I was out somewhere reciting my love for Adidas with wishes thrice – décolletage! – and music, the train arrived on time. I wanted to ask about your shoulder and you said there was so much Guinness after the football, the rest of the world was a rumour. We had all these non-sequiturs to like, communicate the fizzy little spirals. I was like an ice cream sky for you! A spring-rush blossom you! Tapering, tapering. Went to buy salad from downstairs, went to run around putting jeans on. New jeans. Matte suede lips. Blue Sunday. Covent Garden was glistening with consumerism and the new good weather. Every time I’m in London it’s sunnier, warmer, more deniable; so much the smell of pollution & impossible flowers, pollution & impossible flowers the city I really learned to love was so expensive you could only love so much before the money felt mouth garbage of gorgeous surplus: What I kept feeling about London was…what I had kept of something & nothing a type of ‘neutral metabolic beverage’ bought at room temperature in the clothing store – spontaneous purchase! Questions to fall in love to……what’s your favourite checkout compulsion? To shoplift gum? To flirt with cashier? To buy an oaten flute and play it to god? I was so concerned about the woman in Asda with the bleeding nailbeds and I kept recommending apricot oil and lots of sleep, I’d been through it too, and my Nan from the chemo. What our nails tell us. Mine used to be silver striped and blood-let-violet, now they are cracked with the memory.
The rain came out the day I went home. Lucky I got to bring my book to London. Oh god it was beautiful the matinee I was nervously also on Guinness and lots of intersections of arrival, read first, took ponytail out like to say she is me now. Cinders. The night before, D. and I had gone to see some bands at the George Tavern and we talked through a few sets just because it had been so long since we’d talked and I wanted to know all about work and love and she said something amazing about how it gets better every day, like you just want to find out so much about the person, you want to figure out the total every degree of how they think and what they feel about something – this plenitude. I said that to my friend last night like the thing about a successful relationship is surely that every day it gets better in that you change together, you change each other, you discover things about yourself that would irrevocably not be possible to discover unless you met this person and you change each other’s day and daily and that’s not like tree branches curled around each other it’s more like mycelia underground, so much unseen, more like alchemy. So when you break apart, you never really sever. You are cellular bonded. Their energy surges in you – what – a bus ride home, a voice note, a quiet cry in the night. Something said, something unspoken. Unexpected holding of hands. Curly little yes.
*
I reread The Hour of the Star over breakfast sauerkraut and the flicker of lighter-light out at the end was it. So easy ideation; not to say I made plans, just that the impulse had become my little sister. You have to find your light.
I was lighting up to go to the next thing.
‘Beautiful though it is, it’s just walking really,’ said the woman behind me on the train, talking about the countryside.
She also said:
99% of people who study to be dentists end up being dentists
99% of people who study art don’t end up being artists
My brother and I stay up til 2am listening to hardstyle and reminiscing 2000s absurdism like it’s our good soft history and I suppose it is. Castles in the sky, pretty green eyes, quiver, save me, braveheart, moonlight, sunshine after the rain, bits and pieces, concrete angel, true love never dies.
I want to exhibit gelatinous entrails of everything we ever said.
*
Someone not new I met again talked about making love in a cornfield, listening to Sting. That the not-not-new of it all shared love for Eva Cassidy broke a little nerve platonism so much that I would melt into what we made awhile. Nightcap. Fortuitous timing of trains.
J. said I looked about twelve in the picture. I said this is my heartwood: surly, surly.
The readings:
Jane’s brilliant poise – poetry delivers the body. Ellis’s infinite – I was so elated to meet them finally ❤ Rob’s plasma poems enamoured and the fuck devastation of elegy. Karenjit’s percussive grace.
The readings were gems I will live with. I took videos but for some reason couldn’t upload them anywhere, but I have them.
Noodles at Silk Road backscattering miso. Hospitality stories. Stafford yellow fields. Lambs around Penrith.
Intimate fish tank of the Zoom reading with my Krupskaya label mates. I nearly read with the AR halo. Two in one day.
I slept thick treacle.
“kept swelling with the sense of this year as the best, it keeps getting better” “wonderful” “Oh rly?”
Che Go Eun, a hole in a boat and a deep hole (2024)
Dear pain,
That’s how the light gets in. Fractal emanations of screaming the dark is a luxury the dark the dark. I listen to the radio and a mother talks of her autistic child preferring the dark — thriving in it, coming to life.
We soft-light to protect the unsaid stories.
Our bodies twist in the dark and we make an inconsistent work of pain-pleasure. The mattress gives out: pools of blood, ink, sweat, coffee, sex. I feel better when the sun comes up and when the sun goes down, wine-dark. It’s what’s in-between that’s the problem.
I keep thinking about Fred Moten’s luminous correspondence, ostensibly between Andrea Geyer and Margaret Kelly:
My friend, I have discovered in the antagonism between my work and dead letter that the project returns as an amazing field and air of correspondence, a transgenerational lotion of breathing, a revue of breath, a general bouquet in the grace of your asking in friendship since the day we met, and our braiding and breathing of a correspondence that we are now and have been working together in the atmosphere of our comrades, that we literally breathe them as a kind of braiding, an insistence of revolt as garment, a tapestry for the touched wall of a spaceship we noticed on the way to school, that off dimensionality of the cloud from our perspective, which I want to say is real not graphed, which I want to say is both a function of, and still untainted by the terrible business of, the Dutch masters, so that it’s impossible to tell the top from the side, though there was some kind of emanation or emendation that we all saw as a smooth flatness, like a table the cloud prepared of its own accord, a spread platform for spreading our metastatic air, our beautiful, is ourreal.
To make a pain of you, stop being a pain, I’d form a cartography of the nerves so rich you’d never know I’d outmatched the major scale. A map does not function in service of security. Anyone who has seen me read (and attempt to follow) a map knows this.
What is so gorgeous about the Moten quote above is its ph(r)asal longing: an ongoingness open to improvisation and constant sentence desuetude. Language like you don’t even need it, breathing all the same beyond what’s essential. Take this key. Braiding and breathing a coital somnolence of the body, twice rung out in language / only us leaving voice notes for what clicks pearls together, minor, deep in the distance.
Emollient longing of writing between pith and pronoun, what is prepared by the passing between. Our breath, clouds; mattering.
‘•.¸♡ ♡¸.•’
I saw the spaceship too. Didn’t you?
Intimacy, I told someone recently, feels like the opposite to what capitalism wants of us. Intimacy is worldsharing, ourreal, a grammar of humours, kisses and shibboleths. You know my pain and I know yours. We make a joke of it. What escapes serious talk but our serious dreams. So when we’re all in the gallery, we switch to our senses to make language-sense of ourreal, cellular vibe spread. It’s a room replete with the sonic ecology that is feeling all my fucking feelings (Clémentine Coupau): aka hook me up to ‘electronic components, dimensions variable’. The little paper lantern is a miniature version of my own IKEA lampshade. The problem with my IKEA lampshade is that I had to tear it a bit to change the lightbulb. I have a torn lantern. Magic hands. That’s how the light gets in. Paper = skin. Creamy light.
Che Go Eun 최 고 은, a hole in a boat and a deep hole (2024)
Aside from lanterns, the other homeware alluded to are curtains. Che Go Eun’s a hole in a boat and a deep hole is composed in collaboration with artificial intelligence. The artist inserted diary notes into an AI image generator which ‘transformed [their] intimate reflections and resulted in images’. Watercolour drawings were then made in response to those results, with the artist ‘reappropriating’ their ‘own feelings back from the AI’. This tension between creativity, data and predictive imaging results in a fascinating, speculative assemblage of arabesque, thorn and psychedelic colour. The nod to William Morris/Arts & Crafts reminds us of the collaborative handicraft that has gone into the piece’s imaginary and manifestation. Diary phrases such as ‘art nouveau’, ‘harder I am sinking’, ‘throw all my stress into the hole’ are woven into the fabric of these drapes which suggest both privacy and opening, light and shade. The work is gauzy. There’s a real street, a construction site behind it. Trongate: name as lozenge. What Moten says in the same letter-poem as quoted above, ‘a gauze of reckoning’. Threads, braids: stress, tension. I want to wrap the code-baroque of the fabric around my body like I’m a silkworm going in reverse, all the way back to its gross and sultry, larval conception. I keep hearing that the internet is just the unconscious. I see a bag of squishie candies in a vending machine and think: ugh, silkworms.
‘•.¸♡ ♡¸.•’
Back IRL, it’s raining with the pelting dreich that only a Glaschu April delivers, and I arrive at Trongate 103 having walked through Dennistoun listening to Elliott Smith. I’m not feeling morose; I’m just in touch with my feelings. As if they were tangible: animatronics, statuettes, pets. I’m still on a medication that holds such whimpering demands at just enough distance to be considered somehow ornamental — torrents no more. Once I would torrent my day in their favour. Let someone seed me. Now, I might choose to pick them up, put them back down, or smash them into oblivion. Let my soul have the architecture of a bleeding gate.
As I enter the exhibition, the invigilator says something about one of the objects we’re allowed to touch. I forget immediately what they say because I am greedy for colour and form, not meaning. So the whole time I am looking at the exhibits wondering: which of you may be touched? A finger trace of the curtains, time slider on video screen, glass surface of framing, kinesiology tape cut into bows and ribbons.
Daisy Lafarge, Gate Theory of Pain (III) (2024)
Touch is not in itself untainted. I am in love with Lafarge’s black tulips; their painful, precious tendrils.
‘•.¸♡ ♡¸.•’
Some people gave me advice on how to do better: thirsty in the flowerbed for some aphids fed upon 200 ladybugs to eat/moult more often than not they would die as fast as any plant blocked sunlight to pay (dustfall / bonnie / smitten ) should the wind ever blow you a raven
‘•.¸♡ ♡¸.•’
Mau and I try to diagnose the Mandelbrot set-seemingness of Lafarge’s watercolour fractals. The sequence ‘remains bounded in absolute value’. This is a beautiful phrase I find on Wikipedia. ‘It is one of the best-known examples of mathematical visualisation, mathematical beauty’. I could watch the little fractal gif forever like giving birth to myself over and over as a starfish with 7000 eyes & infinite narcissism. As it stands, that boundedness is a gate: pink, the colour of doll-flesh. I think of tentacles, elliptical phone calls, inflammation. We agree that almost all the art in the room is art that could be done on the phone. It’s not just about doodlecore but the intimate, desultory gesture of the line itself, and what’s on either side of it.
Not to get kinda kinky but the other day we were explaining ‘lucky pierre’ in the pub (because of Frank O’Hara the poet we all love and love most of all to discuss in the pub). In his ‘Personism: A Manifesto’, O’Hara talks about the poem in supplementary relation to people. Intimacy again. Sure, he wrote it while ‘in love with […] a blond’, which makes it all the more true and golden:
I went back to work and wrote a poem for this person. While I was writing it I was realising that if I wanted to I could use the telephone instead of writing the poem, and so Personism was born. It’s a very exciting movement which will undoubtedly have lots of adherents. It puts the poem squarely between the poet and the person, Lucky Pierre style, and the poem is correspondingly gratified. The poem is at last between two persons instead of two pages.
As Moten’s poem from The Service Porch is framed between two persons, so the epistolary heat is folded into Personism. It’s not letters but speech itself that gets electric. So what Mau and I mean by ‘this is art that could be done on the telephone’ is perhaps something about how the work takes place in correspondence between two or more bodies. Lafarge describes her paintings ‘as a means of pure distraction’, made during ‘episodes of severe chronic pain’, ‘remote NHS chronic pain sessions’ and ‘in phone queues and conversation with Adult Disability Payment (Social Security Scotland)’. The trembling of watercolour is an apt form for the bleeding edges that connect the power imbalance of someone trying to get support and the person with the power to connect them to it. It’s the art of turning away, seeking psychic space, without letting total go of the line.
How often do we find ourselves at the gate, with no end of wanting to both know and not-know what’s beyond it?
Wrought/not I.
‘•.¸♡ ♡¸.•’
I love gates. I love especially baroque ones with curlicues. I grew up with a broken gate which soon got removed. What did we have to keep in, or shut out? It was black and gold and the paint flaked off very beautifully. You might describe it as ‘tawdry’. I probably have false memories about this gate. Sometimes the screech of its opening hinges my dreams. Lafarge’s gate might be a homophonic pun on ‘gait’ (and so referencing the debilitating effects of chronic pain on one’s ability to walk freely). The painting, titled Gate Theory of Pain (III), no doubt references Ronald Melzack and Patrick Wall’s 1965 paper on ‘The Gate Theory of Pain’. In the words of Lorne M. Mendell:
The [Gate Theory of Pain] dealt explicitly with the apparent conflict in the 1960s between the paucity of sensory neurons that responded selectively to intense stimuli and the well-established finding that stimulation of the small fibres in peripheral nerves is required for the stimulus to be described as painful. It incorporated recently discovered mechanisms of presynaptic control of synaptic transmission from large and small sensory afferents which was suggested to “gate” incoming information depending on the balance between these inputs.
The Gate Theory concerns sensory fibres, transmission cells and their respective levels of activity. The idea is that painless sensations can supplant and so quell sensations that are painful. The process involves a blocking (a closed gate) of input to transmission cells. When the gate is left open, the sensory input gets through to transmission cells and produces pain. An example of the therapeutic application of this theory is transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS), massage, acupuncture, vibration and mindfulness-based pain management (MBPM). While gazing at Lafarge’s vivid watercolours, one senses that pain is not suspended in the art of painting so much as calibrated, channelled, short-circuited. We keep commenting on the bleeding edge.
Aniara Omann, Resting on an icy couch (mother, grandmother, grandfather, big brother, older sister, little sister) (2020-2024)
Elsewhere in the exhibition, ideas of feedback loop, intimacy, daily life and relationality are also manifest. Feronia Wennborg and Simon Weins’ soft tissue plays with sound transduction to install a ‘lo-fi sound system that lives at the periphery of perception’. This installation of contact-based sound production manifests the pair’s ‘long-distance collaboration’ in felt space. Aniara Omann’s haunting paper baskets, plugged by family faces, makes a ragged philosophy of grief and panic. The raggedness betrays a struggle for focus which is played out through the woundful (I meant to say wonderful, but this works better) arrangement of loose paper, woven baskets, the sense of things cut, twisted, recycled. Omann describes wearing the clothes of their sister, who died: ‘If anyone complimented me on a garment I had inherited from her, I would say it was a gift from a family member’. In that sense, we could think about the paper baskets as fragile amphora for an archival underworld. The baskets are not perfect, machine-made. They retain the expressive and painful grace of their making. They are a flammable structure, woven from newspaper clippings, election flyers, prescription papers, envelopes, bills. What is it to find a way of wearing something? Wrap your troubles in dreams. Shuffle for sources. The difference is a question of agencies; and yet either way the gesture remains. The gift: it has to be infinite.
Elísabet Brynhildardótti, The Lines- Hesitant line, Obediant line, Indecisive line, Decisive line (2023)
When someone says ‘hold the line’. Please hold the line. Please hold the handrail and take care on the stairs. Will you please hold? What’s at the end of that hold? I have been trying to get a medical appointment for weeks. They keep putting me on hold, hanging up. I phone up a doctor’s surgery which is based in a shopping mall at precisely 08:30, when the lines open, and immediately the lines (the queue) are full. How do I envision those lines? Swirling and spiralling around the postcode lottery of where we live, tangled and fizzing with people trying to find words for the pain they’re in. I think of my mum in lockdown, endlessly on the phone 500 miles away from the fact of trying to get prescriptions and medical treatment for my nan. It’s pretty mild for me, my current need to be on the line: among other things, fucked-up hearing, tinnitus, crackling I hear like static between the two sides of my skull. Sometimes a pleasurable hum in the morning, like ultrasound waves in the skeins of my pillow. On hold to the doctor’s office, you become a line. The hidden labour of the chronically ill is this beholden quality, the line with its insecurities. It’s getting thinner. There is no guarantee that the line will lead to something: its pulsing, throbbing insistence on being anything but spirogram music. The irony of disconnect. Give me a point; an appointment; a person at the other end.
Who would pick up the line would do so, of course, in the dead of night. In Stigmata: Escaping Texts, Helene Cixous writes:
It is the dead of night. I sense I am going to write. You, whom I accompany, you sense you are going to draw. Your night is waiting.
The figure which announces itself, which is going to make its appearance, the poet-of-drawings doesn’t see it. The model only appears to be outside. In truth it is invisible, but present, it lives inside the poet-of-drawings. You who pray with the pen, you feel it, hear it, dictate. Even if there is a landscape, a person, there outside—no, it’s from inside the body that the drawing-of-the-poet rises to the light of day. […] The drawing is without a stop.
Hélène Cixous, Stigmata: Escaping Texts, trans. by y Catherine A.F. MacGillivray (1998)
What I see in iNsEcurE (whose inconsistent casing recalls the long identifiers of medical-grade pharmaceuticals, the vowel-like howling insistence, the trembling name) are poets-of-drawings. The asemic work of line, layer and bleed is an avid supplement for writing itself. Who can write while in pain? Who’s afraid of the dark? Who’s afraid of the blank? It is in the night of writing, unnannounced. What is that invisible presence but pain itself? There is no ‘outside’ to pain, once you’re inside it. And yet the gate theory does imply a certain threshold. Relief bucks at the gate. Still, we draw from the well of it moving inside us. You can’t stop it. The appearance of the outside is only gauzy separation.
‘•.¸♡ ♡¸.•’
When I thought I had endometriosis and lived in the hormone torture of latent, duplicate pubescence, resulting from the long-durée of various quiet disorders, I wrote spiky little poems for a pamphlet called Cherry Nightshade. I didn’t yet know about the gate theory of pain but I saw all the poems in a dream_garden festering behind a gate. Well, more like a trellis. Ground cherries contain solanine and solanidine alkaloids: toxins which are lethal, and all the more lethal for their immaturity. Tart cherries have soporific qualities. I wanted sleep to envelop me in perfect velvet. My speaker was a jumping nerve, a shitty little internet silkworm.
What did I get from staring so long at the gate? I fell asleep on the line and the vine grew around me.
I love this exhibition for what it teaches us about art between bodies, how light interacts with feeling-colour, Moten’s ourreal in its total ambience, the drilling outside is part of that thrum in your skull, the way I love to look at my friends as they look at art, tulip mania, mourning vessels, the exquisite difference between red and pink, the meaning of panic touch, pain as the body’s great epistolary effort, fragility, attention’s relationship to healing, what it means to be gratified (if at all). I am grateful for the sharing of insecurity at the heart of the works, and for what they offer by way of being with pain. A bearing, a cloud platform, an intricacy. Standing at the gate.
‘•.¸♡ ♡¸.•’
Further notes:
medical filigree
acid yellowing
mau touches a sound magnet
‘insecurity fuels consumerism’
light source
biofeedback
neon bandage
organelle ballet
tesselate attentions
the puzzle pieces do not technically touch
go into the hole
golden shovel
’emoji repertoire’
give me a viable body
‘cast latex, apple seeds, sawdust’
‘I am still earning less than living wage through my art practice’
Becoming a line was catastrophic, but it was, still more unexpectedly (if that’s possible) prodigious. All of myself had to pass through that line. And through its horrible joltings. Metaphysics taken over by mechanics. Forced through the same path, my thoughts, and the vibration.
Henri Michaus, Miserable Miracle (2002) – quoted by Elísabet Brynhildardótti in the exhibition handout
iNsEcurE is open at Glasgow Project Room, Trongate 103, First Floor G51 5HD between 29th March-7th April. It is organised by Aniara Omann and supported by Creative Scotland and Hope Scott Trust.
What a fucking privilege to sit down with a writer whose work not only touches a nerve but leaves a whole room of folk feeling inspired, invigorated and just the right amount of raging about the world to go and do something good about it. Graeme is an eloquent, generous speaker who came to StrathWrites last week to talk to us about his memoir, The Cloud Factory, along with his debut novel The Young Team (2020)which has made waves for its frank engagement with Scottish gang culture, masculinity and the vitality of Scots language. Graeme read from the end of The Cloud Factory, a work which feels like memoir dialled up to the communal document of what it feels like to be both inside and outside of something, to memorialise it and to work right through it, to know what was beautiful and also painful beyond words, camaraderie and shattering, refusing to paper over the cracks in reality, to note their presence and texture, to send up lost pals and those who never made it, to speak measuredly about how class and gender affect everything, to meditate on addiction, self-medication, faith, to find a turning point, to know what the past does, ‘stored as a memory in yir very cells’. He’s an author that gets it — the inside violence as much as the outside — and it’s clear from listening to him and watching a room full of folk listening to him that he can negotiate what goes unsaid with clarity and determination. After the reading we all just talked for ages, people sharing their stories and their experience of working in schools and what it means to teach and mentor and edit and pull each other through the muck of it all. What I loved most was everyone just speaking in their strongest tongue, telling stories.
~
StrathWrites is a series of writing events and workshops supported by the Strathclyde Jubilee Engagement Fund and the Strath Book Club. I’m lucky enough to work with the wonderful Jenny Carey from the Institute of Education — she’s swiftly become a radiant presence in my life and we’ve had loads of fun collaborating on these events.
READ: Extract from The Cloud Factory by Graeme Armstrong, in Granta
For anyone who missed Thursday’s event with Graeme, in lieu of a recording here’s a transcript of the workshop handout:
‘In place ae a realistic dialect portrait, authors create mutations where narrative is transacted in a ‘higher’ form. The clarity ae thought n expression afforded tae oor native guide default tae a more palatable Standard English. Meanwhile, the low, wild demotic dialect is reserved fur characters, who become linguistic puppets dangled on strings ae supposed authenticity. Characters ir reduced tae caricatures by this effect, their true dialect offered as dialogue canapés tae the unfamiliar reader, satiated by the apparent otherness ae the partial linguistic exhibit. They provide the local reader nae such nutrition. Oor language becomes a motif n isnae truly represented or respected by it. Nae working class Scot thinks in RP. Kin yi imagine? The willin suspension ae disbelief fur us is broken. An elevated n alien Standard English narrative voice betrays the remainin realism they have so carefully n respectfully crafted.’
— Graeme Armstrong, ‘Standard English is oor Second Language’, Literature Alliance Scotland
‘My culture and my language have the right to exist, and no one has the authority to dismiss that.’
— James Kelman’s Booker Prize Acceptance Speech 1994
Prescriptive grammar, in other words, becomes the sound made flesh of prescriptive pronunciation. The tawdry little syllogism goes something like this:
1. In speaking of reality, there is a standard correct mode of pronunciation.
2. In writing of reality, there is a standard correct mode of pronunciation.
3. In reality, correct spelling and correct syntax are synonymous with correct pronunciation.
Putting it another way, if a piece of writing can’t be read aloud in a “correct” Received Pronunciation voice, then there must be something wrong with it.
— Tom Leonard, ‘Glasgow Stir-Fry: Chopped language pieces on “the language question” in answer to a request’, Poetry Ireland Review
Drug-inspired delusion or Christmas epiphany, A cannae say fur sure but everyhin changed fae that night on. A never used drugs again n the violence wis finished tae. Suhin stirred in that wee flat that feels fundamental tae ma life noo. Maybe it wis always kinda there n just a ringin phone, never answered. The mare A sat n scrutinised it days later, A felt stupid n that kinda exposed way that speakin aboot faith sometimes makes yi feel, like if yi told any yir pals they would rip the pish oot yi n aw laugh. That feelin started tae pass. A dunno the ins n oots ae aw this either. The required leap that faith demands is complicated tae the best ae us, but ask yirself this, who really made the clouds? N when they clear, ask yirself, who put aw they fuckin stars up there? No everybody hus faith n that’s sound. A don’t minister tae anycunt, but A know the difference it made tae me wis life or death. That’s no nuhin.
Gangs huv dominated ma life. A’ve spent the last decade recoverin fae them n tryin tae find the words fur it aw in ma writing. That’s twenty year ae gangs in total. Their effects on yi ir far-reachin n complicated. Substances n drink ir used by many as self-medication. The aggression n hypervigilance that years ae gangs create don’t just disappear. They’re stull somewhere below, stored as a memory in yir very cells or expressed as violent tendencies.
— Graeme Armstrong, The Cloud Factory
WORKSHOP ACTIVITIES
Word bank warmup
Share what you consider to be an unusual or personal word – perhaps one you associate with place/location or a dialect word. Share a definition with the room.
Then pick someone else’s word and use that as a prompt for some free-writing.
Discussion: collocation e.g. ‘pishy pubs’. What effect do these have on our sense of familiarity with the world of the prose and the associations we have between words?
Voice
Writing dialogue: write a conversation between two people who come from a place you know really well. It might be your hometown or your current neighbourhood or a place that’s connected to your family somehow, or just a place you’ve spent a lot of time. Think about the textures of familiarity that are revealed in the language: experiment with dialect, code-switching and loanwords.
Now write about the relationship between these two people using the same dialect that they speak in. Whether your narrator is third person omniscient or first person, experiment with writing in dialect so that there isn’t a stark difference between how the characters speak to each other and how the narrative ‘speaks’.
Memory triggers
Think of a photograph or significant object that holds memory for you. Describe it in detail and use it as a springboard for writing a poem or story. Be as personal as you like.
Turning points
Write about a turning point in your life where you realised something, or had to make a decision to live differently.
This event took place on 21st March 2024 at the University of Strathclyde.
Thrilled to be bringing the Cinders ball to London for a lil matinee at Peckham Pelican on Sunday 14th April. I’ll be accompanied by a dream line-up. There will be books for sale (card only). Hope to see you there!
Event starts at 2pm and will be finished by 5pm.
Entry is free and unticketed.
Accessibility:
The Peckham Pelican is a ground level venue with step-free access, gender neutral and disabled toilets. You can find out more about the venue here.
Readers:
Jane Hartshorn is a poet and PhD candidate at the University of Kent, writing about the lived experience of chronic illness. Her pamphlets include Blowfly (in collaboration with ossa prints), Soft Tissue Rarely Preserves (in collaboration with Valeska Noemi), In the Sick Hour (Takeaway Press, 2020) and Tract (Litmus Publishing, 2017). Her work has been published by Footnote Press, Boudicca Press, Dostoyevsky Wannabe, Lucy Writers, The Polyphony, and SPAM. She is founder of CHASE Medical Humanities Network and teaches poetry to medical students at University of Southampton. @jeahartshorn janehartshorn.weebly.com
Robert Kiely is the author of ROB, Gelpack Allegory, and simmering of a declarative void. He is an editor at veer books.
Karenjit Sandhu’s publications include Poetic Fragments from the Irritating Archive (Guillemot Press), young girls! (the87Press) and Baby 19 (intergraphia books). Her practice comprises poetry, performance and artists’ books. She is a member of the British Art Network and Lecturer in Art at the Reading School of Art.
Suzanna Slack is the author of Happy Birthday Story, Is This It?, The Poor Children, The Shedding, Luxury Profile, White Spirit Videotelephony and Gummi Zone. Their work has been published by Solstis Literary Magazine, Datableed, Hot Pink Literary Magazine and others. They are seeking assistance with their next work!
Maria Sledmere is the author of books including Cinders (Krupskaya), AnAura of Plasma Around the Sun (Hem Press) and Visions & Feed (HVTN Press). She is managing editor of SPAM Press and a Lecturer in English & Creative Writing at the University of Strathclyde.
After a long subaquatic slumber Gilded Dirt has returned to the surface with the BERMUDA ▲ SADCORE issue ! Drifting ashore this summer !
As though transmitting from within the ‘vile vortex’, the plaintive music of Weyes Blood serves as a warning to treat the open ocean with reverence. Between the reluctant mermaid of Seven Words, the amphibious starlet beckoning her audience underwater in Movies, the waterlogged chorals of In Holy Flux and the whirlpool of classical collisions on Front Row Seat – the real (and make-believe) horrors and wonders of the sea are never far from sight.
Taking cues from the imagined wreckage recovery of 2019’s Titanic Rising, we invite you into the doldrums in search of treasure; glimpses of a phantom vessel, underwater cities in rust, abandoned sea forts, devotional letters cast adrift, living fossils, vampiric squid, titanic fauna and any trace of life after all in the sunken catacombs.
We are looking for submissions of poetry, flash fiction and flash essays on the topic of..
aimless drifting.. “aliens” of The Abyss.. Andromeda + Cetus.. Andromeda (750% Slower).. billionaire hubris.. bottled messages.. coral skeletons.. deep-sea gigantism.. figureheads + apotropaic magic.. flotsam and jetsam.. Ghost of Maiden’s Peak.. ghost ships.. immortal jellyfish.. Jewels of the Sea (1961).. Lake Lachrymose and its leeches.. lure of the siren.. Mary Celeste’s mythical mise en scène.. mutiny -and- bounty.. Ocean of Tears.. octopus cities.. Sailers Delight (sea)bedroom pop.. Sea Punk.. Seven Words speculation.. St. Elmos fire.. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch.. The Jacuzzi of Despair.. The Milky Sea Effect.. whale-fall ecosystems.. x marks the spot..
You can submit under ONE of the following categories:
Flash essays / nonfiction: up to 500 words
1-3 pages of poetry in any form
Flash fiction: up to 100 words
All submissions must be sent as a .doc file. If you have nonstandard formatting you may additionally send a pdf. Submissions which do not adhere to word count will be disregarded. No need to send a full bio but a brief cover letter is appreciated.
Submissions should be sent to: gildeddirt.zine@gmail.com with subject heading ‘SUBMISSION: [CATEGORY]’. Categories are either ESSAY/POETRY/FICTION.
Please name your files: NAME_CATEGORY_DATE
Deadline: 12th April 2024
We aim to respond to all submissions within 2-3 months.
Gilded Dirt is a free e-zine edited by Douglas Pattison and Maria Sledmere. Unfortunately, we cannot offer payment to contributors. You can view past issues at
mariaology 