is no one’ is to declare at once absence and the impossibility of presence as a singularity, there is no ONE. What if voice was infectious, modular, sporous, erotically charged, in common? Early in the project, I had this conversation with Jack where he told me that sometimes in the process of sculpture, he’ll try turning something upside down, or inside out, to revitalise the work. Make it strange or more-than. To sculpt by hand is to ‘leave a trace, of what is made’, and to write is to leave a trace ‘of what is said’. I wondered if the inner speech of the lyric ‘I’ could be turned inside out, to be exposed to the grain, the noise, the weather. A voice that touches is and is being touched, traced, smudged. I imagine this book as a glasshouse, somewhere between inside and outside, shelter and exposure; a chamber music of alchemical voicings, always repatterning, transforming each other. Sound and light. A place of invitation, ritual attention, metamorphosis. Many selves stuck to the web of a visual, expansive language. 

Hyperfox – photo by Sean Patrick Campbell (French Street Studios, 2021)

Notes on Lyric Solarity

‘Notes on Lyric Solarity’ at Summer in the Way, Birkbeck University of London, 9th July 2022.

Video of a creative-critical paper delivered over the weekend at Birkbeck, as part of an ongoing collaboration between the87press and the Contemporary Poetics Research Centre. Below is an extract from the first half of the paper. A lot of this thinking is developed more fully in a forthcoming academic article.

As flowers turn toward the sun, by dint of a secret heliotropism the past strives to turn toward that sun which is rising in the sky of history. 
– Walter Benjamin, Illuminations. 

Today, I’m going to move fluidly between poetry and essay to present some nascent thoughts on lyric solarity. I want to suggest lyric solarity is a poetics in which solar imaginaries are linguistically mediated and refracted through the close rhythms, affects, sensoria and arts of noticing associated with the focalised energies of lyric poetry. Lyric solarity enacts an embodied poetics of dissolve, exposure, surplus, saturation and excess/residue: it offers a way of turning towards the sun, while helping us make, in the words of Imre Szeman, ‘commitments to reshaping’ the ‘existing infrastructures’ which underpin access to and distribution of energy. While the anthropocene, a contested epoch defined by humankind’s ascendance as geological agent, is often understood as an issue of scale, attending to the solar helps us think about planetary crisis in terms of distribution and density of harm, resources and changes to climate or energy. I take energy to mean both the power derived from physical or chemical resources, the property of matter and radiation manifest as a capacity to perform work, but also in the sense of an organism’s energy – their metabolism, vitality, ongoingness within the world, and its working demands or desires. What follows is less of an argument than a set of propositions and possibilities, a selection of field notes in search of lyric solarity.

  1. Sans Soleil

In Chris Marker’s film Sans Soleil, often translated into English as sunless, we begin with a quote from T. S. Eliot’s ‘Ash-Wednesday’: ‘Because I know that time is always time / And place is always and only place’. It begins again with an image of three children in Iceland, ‘an image of happiness’ accompanied by black film leader. The voiceover suggests that if viewers can’t find happiness in the image of the children ‘at least they’ll see the black’. The film is itself a kind of lyric documentary on human memory, how memory is fragile and so our recall of personal and political histories – especially on a global or even planetary scale – is inflected or reworked in the present. In the spring of 2020, I approached the film as a kind of memory place. I had never seen such spring sun in Glasgow, but due to Covid I was locked down inside my own sunless temple, or tenement. What follows violates, perhaps, Eliot’s insistence on the essential containment of space and time. Eliot, I guess, never used the internet. 

I was messaging the poet fred spoliar, and suddenly it was the solstice and we wanted to mark it. We began this remote collaboration, not in response to Marker’s film so much as through it, or some residue within it, a blemish or shine. A bright spot, a blind spot, a kind of fleck on its vision. We wrote remotely, wrote ‘live’ and in those hours of shared writing, we existed in a solar time: where solarity was a quality of memory, its absence our absence, and yet also speculation towards something better – waiting for rays of arrival. In that sense, the poem is about the uses and abuses of pastoral; about an ‘elsewhere’ to be written around, glimpsed, squinted at, but never quite accessed. It’s also about the temporal alignment of two people writing together. Lyric as a thought device for telecommunicating something of a paraworld hidden in language. I’d fall asleep with our phrases like film credits flashing behind my eyes. We wrote between the summer and winter solstices of 2020, we split lines with sun-cloud emoji. Here’s some of the opening sequence of the poem:  

Ultraviolet rose us

spilled into formless

unration of atoms

and we spend ourselves back, the day

extends pause,

folding up

in luxe ellipsis 

hills and hills 

of recessional cloud, cast debt 

between us, rolling one-sided 

to release it, all of I’m rain 

cast thru fierce aureate

disquietude, to not say 

hope this finds you, or 

nearest the soft motif of yr hair 

bright spots around the antisolar point

balayage of except champagne 

never sets. In a forest image / I cannot touch you 

or notify through light that drowsy reminder 

we are many. Something 

decorative / in the cold soak of sylvanshine 

gives up its entrance, the long day 

composed of such stills is lying 

back from its voyage. To say 

all of the land escapes / an exorbitant teardrop 

a teardrop. I have these ambient hands. 

I wring the leaves…

2. Solar Apocalypse

In Etel Adnan’s poetry sequence, The Arab Apocalypse (1989), the sun is variously a shapeshifting trickster, a totalising energy, an authority, a marker of time, a blinding force, a monster, a pool of blood. Here are some of Adnan’s lines taken from across the book: 

I took the sun by the tail and threw it in the river. Explosion. BOOM…

the sun is contaminated by the city

the sun has eaten its children

a sun rotten and eaten by worms floats over Beirut       silence is sold by the pound

eat and vomit the sun eat and vomit the war hear an angel explode

The brain is a sun STOP the sun is an eye

the sun’s atoms are incarnating in my flesh     STOP          STOP

The sun is a kind of virus, pulsing and multiplying, changing form and colour, nourishing and deadly, making things grow or die; a kind of white noise in the context of war, a vulnerable body, a weapon, a machine of surveillance, a carnal threat. In the American Book Review, Barbara Harlow says of Adnan’s poem that it ‘invokes a mythic past […] to presage a present that resists narration’. To presage is to be a warning sign, a prediction, typically of something unpleasant; in archaic meaning, presage is an omen, a feeling of foreboding. In The Arab Apocalypse, Adnan writes back and forward to historical crises: as Aditi Machado points out in an essay for Jacket2, the poem was begun in January 1975 in Beirut, two months before the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War. But there is also a generalised economy of violence, exposure and replenishment which speaks to the twentieth century at large and indeed to the explosions, contaminations and environmental atrophying of the twenty-first century. As Harlow identifies, the simultaneous, coagulating, geopolitical crises of the times, what we might call the ~Anthropocene, are often resistant to narrative. The recurrent, modulating figure of the sun has more of a lyric quality, beaming and seeping, punctuated by telegraphic lines and signals of stop, break, transition. Language garners a lyric intensity which is elemental, saturating, overspilling the traditional bounds of a human ‘I’. Impressive and god-sized dramas of the stars and planets play out in a mythopoetics of Beirut, of Gilgamesh, of ‘grass snakes hiding in the texture of TIME’ (Adnan, The Arab Apocalypse).

3. More sun to consider in lyric

Julia Kristeva’s Black Sun

The music of Sun Ra

Sean Bonney’s ‘solar cop’

The shine sprites in the video game, Super Mario Sunshine

Georges Bataille’s ‘solar love’

David Schwartzmann’s ‘solar communism’

Alli Warren’s Sun Dial

The photographic process of the ‘anthotype’

Björk’s song ‘Sun in My Mouth’

Catherine Wagner’s line ‘If everything is from the Sun why praise it’

Paul Klee, Castle and Sun (1929)
Etel Adnan, Untitled (2016) Source: White Cube.

4. Shimmer 

In Paul Klee’s painting, Castle and Sun (1929) the castle is line-drawn in myriad geometry: its surface is of different coloured shapes, set underneath a bright orange sun. In proximity, the colours shimmer and vibrate. If there was a patchwork made of Adnan’s poem, it might be this; or indeed one of Adnan’s own geometric, brightly-coloured abstractions. Shimmer is to shine with a soft, wavering light. It offers a coming-to-knowledge distinct from the Enlightenment regime of ‘shining a light’ on your subject; it is a way of making contact, of existing in non-linear, non-narrative – that is to say, lyric – timespace. In her 2018 book Surge, Adnan writes ‘We came to transmit the shimmering / from which we came’. In this shimmering tautology we yet cross a line, continue transmission. Shimmer is instrumental in what I call ‘hypercritique’: a poethical form of writing which orients not to the capture of time, meaning or ecological reality, but to a beyond. 

Glitching the Poem: A workshop with SPAM Press

This event is part of the Glasgow Zine Fest 2022 Programme

Location: CCA Glasgow, 350 Sauchiehall St, Glasgow G2 3JD

Room: Creative Lab

Who: Maria Sledmere & Kirsty Dunlop from SPAM Press

Tickets: Pay-What-You-Can (find out more here!)

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.

LINK FOR TICKETS.

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 🌐

Let’s Go to the (Dead) Mall

Adam Rybak (AI-generated vapourwave mall art)

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.

I’ve written about malls before in fiction and poetry. See ‘Mallwalkers’ and Rainbow Arcadia.  

Suggested exercise: 

Mall Regeneration

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?

You can write this as a list or mini essay. 

Frightened Rabbit Anthology

Pleased to announce I’ll be working with Aaron Kent in editing an anthology of poetry and prose in response to Frightened Rabbit. I’m anticipating this as a really special project, and a chance to make something collaborative in celebration of the work of a band that touched the lives of so many. I love music! The pandemic knocked some of that out of me for a while, but it sounds good again. Music! I want to write about it all the time. Send us your best odes, ekphrasis, reflections, fiction, mini essays, lyrics etc.

~

I went looking for a song for you
— Frightened Rabbit, ‘The Oil Slick’

Edited by Maria Sledmere & Aaron Kent

​

From the release of their debut album, Sing the Greys (2006), Frightened Rabbit were a phenomenal presence in the lives of many. To be at a Frabbit show, to read the liner notes, to belt the words back at your friends was to feel if not release then solidarity in suffering. To catch love from the greys and live in colour. The band’s inimitable singer Scott Hutchison (also a talented illustrator) penned lyrics that captured the weight and heat of adolescence and its wreck, of joyous chaos and loneliness, of growing into a person, falling in and out of love. Frabbit helped many of us nurture a voice in the woodpile of the dark, and to embrace what happens when it sparks. 

This anthology is a celebration of Frightened Rabbit’s work in both music and community. Their songs inspired many of us to pick up a pen and write, or share our stories and inner lives with others. We are looking for work that engages with the themes of the Frabbit discography: work that takes its cue from a quoted line, a song, a title, a particular performance. Work that processes the memories filtered through music, that delves into the landscapes, emotional topographies and rich imaginaries of the Frabbit world. Work that shows us how the band’s immense legacy continues through our words, and makes tiny changes.

As Tom Johnson, founder of the magazine GoldFlakePaint writes in a heartfelt tribute to Scott, not long after his passing: ‘The songs are right there anyway; they will always be there’. This is an invitation to carry on the songs. Send us your poems, send us your words.

submissions@brokensleepbooks.com 

Please send:

  • Up to 3 A4 pages of writing.
  • All submissions considered, regardless of location. 
  • Simultaneous submissions ok – but please indicate if this is the case in your email.
  • Collaborative submissions are considered. 

Email:

  • Include a short biography and cover letter in the body of an email.
  • Subject: [Frightened Rabbit Anthology] Submission – [Name], [Title]


Deadline is 31st May 2022.

Blue Mould, Birds, A Deer, A Door

Walking to the supermarket today cost wild amounts of strength and energy, for which I am grateful to have spent now that I can eat nauseating Roquefort cheese in the hope of coaxing my numbed-out tastebuds to attention (so far semi-successful) with lathering of French mustard on wholewheat bagel. Semi permasick seemingly from something in the walls in me. MOULD. Watching the Easterheads peruse giant boxes with undersized, foil-wrapped eggs inside reminds me of a lecturer I had many years ago whose primary exam advice was to study always with such an egg by your side, because curved chocolate is ‘superior’. Trying to summon childhood memories of Easter and all I get is something hardboiled and glum, rainbow-painted free-rangers being rolled down the smashed-up concrete of Minnoch Crescent estate. What were you supposed to do next? Retrieve the egg. I forget. I roll over. I have to sleep on my side or something in my organs hurts; but I believe cats have healing powers and if a cat wants to sleep right on my chest, sure, I’ll sleep on my back and wake up better.

So I’ve been enjoying The Blindboy Podcast and recently the episode where he talks about the internet before it became, well, everything. The total bombardment. Blindboy has charming tales of what cultural scarcity was like before you could just shazam the shit out of any sonic phenomenon, google every micro-thought that comes into your head or find your brain rewired around the big-ass anxiety MMORPG that is Twitter. I’m geriatric millennial enough to remember this and especially tapes. I had a thing about tapes. I wrote about this already, way back in 2014, my thing for tapes. That was kind of before the indie tape revival (is it still going on?). Seriality in writing is irresistible to me. The backwards and forwardsness of it. Krapp’s spoolish jouissance. Bernadette Mayer’s tape recordings in Piece of Cake, Memory and Midwinter Day. The glossolalic Mr Tuttle in Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist.

Recently, editor, writer and absolute king [<3] in the poetry community, Aaron Kent, published a pocket-sized pamphlet called The Rise Of… (Broken Sleep Books, 2022). The back page features the familiar anatomy of tape reels encased in clear plastic. There’s a kind of Side One/Side Two vibe: a long essay-poem, ‘The Rise Of…’, which documents the process of coming to know what happened in the wake of a sexual assault; and a poem ‘Inkmist’ dedicated to ‘CRASAC group therapy; for saving me‘. This is a breathtaking work that doesn’t so much ‘confront’ its difficult subject as enter into a kind of ‘momentum’ capable of thawing the petrification of trauma. Of central concern to the speaker is the notion of hallucination, of letter-writing, of ‘difficulty’ itself. I opened it gently from the envelope as I once would a cassette from its casing, read the whole thing in one go and found myself at this point upside down on the sofa, blood rushed to my head, kind of too stunned to even cry. The fluidity and force of Kent’s words are such that all kinds of dormant synapses in my own brain began to take flight again. This is poetry which dials up exposure not exactly to ‘tell a story’ but to disclose the whole affect-storm of a writing that could approximate a traumatised consciousness — one that is at once deeply singular, embodied but also permeable within language itself. A writing that soaks up the residues of thinking’s trillions. It’s hypnagogic, syncopated, a rush; full of swerves, stops, broken clauses, syntactic mania. Forget punctuation. This is a book about the secret. About a wild undersong of constant, yet fluctuating pain. ‘I’m like a sponge i’m always shedding and if i don’t deal with it the pain won’t go away’. Anhedonia, itching, ‘something so simple and powerful’ about a scream. ‘There must be a word for losing melody’. In a blurb for the book, Day Mattar describes this not so much as ‘a stream of consciousness’ but ‘a flood’. There’s something mesmerising and unstoppable here. ‘I am the rapture!’ Buy this book.

When I was in London I also picked up Emily Berry’s new collection, Unexhausted Time (Faber, 2022), a book I’d hotly anticipated owing to Berry’s excellent previous titles Dear Boy (2013) and Stranger, Baby (2017) but also because the book cover perfectly matched the magenta of fred’s new iets frans tracksuit. I read this last weekend in a few turbulent, food coma type nights, marvelling at how my brain could just pick up a special Berry ellipsis, steal it for a dream and then awake to another suspension in the poem. This is a book full of ghosts and twisted souls, a kind of carefulness around utterance itself; spellbinding in the sense of a spine for holding together our weathering lives. A book bound by some kind of spell. You have the sense of a secret, and a holding back:

All statements purporting to be act
are true. Nothing goes away…
You carry it with you,
if not on your back, or in your arms,
then somewhere behind your eye…
So be careful…
See the ghost scratching at the door frame
for the note that will free her.
The past is parked next to me like a dirty van
with messages fingered in the grime…

(Emily Berry, Unexhausted Time)

These lines summon us but also disintegrate on the page as dust. I imagine the automatic typing of a super-intelligence gleaned from our messages. It feels intimate, uncanny. Where is this person speaking from? I want to take their advice seriously. There’s a lowkey lockdown hauntology, the house turned inside out by a kind of social toxicity. Anything natural is also sort of monstrous: ‘It always seemed to me a kind of madness, / the gardens all in flower year after year’. It’s sort of obscene to me that the blossoms are all out and I feel about as disconnected from them as if they existed purely as pixels. Is this disintegration of the senses a prefiguration to ageing? How do you stay involved with the big delicious ‘madness’ of the sensory world? The hyper-pitch of birdsong made audible by the lockdown of spring 2020 was lush, but also spooky. As if to be always in the dawn song of 5am, alone with the birdly chimeras — too piercing to surely be real? I miss it. The feeling of being wholly alive in waves. Write something to the ghost?

It always comes back.
And there are new messages…

(Berry)

The digital eeriness of felt presence. New messages. Poems in their seasonal palimpsests. I want that unexhausted time, a time we haven’t yet strung out, a time to be rechilded. A time for birds.

Dearest,
Happy pink moon!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Lastly, the new Ludd Gang arrived. Mark Francis Johnson:

Those birds of passage
present as fists.

I think we fauns may learn
more from those birds than

half-hours by the sea
teach us.

In the summer the woodcutter
wanted to fell my home

and I let him.

(from The Faun Book)

You go stumbling, burned your pineal gland, phone mum. I keep the doors open in my dreams in case a deer walks in. ‘With my eye’, says Jesse Darling in the same issue, ‘I wanted to go / there, to the end of that road. With my whole body I wanted to go / there’.

Let the cold, curved chocolate fit the lip of my tongue, from the fridge.

Want also to melt.

Earlier I wrote something of our weathering lives. It’s the most beautiful and encompassing thing you can say to someone, becoming the spooky sweet hail in flux with sunbursts and mugs full of snow, a rainbow.

Something like an offering, snowballs of silver foil. Blossoms and more blossoms.

Again, from Ludd Gang (the last poem), Gloria Dawson writing for Callie Gardner:

hey, you were my weather
sometimes arriving at my door

<333