Now that Borrowed Ground is officially launched (more about that another time, but if you came to last night’s online launch thank you so much!), attention is turning to the weeks ahead. If you're looking for inspiration this autumn, there are lots of different ways you can come and work with me! Including ....

Reweirding Albion correspondence course exploring the folkloric wyrd of our sceptred (septic?) isle, online - begins September but you can start whenever you like up to 31st December.

Level Up! Monthly small group mentoring sessions, online (one spot left). Starts Friday 11th September.

Reading group of shortlisted poems for Forward Prize 2026, 21st September, Borderless Books, Stroud, 6pm.

Reading group for TS Eliot Prize shortlisted collections, starts 23rd October and runs over 5 sessions until early January (1pm - 2.45pm), Stroud.

2nd - 5th October. FROME. ‘Landscape as Archive’ A three-night poetry writing retreat exploring landscape as archive, using observation, memory and place as the starting point for new work. Oakhill Ponds, Somerset. This is going to be amazing. More info here.

I am also offering one to one mentoring sessions in poetry and creative nonfiction - perfect if you’ve got a specific project on the go that you need advice on or if you’re working towards completing a pamphlet, collection, book or set of essays. Sessions cost £50 per hour - hit reply to this email for enquiries.

So, with permission, I am passing the poem on here to allow its light to travel a little further. Here it is.

Lúnasa
for JLM Morton

Under a heavy sky these stones
and their circle become a place
where stories begin and end and lurk.
The purple cowl and its dagger-sharp glare,
it is without doubt a kind of magical light.

Then this long view downhill to the local sea,
pastoral farms here and there,
cattle and barns and running water.
It has all the right proportions
for a formal composition.

To photograph the offerings
is to make another kind of gift, a celebration
of the spiritual in these bright coins, 
these sheaves of new wheat, 
these flowers in hedgerow colours.

Though it is easy to say that the past 
is both full of memories and forgotten, 
or that the future’s unknown
and cram-packed with fears, both future
and past spool out from this moment now.

And, of course, from this ancient site here, 
which lends with its saturation and its shadows
importance and significance.
The word ‘lends’ is used advisedly. 
It is a place we borrow.

For so long, publication day has felt so far away and now - suddenly - it is almost here.

I’ve lived with the poems of Borrowed Ground for at least the past two years, some of them for very much longer and I’m so looking forward to letting them go. Without meaning to sound grandiose or self-regarding, I’m curious about this next stage of their existence as they meet new readers and accrete new meanings and (in)significances in other people’s lives.

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Reading is such a dynamic experience, changing with each reader and each new reading. Poems become inflected with new experiences, understanding, emotions every time they are met. Didn’t Walt Whitman say that ‘it is you that stand by the accruling [accruing] and accretion; it is out of you that comes the poetry, the storm, the identity, love, concealment.’1 And I’m intrigued with the way Gwendolin Brooks framed the encounter of reading when she said, “when you read a poem, you may not get out of it all that the poet put into it, but you are different from the poet. You’re different from everybody else who is going to read the poem, so you should take from it what you need. Use it personally.”2

That interaction between poem and reader enables an evolving understanding of what the poem is trying to do and say - one of the many reasons why I love poetry, how it can hold and provoke complexity and not feel obliged to resolve or pin itself down to a single meaning. In this way, poetry is creaturely, isn’t it (?), for it has this capacity to perpetually adapt and transform.

I would love you to join me for the online launch of Borrowed Ground, and hear new work from the amazing Elontra Hall, Amaury Wonderling, E Walker, Jean Stevens and Christine Patridge. It will be taking place online, on Bank Holiday Monday 31st August at 8pm. Tickets are free or pay-what-you-can - sign up via the link below.

Launch Tickets

It is not my place to toot my own trumpet, so I’ll leave you with a couple of nice things others have said about my work (slight cringe, yes). Happily The Bookseller has selected Borrowed Ground as their poetry choice for Autumn / Winter in their Buyer’s Guide, calling me a ‘rising star’ (note: age no object!) and PBS have made Borrowed Ground a book of the week for International Day of Justice and a featured Autumn listing. They had this to say:

“Borrowed Ground by JLM Morton is a lyric ecology of dread, devotion, and damaged inheritance, written from woods, lanes, riverbanks, and suburban edges where the nonhuman world keeps pressing its claims. These poems move between tight, image-led lyrics and more expansive prose blocks, braiding birds, seeds, fungi, and weather with biblical echo, mythic return, and the daily abrasions of modern life, from fly-tipping and job centres to wildfire tourism and floodwater. A long sequence addressed to Black Pine becomes both prayer and argument, as Morton tests the language of blessing against collapse, grief, and the uneasy ethics of belonging. Throughout, the collection holds beauty and brutality in the same frame, insisting that attention is not innocence, but a form of witness.”

~ Poetry Book Society

Buy Borrowed Ground here

Let me leave you with a little poem by way of saying I promise the collection isn’t all doom and gloom (!), thank you for reading this far and thanks so much for all the support in the making of this book. Hope to see you up the road somewhere! x

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I WAIT FOR THIS MOMENT

each year, when the trees shrug

themselves off, hawthorns become lanterns

of tiny red fires, waxcaps the last pale

plumes of life as the earth shrinks in

and the larch shows itself, peach gold

and disco, fringing the valley. Going out.

All guns blazing.

Landscape as Archive is centred around the idea of place as something living, something that holds traces, memory and meaning.

Across the weekend, we’ll explore pond, marsh, meadow and woodland as sites of attention and creative response. Through poetry, field notes and sensory mapping, you’ll begin to read the landscape more closely and develop writing that emerges directly from your surroundings.

The emphasis is on slowing down, noticing and allowing writing to arise from the lived experience of place.

Landscape As Archive

What to expect

• Guided poetry workshops

• Time for independent writing and reflection

• Close observation of the surrounding landscape

• Approaches including sensory mapping, field notes and archival thinking

• A small, supportive group environment

• Opportunities for swimming, sauna and fireside gathering

By the end of the retreat, you will have developed new writing, deepened your attention to place, and gained new ways of approaching your writing practice.

An idyllic setting

Oakhill Ponds offers a varied and immersive landscape of water, woodland and open meadow as well as the main retreat house.

Writing spaces are spread across our large retreat house as well as the 25-acre site, allowing you to move between environments and find places that support your process, whether by a roaring fire, the quiet library, the water’s edge, in sheltered pavilions, or within your own room.

The retreat house, part of the original Oakhill brewery, is well equipped having two living rooms with open fires, a well resourced library as well as spacious bedrooms. The wider site is intentionally simple and hosts a horse lorry library, two warm Shepherds Huts as well as many spaces to explore, creating the conditions for focused creative work.

Sounds good, huh? Find out more and book, using the link below!

Landscape As Archive

Thanks for your lovely responses to my last post about current challenges of basic survival - many of us are in the same boat and I appreciate very much the kind support and solidarity. I took the post down, not because I was ashamed, but because it occurred to me that you good folk of Substack might have felt guilt-tripped into buying my new book. Not a look I like to go for, as they say. So anyway I thought I’d try and trick you into pre-ordering my book in a much more transparent way now instead! Pre-orders are great for indie publishers and poets, giving a much needed boost to morale, visibility and momentum in the run up to publication. Borrowed Ground will be out officially on 31st August.

Preorder here!

It’s got a beautiful cover which I enjoyed working on with Aaron Kent, editor at Broken Sleep Books. I am grateful for his patience and the extended editorial conversation about poems and images. I hope this captures something of the quiet power of the numinous and our deeply entangled, rotting and rooting interconnectedness.

The epicentre of this book is a series of poems that were inspired by a residency in Sladebank Woods, a semi-urban woodland where human and more-than butt up against one another. It asks if we can live with greater attentiveness to the places we inhabit and the stories that have slipped between the cracks of official record. Here’s the blurb…

Borrowed Ground is JLM Morton’s second full collection, a reckoning with land, climate grief, and the entanglement of human and more-than-human life. Rooted in the woodland and river country of the west of England, the poems move between close observation and myth: a central creation sequence follows a black pine through litany and shaped, fragmenting text, while a closing sequence stages the drowning and mythic rebirth of Sabrina, goddess of the Severn. Morton works through erasure, found material, and liturgical forms without losing lyric precision, holding ecological dread against humour, domestic comfort, and ancient, feminist modes of knowing.

Preorder here!

Thank you for reading this far, thanks for supporting my work. To finish, below are some nice things folk have said about the collection. Bye for now! x

PRAISE for Borrowed Ground:

Borrowed Ground is a generous meditation on land, connection, and recovery that explores the borrowedness of our lives and works to bring neglected voices forward. These poems are formally inventive and lyrically captivating; they dissolve into the memory of weather and emerge into the knowledge of the black pine.
— Alycia Pirmohamed

Deeply accomplished, J. L .M. Morton’s poems are tuned to the rough rhythms of seasons and the insistent music of sorrows. In her work, time is seamless, history vivid and brutal. Yet Morton’s words are also warmed by humour, and by human tenderness. Her powerful final lines give an extraordinary sense both of the planet and of its smallest places. There is soup. There is hope.
— Alison Brackenbury

The heart of this collection from celebrant JLM Morton is a forest and a blessing: ‘Blessed be the first layer of rot’ that connects us to the nervous systems of Life in fuzing, synaptic phrasing. Flooded with hollows, this poetry affirms complicated (and implicated) relationships: fire that would ‘eat us alive in the car’, waxwings that howl, a civilisation that’s ‘Going out./ All guns blazing.’ Morton’s eye for detail consistently brings all the big climate questions close and reflects sharply on our longing, anger and grief.
Not unlike the elf caps of ‘Late Warning’, Morton’s poems are ‘acoustic mirrors’ broadcasting ancient, feminist knowing into the jangling contemporary hubbub. Morton is an unflinching chronicler of what is. You could not want for a more entangled, fecund, thrilling exhalation of Life dying.
— Alice Willitts

Ambitious, intelligent, sensuous, and deeply attentive to land, myth, grief, and non-human life. There is real authority here.
— Vasiliki Albedo

Preorder here!

It’s becoming something of my own tradition to hold space for writers around the solstice, a chance to check in with our own practices at this mid point of the year and write into themes of heat, intensity, imbalance, radiance, volatility at sun’s pinnacle.

What does it mean to stand at the peak of something? To feel the pressure of light? To sense the turning even as the day burns at full height?

If you would like to join me, this workshop is happening on Zoom on June 16th at 6pm - 8pm and it’s suitable for anyone.

I would love to see you there!

Find out more!

Even after all this time
the sun never says to the earth,
“You owe me.”

Look what happens with
a love like that,
it lights the whole sky.

~ Hafez

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Older than light.

Always moving, always made, always already elsewhere.

I observed the River Severn every day across the Vale for a year before writing about it, meticulously taking notes on my phone as I walked, capturing texture, colour, mood, the shifting light. When I came to writing, it came tumbling out one night in January and I knew it needed to live in some kind of soundscape, not solely on the page. I worked with the sound artist Joff Elphick and my friend and musician Oonagh Davies to help bring the piece to life, using recordings from the riverside and weaving it with voice and an old folk song which you will hear in the background if you listen closely.

‘Drowning Backwards’ reimagines the story of Hafren/Severn/Sabrina first told in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain (1136). The History recounts how Locrinus, one of the first Kings of the Britons, fell in love with Estrildis, a Germanic prisoner of war. He kept her underground in a cave and after seven years (of abuse), Estrildis gave birth to a daughter she called ‘Habren,’ another name for Hafren/Severn/Sabrina.

Discovering her husband’s adultery, Locrinus’s wife – Gwendolen – raised an army, killed her husband and drowned Habren and Estrildis in the river in revenge.

‘Drowning Backwards’ is a retelling of this myth, bringing Habren back to life, equipping her with agency, including her right to vengeance.

As well as reaching back to one of the founding myths of Britain, the poem connects with goddess worship that was practiced by the Iron Age Dobunni who lived in this region; a practice that was hybridised in Romano-Celt culture. We have long said our prayers by water, cast our votives into the current, asking for whatever salvation is required of today. These are alternative ways of connecting with the land to the patriarchal pillage of men like Locrinus. In my poem, Habren is unhinged from the door that slammed her voice shut for centuries. She is a polyphonic force, multivocal. Uncontained.

It feels like a good moment to let her loose. We need more Habrens right now, do we not?

This long poem, renamed ‘The Undrowning,’ will appear in my next collection Borrowed Ground which is out in August. You can listen to it below - hope you enjoy it! And for those of you who may have heard it before, mea culpa, some things bear repeating.

I love Lucy Jones’s book about what the process of becoming a mother does to women. Its blend of scientific insight, rigorous social research and lyrical memoir is explosive – and I especially love what she says above about the caterpillar’s dissolution and metamorphosis. It makes me think of midlife as goo, perimenopause as a time of profound and irreversible change. And you don’t have to be a mother to experience this either, ‘just’ a woman. We may bring our memories and experiences of the past with us, but the form we take and the ways we henceforth navigate through the world is entirely other to what has gone before.

I have wholeheartedly adopted the moth as my spirit animal.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about how much time we waste apologising for the bodies that have carried us this far. I’m bombarded online each day by memes and ads and posts that tell me I’m too podgy, too dry, too sloppy, too hot, too blunt, too foggy, that I should be more worried about my grip strength, those eyebrows, my slackening skin.

This softening jawline, the silvering hair, the stiffness in the morning aren’t maintenance failures. They are the archive of a life lived – the goo-ing of experience. Evidence. The record of every threshold I’ve crossed, every grief metabolised, every joy that left its imprint on my skin.

Menescense, if you will.

Those two deep lines between my brows? Testament to the hundreds of thousands of books I’ve pored over in my lifetime.

The girth of my thighs? Proof that I’ve spent the past couple of decades carrying the weight of a household, a family, juggling at least three jobs at any one time.

Somewhere along the way, we were taught to treat these signs as shameful. Something to correct, conceal, reverse. As if ageing were a terrible personal mistake rather than the most natural, astonishing thing a body can do.

I’m tired of that story and I want new ones.

I want to read about women who flourish in their forties, fifties and beyond.

I’m tired of pretending that midlife is a decline, when in truth it feels more like an uplift, a place where the clouds finally part and you can see the flight ahead with a clarity you didn’t have at twenty or thirty.

These – and many more - are all the reasons why I’m hosting the Moth Magic Retreat this summer as a way of turning towards ageing, not of escaping it – recognising the powerful transformation we undergo at this time of life. We will gather in the creative sanctuary of a restored mill in South West France hosted by the brilliant sculptor, ceramicist and founder Nathalie Edwards, deep in the peaceful countryside of Aveyron, near the iconic Millau Viaduct.

We’ll write each day from the body. Not the idealised body, but the real one that we actually live in. The one with the many different lenses, the almost-360 vision gained from how very much we have witnessed in our lives. We’ll swim in cold water, letting the zing of it remind us that we’re still capable of full bodily joy each day. We’ll move gently, rest deeply, make things with our hands – poems, stories, clay that remembers everything it has learned of the landscape and the pressure of human touch. We’ll eat delicious home cooked food and sit with other women who are so over apologising for or hiding their age and ready to claim the wisdom that only time brings.

Midlife isn’t a crisis. It’s a metamorphosis. And like the moth, we don’t need to be pretty to be powerful.

If this chimes with you, then perhaps this retreat is for you. I’m not really a hard sell kind of person – I know this thing we’re doing will find its way to the people who need / want it. Perhaps this post on its own is enough: a reminder that your ageing body is not a problem to solve, but a story to honour, an ancient goo to revel in – loudly and unapologetically.

Find out more!

Things it might be useful to know:

• Flights from Bristol to Beziers go out on Wednesday 24^th June and return Monday 29^th June with Ryanair

• You can also get there by train

• There’s a deposit option to secure your spot

• You can pay in three instalments if you select this on checkout

JLM Morton

‘What Middle Age Taught Me at the Equinox’

~ first published in Lighthouse Journal Issue 27

In answer to your question, I made love to him for at least the thousandth time, whispering into our peach-coloured linen sheets while the kids were still asleep and the bed was hot from the night.

Outside it rained hard and the smell of water on the road drifted through the open window. Curtains moved the light, patterning our helpless limbs.

Nobody admits you can make and destroy something a few times over and it can endure. Love can return and you can hate him and love him and hate him and love him in ways only your body grasps, the tough, fibrous parts that unite muscle with bone.

This is how I know it is the last day of summer and my blood is turning brown with fragments of falling leaves on cotton. Over the celestial equator, I step into the next illuminated half and the new freedoms I’m not meant to thrill for.

I throw the windows open on yellow’s longer wavelength, inhale the thickening atmosphere, gather in the scattered light and harvest moon and I tell you this, knowing as I do now that our failures and our fury love us more than the romance. We are living on instinct in this soft, wild kingdom, nosing at the trail of beginning afternoon.

*note: Substack's “poetry layout” fails again! Hope it doesn’t spoil the reading experience too much. See eche for correct layout.

Holidaying in Cantabria (multiple choice)

The boat was meant to be a way to appreciate the distance. 
I ate beignet / a pot noodle / green olives with a cocktail stick 
sitting on the deck in a storm. What else was there to do 
in this place of endless wind and Abba medleys, sequinned crew 
dancing in a circle on stage. 

On land, the hotel cancelled because wildfires were broiling 
their walls. My husband said it was embarrassing / funny / strange 
to be so oblivious while the world burned and I thought 
there will be no one to save us when the fire 
eats us all alive in the car.

Gas station staff pressed their hands into the counter, 
watching a yellow tower of smoke spin closer. Mountains 
so black, they’d lost all depth. Rocks emerged 
like rescue squads laden with toxic dust, a reminder
we’d escaped for all this dopamine / splendour / devastation.

Sunflowers dumbly turned their heads to the source — 
will the scars be wiser than the wounds? When the hills 
stop smelling acrid, will they smell of meadow grass again,
waving like the lone woman on El Pintal beach as the ferry passes, 
looking for connection and only one / everyone / no-one waves back. 

I see last year’s blackened trunks bursting with fresh green 
leaves and feel only gladness / disbelief / despair. Oh, for the optimism 
of pampas grass hitched in the bonnets of our cars, throwing 
themselves at verges on routes from the port, thinking 
in their seedy way — if not there, then here / here / here. 
 

I’m in the full‑stop phase of edits for my next poetry collection, which is its own strange terrain. Everything feels close‑up, granular, almost too intimate. And at the same time the vernal equinox has tipped us into a new light, a moment that invites recalibration.

I love following a thread. I love the deep dive, the flow-state, the way the making of a collection of poems can pull you under and remake your sense of time. But there’s a cost to staying submerged for too long. Lately I’ve been so crushingly busy that it’s begun to feel destructive - not just to my own health, but to the people I love. There’s a point where devotion becomes depletion.

And the truth is simple: if you keep doing what you’ve always done, you get what you’ve always got.

So I’m taking step back. Looking up. Breathing a little. Remembering that writing isn’t just the work of burrowing; it’s also the work of reorienting. Recalibrating the instrument. Letting the gaze adjust to distance again. If my flinty eyed re-watch of Will Smith in The Pursuit of Happyness lately taught me anything, it’s that the grind don’t change the system, baby.

The equinox is a hinge. A balancing point. A reminder that light and dark can hold each other without cancelling each other out. I’m taking that as permission to pause, to listen and re‑enter my own life with a little more spaciousness.

With this simple ritual I made for vernal equinox, I invite you to do the same.

Gather two threads of contrasting colours to symbolise day / night, winter / spring, this brief pivot between light and dark.

Go for a walk to your river / lake / sea. Find a small stone.

During your walk / swim, touch the stone to ...

♥ the earth

♥ the water

♥ your heart

Wrap the threads around the stone. Keep it as a reminder of those three relationships to carry you from this sabbat to Beltane: earth for steadiness, water for change, heart for intention.

On the horizon: some upcoming events

21st April. ONLINE. Poetic Mapping: an immersive online workshop exploring how poetry can chart the landscapes of memory, emotion, and environment. More information and booking here. 6pm - 8.30pm. A rerun of a sold out workshop I did at The Poetry Society.

25th April. STROUD. Slight. Poetry reading at Rough Hands with Al Hughes, 7pm - 9pm

8th May to 3rd July. ONLINE. Level Up! Elevate your poetic craft in this dynamic mentoring workshop tailored for those already writing and eager to take their poetry to new heights. More information and booking here.

25th June. FRANCE. Moth Magic: a writing retreat for women at midlife - a week of writing, yoga, wild swimming, walking and ceramic making in southern France. Find out more here.

The wider picture reflects this. Arts and culture are not a luxury in the UK. They are a significant part of the national economy and a recognised driver of growth and opportunity. Creative industries contributed £126bn in gross value added to the economy in 2022 and employed 2.4 million people. Parliamentary research describes culture and creativity as important to economic development and to the futures of young people, while also acknowledging that the sector is precarious and uneven in its resources and working conditions.¹ Local authority spending cuts have intensified this instability. In England, spending on arts and culture fell by 48 percent between 2009/10 and 2022/23, a reduction of around £2.3 billion.² Even with new investment packages, such as the £270 million Arts Everywhere Fund, the long-term pattern remains volatile.³

Literature sits inside this landscape as both an economic contributor and a civic one. The Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre describes the arts, culture and heritage sectors as ecosystems that rely on organisations of all sizes.⁴ Writers, small presses and literary development groups generate value that is not only financial but – crucially - social. They support literacy, confidence and wellbeing, nurturing imagination, play (yes, play, for adults too) and critical thinking. They help people make sense of themselves and their communities. This work is slow and relational, and it depends on continuity.

Small arts organisations like Dialect carry much of this responsibility, yet they face some of the toughest conditions. Funding is erratic and administratively heavy. Competition is fierce. Staff / freelancer burnout is widespread, with small teams holding everything from fundraising to safeguarding to community care. Many organisations operate without reserves or long-term security. Research shows that organisations like ours are pushed to diversify income while navigating declining public support and increased accountability pressures.⁵

And still, these organisations are often the ones doing the most inclusive, imaginative and community-rooted work. They create space for diverse voices. They offer opportunities that are accessible and place-based. They build networks rather than silos. They hold the kind of creative ecosystems that allow literature to thrive.

Dialect is part of this ecology. In the past month alone, we’ve run a audio and text-based story trail in Stroud Town which was created by two young writers and offered for free during half term, we’ve commissioned an intergenerational team of four writers for a project called Weight of Light which imagines life in the near future. Just today, we have been running a retreat in a woodland that will be followed by an open mic. Next week we have an online seasonal workshop series starting and are launching an innovative new collaborative poetry pamphlet.

Our work is grounded in the belief that writing grows best in community, in conversation and in relationship with place. We support writers through courses, mentoring, retreats, books and a membership scheme that helps us plan sustainably. We champion voices that might otherwise be overlooked. We create spaces where people can write, think and imagine together.

If you believe in the value of literature and the importance of diverse, local, imaginative voices, supporting small organisations is one of the most effective ways to make a difference. You can support Dialect by joining a course, booking mentoring, coming on retreat, buying books or joining our membership scheme. These actions help sustain the work and ensure that writers at all stages have access to the opportunities they need.

The road trip conversation has stayed with me, looping around and around in my head. It reminded me that the arts survive not because the system is fair, but because people choose to keep the work alive. Literature does not happen in isolation. It happens in rooms, in circles, in landscapes, in conversations and in communities. It happens because people make it possible.

Dialect

Endnotes

1. House of Commons Library, “Arts and culture: key issues for the 2024 Parliament.”

2. House of Commons Library, “Local government finances: arts and culture spending.”

3. Department for Culture, Media and Sport, “Arts Everywhere Fund announcement.”

4. Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre, “State of the Nations 2024.”

5. Centre for Cultural Value, “Culture in Crisis: Impacts of Covid-19 on the UK cultural sector.”

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I find this excruciating. There’s something uniquely exposing about sending your work out with a little note that essentially says: Would you mind validating my artistic output of the last couple of years in 2-3 sentences? No pressure.

It’s not that poets aren’t generous. They are. More that the whole endeavour feels like standing naked in a spotlight holding out a bowl. I’d rather be neck-deep in a river, or lost in an archive, or doing almost anything other than this polite literary begging.

And yet – though I may kick against endorsements (a friend of mine calls them ‘puffs’ for good reason) - they have become part of the ecology of publishing. We endorse each other’s books because we know how vulnerable it is to make them. We say yes when we can, and we try not to take it personally when someone can’t. Thus far I’ve had two very kind declines (from folk who have a policy of saying no to everyone - and I believe them, they are famous and teach a lot, must be deluged, now feel bad for asking), two resounding yesses and a ghosting.

So here I am again, sending my little messages into the ether, cringing as I press send, trying to remind myself that asking is not the same as imposing. It’s simply another way of saying: This book matters to me. I hope it might matter to you too.

My second poetry collection, Borrowed Ground, will be out on 31st August with Broken Sleep Books.

But already, Imbolc is here. Midway point between Winter Solstice and Spring Equinox, holding new growth the ‘in the belly’ (from the Old Gaelic im bolg). A reminder that the light always returns and an invitation to notice the subtle changes in the more-than-human world and the shifts we share in common. I’ve been writing and thinking a lot of late about how renewed interest in ceremony, ritual and observing the turns on the wheel of the year are naturally helping people to re-bond with the land and honour our reciprocity. It’s a way for us to decolonise our relationship with time, retune to the seasons and the rhythms of our own bodies - not a new discovery, but an impulse driven by a great remembering of something we mislaid for a while or lost sight of, resurfacing now in our lives.

This tuning in to the rhythms of land and body shapes my writing as much as it does my celebrancy practice. And so, next weekend, I’m doing a bit of an experiment by hosting a mini retreat at Sladebank Woods near Stroud in Gloucestershire that will blend ritual and writing with attunement to physical and emotional changes for women at midlife. Shaking off all that social shame around ageing, we’ll explore this moment in our lives as a powerful experience through the shapeshifting figure of the moth - our gateway and our guide. I am curious to know if there are other women out there who are as interested in crossing this threshold as I am. Afterwards, there is an the option to have a woodland sauna too and mark, in very physical way, this time of transition. You can find out more here.

Moth/er Mini Retreat

Though in truth, I didn’t mean to plan it this way, of course the timing of this retreat couldn’t be more perfect really: ‘in the belly’ of the year, symbolic site of our becoming. I hope when we wander the woods next Saturday we might find again the scarlet elf caps I snapped there recently, sprouting amongst the moss and sticks; cheerful crimson bowls that hold past, present and future all at once. I hope you’ve found a minute today to throw open the windows, light a candle, wash your hands in cold water, do some kind of gesture that freshens things up a little and (I would say this wouldn’t I?) read a poem! Brigid, who we honour today, was a goddess / patron saint of poetry after all. Here’s a recent one of mine from Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal to mark the day - Merrie Imbolc, all!

Try this instead.

Night – sitting in the dark

• What remains uncertain, something you’re feeling your way towards?

• What are you learning from the slowness of midwinter or these twixmas days?

• What feels unresolved but worth staying with?

Hearth – keeping you warm

• What sustains your creative life right now?

• What practices, people, or ideas are giving you heat?

• Where embers of your writing are still glowing?

Seed – lying dormant but alive

• What small idea or instinct is resting under the surface?

• What might germinate when the light returns?

• What wants quiet protection rather than action?

When you have finished working through the ideas that come up for you, think about something you want to shed or let go of.

Write it down on a piece of paper.

Burn it.

Now write down one thing you would like to carry into your creative practice for the new year – it can be as simple as ‘imagination’ or as complex as ‘finish the poetry pamphlet’! Up to you. At a recent solstice workshop, we talked about the yew tree as a metaphor of longevity, portal to the underworld, symbol of the passage of time and hope for renewal. Go and find your local yew tree – if you want to find a very ancient tree (for they are among the oldest living things on our planet), take a look at this map. Pick three sprigs of yew – one for the past, one for the present, and one for the future. Roll up your piece of paper, get a piece of string and tie it into a bundle with the yew sprigs.

Carry this with you into the new year and keep it somewhere safe and ceremonial. Don’t forget to check in on it at the next turn of the wheel Imbolc, 1^st February.

With love, Juliette x

Ancestral 

The veteran yew has already 
lived five of my grandmother’s lives.
Can you hear them? Leaves 
speaking all of the words
caught in their seams.
The infinite memory 
of layering branches. 
And berries 
— the only perishable parts,
singing sweet and fleshy yearning.

Workshops coming up in early 2026 (with spaces still available)

Reading for Writers in-person monthly group, starts 16th January

Even Now: writing towards hope three online sessions, starts 23rd January

Poetic Mapping online workshop with The Poetry Society, 26th January (update, sorry now sold out!)

Moth/er Midlife in-person micro retreat for women on writing and ritual, 7th February; includes evening woodland sauna.

I am also running a retreat in Southern France in June 2026 for women who are interested in exploring writing and embodiment at midlife not as a crisis, but as a powerful turning point. Be the first to find out more here.

Hello! I’m just beaming in to share some recent writings that have sprung up like little fruiting bodies in the mycelial UK and Ireland poetry network. It’s felt like a time of abundance lately which has been a joy, but I am ready for the dreamtime now and itching to sink below the soil horizon for some regenerative rest and writing in the dark. Luckily, the rejection vapours have started crystallising again like a hoarfrost on my tender new poemlings, ensuring I stay in the downtime!

Our last Lost Mythos show of our West Country tour was in the ancient setting of the Roman Baths at Bath, an experience I don’t think I will ever forget. It was a freezing cold night in mid-November so steam was rising off the warm (40c!) spring water that fills the great bath we performed around. Absolute magic.

I want to say a very big thank you to Amanda Hart, Director of Archaeology and Art at The Roman Baths & Pump Room who made it all happen in her determined, unflappable way. I can’t believe she let us do it. We were told it was the first synthesiser in the Baths ! And to Archie Marsh for an incredible set up and the best sound we’ve ever had. It was the 35^th reading I’ve done of poems from Red Handed and, as I look ahead to my next collection coming out at the end of August 2026, I am wondering how I can give Borrowed Ground as much of a life as this collection has had – it’s been so much fun. Any suggestions of events/festivals or invitations to read next year gratefully received!

I have had a flurry of new poems published lately, including my first publication in Ireland (Southword). I was extra chuffed about that as I recently traced my paternal line back to Munster and who should publish the poem but… the Munster Literature Centre.

'Vixen' in Southword 49, Winter 2025

‘seeing my eyes seen
hearing my listening heard’ 
- Alice Oswald

at midnight’s hinge 
a fox scream swung the woods ajar 

on my suburban dream 
drawing me back to the path 

where we froze
in one another’s stare

eyeshine encircled 
by the gnarled grip of branches 

leaf scuttle   then a cloud 
clearing past the moon 

guiding lunatic light 
touching our nature

the vixen’s bark 
ripened and released 

like an egg carried 
and dropped from the teeth

I’ve also got new work in the latest Poetry London, an absolute dream journal for me to be in; and Issue 2 of The Aftershock Review, the new / urgent / exciting / interesting kid on the Manchester poetry block edited by Max Wallis, Anna Percy and Suzy Feay. These are quite varied pieces that I hope will work together when they appear in Borrowed Ground. I’ve posted some of the texts here but please do consider subscribing to these magazines – they play such a vital role in our poetry ecology, putting poets in conversation with one another and with a wider readership. We’d be voiceless beyond our immediate communities without them.

'Repeating Patterns' in Poetry London Autumn 2025 

Perhaps it was the myrtle made us that way, 
heady and loose. Its explosion of stamens, 
white firework of youth. Some say flowers 
set bad examples, others that each 
has their own soul. He pressed me back 
without touch onto the cool stone 
of the Alhambra. My breath, his, 
the fretwork of our lungs a repeated pattern
entangled. Hot skin like metal, atoms emitting 
every colour of light. I close my eyes and feel 
again the arabesques, the long still pool reflecting
a spinto tenor of sun, beating down our walls.
Inevitable is a kind of infinity. 
A kind of bloom that outlasts the fruit. 

'After the Burial' in The Aftershock Review Issue 2

I sat in the car watching the sky 
thinking here is a wound 
and here and here   even sundown 
seems ambivalent   smear 
of fire on scattered ash    slack 
lipped scuttle   with nothing 
to say.  But somewhere 
in the trees you’re still around
where the rain has licked 
the copse of birch to gold 
and the shadow bars 
still flicker like perfect rows 
of teeth   shocks of blonde
like gods   playing some kind 
of joke   that it was you 
who got out first
chasing that forsaken 
punchline   that soft umbilicus
you severed from the world.

This month, I was also lucky enough to be nominated by The Winged Moon for a Pushcart Prize. You can read ‘Chimeras’ on their Substack here. Many thanks to Jai Michelle Louissen and Saraswati Nagpal for such a generous nomination.

Wonder as Liberation Practice

Earlier this year, I was commissioned by Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal to write on ecopoetics in an age of fragmentation. In this hybrid essay, with a new poem ‘Late Warning’, I’m thinking about the embodiment of the imagination, as well as its capacity to express a kind of freedom that can’t be contained. Many thanks to editor Paul Robert and Naush Sabah for the invitation to take up some thought space here and consider how the ecopoem can be the antithesis of old certainties, a place to transcend our human exceptionalism. It’s a tricky one to share on the socials and have a convo about it, so I’d love to hear what you think.

Here’s the opening…

“A soldier’s red woollen coat is sprawled on the mudflats of the River Severn, twisted by the push and pull of the water, stinking of oil and coated in sand. It will soon be washed away again by the tide and the gravitational pull of the moon. But for now, the arm of the coat reaches towards the West of England. The sleeve is an entrance to a tunnel leading back to the past.

Throughout the writing of Red Handed, I was haunted by the image of a military redcoat. Made with the precious dye of cochineal beetles harvested from the pads of prickly pears in central America and woven from Cotswold wool produced by the sheep that have shaped the local landscape, the redcoat is a symbol of the dynamic interplay of human ingenuity and nature’s resilience. It is also an iconic symbol of Empire and the armies that patrolled and enforced the murderous expansion of British colonial rule. The Severn Estuary, site of the redcoat haunting, was a mighty conduit for trade between rural England and the rest of the world, connecting the textile mills of the West Country via canal to the Severn and the Atlantic Ocean. Jonathan Yeo’s 2024 painting of King Charles is testament to how deeply embedded the uniform is in the national imagination and is in many ways the most honest royal portrait there’s ever been, the red hue a sure reference to a legacy of bloodshed and violence, a reckoning with that history and the truth of the stories of rural England that some would rather forget.”

Read the whole essay here

And finally… on a rainy Monday in early November I had a wonderful afternoon with real life ray of sunshine Estelle Philips for her podcast Nature Talks With Humans. We talked about white magpies, silverback gorillas and how cold water responds to our grieving bodies. You can listen here or wherever you get your podcasts.

Coming up this month is my annual, much-loved winter solstice workshop which is pay what you can and a seasonal check in with your writerly self. This winter solstice workshop is a moment to take stock as the sun stands still, to do away with what no longer serves you and call in that which you need to flourish. In the new year, I’m running Even Now, a three part workshop that will explore how poetic language can navigate uncertainty, reimagine possibility and tend toward hope. I really wanted to get into exploring how poetry can hold grief and grace, rupture and renewal all at once, look at some poets who do this successfully and be inspired to make our own new poems. Hope to see some of you there.

Thanks for reading! x

Straight away I had a very long list of books I love – I’ve never thought of myself as a bookworm, the kind of neat and tidy good girl who curls up in a window seat with #cosyvibes to lose herself in a book (when I say ‘lose,’ I mean daintily immerse in book with caution). I don’t even look good in an oversized frill collar. But a cursory glance at my sagging shelves and bank statements tells you all you need to know about my relationship with books. Loves em, I do.

And the more I teach, the more I want to encourage closer reading in emerging writers – I meet too many who tell me that they don’t really read. Yet reading is essential to writers to nourish craft as well as imagination and inspiration. As I said elsewhere recently, I was a listener and reader long before I was ever a writer and these modes are fundamental to my practice now. Exposure to diverse voices and styles helps writers to absorb techniques for rhythm, structure, and emotional resonance. Reading builds empathy and challenges assumptions, offering new ways of seeing and imagining the world – it sharpens discernment and critical skills, strengthens the ability to shape and edit a narrative / poem and perhaps most important of all, reminds writers they’re part of a larger literary and cultural conversation.

I could wang on about this some more, but I won’t. I love reading and if you’re reading this you probably do too.

In the end and in the face of favourite-book-overwhelm, I thought I’d challenge myself to getting a first pass on five books that have shaped the way I think about stories and the ways we tell them. These were late adolescent / early adult books for me - I read all of these at school or early in my BA, so about a hundred million years ago… and I’m not going to describe the stories - you can Google that - but think about how they influenced me as a writer…

Here we go.

Isabelle Allende The House of the Spirits

I love The House of the Spirits for its unapologetic embrace of magical realism as a radical lens that re-enchants history, memory, and resistance. Allende’s world pulses with spirits, omens, and ancestral echoes, offering a poetic counter-narrative to political violence and patriarchal control. As a writer, it taught me that the surreal can be deeply truthful, and that creativity itself is a form of power.

Caryl Churchill Top Girls

OK, so this is a play, not a book in the conventional sense, but my first encounter with it was as a set text on a Theatre Studies A-Level course. And yes that is my Methuen Student Edition! Top Girls got me from the off for its unconventional form and fierce, fractured voices. As a writer, it was formative because it showed me how structure can be subversive - how overlapping dialogue, historical anachronism, and theatrical dissonance can expose the cost of ambition and the complexity of feminist legacy. Churchill doesn’t just tell a story, she dismantles it, and in doing so, invites us to feel the tension between power and care, success and solidarity.

John Fowles The French Lieutenant’s Woman

The French Lieutenant’s Woman has been a lifelong love for its audacious narrative play and emotional depth. Fowles’ metafictional voice - shifting, self-aware, and deliciously unreliable - opened my eyes to storytelling as a layered, living, somwtimes contradictory act. As a writer, it was formative in showing how form can question fate, how characters can resist their author, and how history can be reimagined with empathy and wit. Like Churchill and Allende, Fowles renders time and history as something changeable and layered, challenging the illusion of historical determinism and authorial control.

Thomas Hardy The Return of the Native

I didn’t just love Eustacia Vye as a powerful heroine, I was drawn to Hardy’s portrayal of Egdon Heath, a place that thrums with elemental presence. Landscape for Hardy is so much more than a setting, it’s a character in its own right, described often as a kind of body or almost as a personality type. I didn’t know you could do this in fiction. The Heath’s brooding vastness, its resistance to human taming, and its cyclical rhythms evoke a deep kinship with nature’s indifference and mystery. Egdon becomes a mirror for the human soul: ancient, and unyielding, yet strangely consoling in its permanence.

Toni Morrison Beloved

One of my favourite books of all time (and writing this post, I was bereft to discover it’s gone missing from my library), as a reader and writer, I love Beloved for its lyrical defiance - for the way Morrison hews language to hold unbearable truths. Her prose is incantatory, haunted, and tender, weaving memory, myth, and trauma into a story that refuses erasure. It’s a masterclass in emotional precision and historical reckoning, where every sentence carries the weight of intergenerational grief and the possibility of healing.

Well, social realism fangirl I am clearly not. That’s been quite a surprising excavation for me, reminding me how much I lean into nonlinear form and thinking about how we express or engage with time and stories. Now all I have to do is chose which one to read from tomorrow night at the opening event of Stroud Book Festival!

Firewords will be a celebration of books and reading and the enduring power of the written word. The event features 10 Stroud-based authors and Richard Ovenden, the 25^th Bodley’s Librarian at the University of Oxford, and author of Burning the Books: A History of Knowledge Under Attack. His writing reminds us we must never take access to books and ideas for granted. In conversation with the Festival’s Programme Director, Caroline Sanderson, Richard will discuss the history of access to books and human knowledge, and why it remains a vital marker of a healthy society. Something I think we'll all agree we need right now.

Get your tickets here, we’d love to see you! I’d also love to hear what your favourite reads are – could you select a top five books that have shaped you as a writer? Have you read any of those I mentioned above? Let’s create a wordy book conversation chain of joy below…

… cue tumbleweed? 😘

as a woman / from a distance / writing about a war I’m too young to remember

writing about war I am too young to remember / a war before I was born

am I too far away to write about a war / a war too far away to write about

how to write about war? / as a distance / from a white woman / how

does it feel to write as a woman about war from a distance

the uneven syntax of Ivor Gurney, Gloucestershire poet and soldier, his impressions of war; the shocks and smashes, gunfire and tanks, trenches, and yet his memory is held whole – some nostalgia – tea and mother, tree and river of home / but we can forgive this, can’t we? How far from home in the midst of devastation his mind retreated / from the heavy rain and mud to the elm trees and beeches, the shimmering Severn in the ‘ecstatic west’ (‘After Glow’) // Gurney’s irregular rhythms, abrupt line breaks, and syntactic fragmentation, are a formal embodiment of dislocation / instability / a soldier’s inner world ‘far past right agony gone’ (‘Laventie’)

As the baby of a post-war baby, growing up in a period of what now seems like rare stability, I learned to scorn war / learned that patriotism represented a kind of conventional nationalism that I hated. I grew up in a postcolonial culture where flags carried the stench of empire, colonisation, suppression of people who, though I had never met them in my corner of rural England, reading had taught me empathy for. And now, here come the flags again, the black clouds drifting in from the right. And now, here we hold the immediacy of war in our hands / back pockets / handbags / handheld horrors of brains splattered on pavements, torn bodies hanging from bombed out buildings. Does how we feel and think about war shift and change in response to what we witness and experience? Closer now, not distant.

I wrote a commission as I prepared to read the poems of Ivor Gurney at Gloucester Cathedral this week. Something about my great uncle Frank had been swirling around for a while, but nothing had settled into anything like a poem. Did anyone ever really know him? He went away to school, was killed in Belgium on 29^th May 1940 on the retreat to Dunkirk, aged 21 - just a few months out of training at Sandhurst. His photo has always been on the wall of the family home, his story has always been told, his headstone reads ‘In proud and loving memory.’ But the feeling was always of a ceremonious ‘Memorial,’ something distant, a Remembrance Service attended every year to lay a wreath at Salcombe by the family. Through the plastic poppies and shiny shoes, is it possible to feel something for someone you have never met, a burnt dead branch on the family tree?

As I was researching the poem, I discovered the men of his battalion wrote letters home two days before his death. These were intercepted by a German, taken away in a van and kept in a loft in Germany until the late 1960s when they were finally given up. It wasn’t possible to reunite all the letters with their addressees. Forty-one of them remain in the archive of the Suffolk Regiment and found their way into my poem, ‘The Long Lost,’ which you can listen to below.

does it feel / to write as a woman about war from a distance

how to write about war? / as a distance / from a white woman / how

writing about war I am too young to remember / a war before I was born

am I too far away to write about a war / a war too far away to write about

as a woman / from a distance / writing about a war I’m too young to remember

With thanks to Philip Rush, Mara Simpson and Emma Kernahan for comments on drafts of ‘The Long Lost.’ It takes a village x

More process note than explication - find out more about the inspiration and evolution of the installation below, with a bonus poem thrown in.

Living Matter pulses with imaginal resonance - a 40-minute spatial sound installation rooted in the ancient landscape, weaving poetry, music and song, field recordings, and mythic memory into a multisensory experience that invites emotional attunement with the more-than-human.

The roots of this work lie in the landscape – in the rivers that have carved their way through the wolds, emptying themselves into the mighty Thames and Severn, in the woodlands and commons, in the soil and mycelial networks and in the history of the people who have lived here for millennia.

A walk-wade-swim trespass along the course of a river through the remnants of ancient Bronze, Iron Age and Romano-Celt communities, became an unexpected encounter with archaeology that revealed a history of matriarchal rituals performed on the riverbanks. Votive sculptures of mother goddesses were worshipped by the Dobunni and Roman settlers, along with the scuttling hooded figures of the Genii Cucullati, to invoke fertility, good health, abundance and protection.

Encountering these figures and the landscape at a time of ecological grief and emergency provoked a response in language and the written word, articulating a journey into connectedness and a deep and growing sense of kinship with the living matter of the land as family and ancestry. The poems and songs are also deeply linked to the contemporary lives of mothers and exploring the ways we have been mothered ourselves, raising families in uncertain times and recognising the importance of being good ancestors, nurturing a love for the land in those who will inherit it. Composition of song, music and field recordings have extended and enriched that response, transforming and renewing the narratives we encounter here again, creating an iterative story that is as spiralling and continuous as living matter itself.

Mother goddesses and guardian spirits have been the tropes and totems that crystallised our ideas around kinship, care and relationship with the nature / environment we call home. They are guides that connect and inspire, accompanying us into an imaginal realm and creating new mythologies. The spatial listening, made possible by d&b audiotechnik’s state-of-the-art technology, fuses with these ancient archetypes as a tool for imaginal perception, evoking atmosphere as well the sense of a threshold. Inside the space there are muslin hangings printed with poetry and painted using oak gall ink made from local materials. Permanent and indelible, oak gall is a ceremonial ink still used to this day on birth, marriage and death certificates.

As a visitor to the installation, you are invited to engage not just with place, but with its sentient memory, guided by listening posts that act as ritual waypoints and by the immersive experience in the venue itself. Through soundscape and poetic invocation of ancient spirits, the work seeks to dissolve boundaries between human and more-than-human, evoking brinkpoints where ancestral and ecological kinship resound. A windfall branch, a sweep of stones, a broken concrete slab creeping with algae, a spiral bowl filled with Slad Brook waters greet the arrival in this space. As co-dreamers, participants are called into reciprocity - leaving offerings, reflections, and presence in a shared field of myth, care, and transformation.

Living Matter opens this Friday night, ahead of the Hidden Notes Festival in Stroud, Gloucestershire, on 20-21 September. This is your early chance to experience the installation before the Festival kicks off. We would love to see you there.

Friday night = bar + deep listening x 2 at 7.30pm and 8.15pm.
Saturday morning = coffee, croissants + soundscapes x 3 at 11.00am, 11:40am, 12:20pm.

The installation is free for Hidden Notes ticket holders. Pay What You Feel on the door for everyone else (no booking, limited spaces!)

We have created listening posts to guide a walk up to the installation to Rattle and Brash. Follow our map which leads you to the site. Ideal if you can bring headphones for the full experience!

To close this post, I’d like to offer a poem from the series that was the original tiny seed for this installation, ‘What the Watercourse Carries’.

Thanks for reading x Juliette x

Gathering water from Slad Brook with gratitude, honouring Slad Valley for all that it gives, our home place for Living Matter.

Charles Wade was an English architect, artist-craftsman and poet of mixed-race descent who bought Snowshill Manor, a Cotswold house, in 1919. He donated the house, gardens and their contents to the National Trust thirty-two years later in 1951. His grandmother, Mary Jones, was a free black woman who married Solomon Abraham Wade, a dry goods merchant who received compensation from abolition and purchased the first of several plantations in St. Kitts in 1850, after which the family moved to Kent, England. Solomon gifted Wade’s father the money to buy further sugar estates in St. Kitts in 1879, a business which Wade went on to inherit in 1911, making him independently wealthy.

Wade qualified as an architect but was called up and served as a sapper in the first world war. Combat engineers, sappers constructed trenches and fortifications, cleared mines, dug tunnels and built roads. As a way of escaping the atrocities of the Western Front, Wade turned to painting and drawing. A talented artist and illustrator in his own right, he was said to paint imaginary gardens and restore whole landscapes and buildings again in his mind after they’d been ruined by war.

About 3.3 million soldiers died on the Western Front, site of some of the most brutal and costly battles of World War I, including the battles of the Somme, Verdun and Passchendaele. The very architecture of war alone - the trenches – were in part responsible for around a third of soldier deaths. Witnessing the horror and destruction of the battlefields was an experience which must have profoundly shaped Wade’s character. Records show that he saw an advert for the dilapidated manor house at Snowshill in a copy of Country Life when he was in the trenches. The house has the feeling of someone who’s seen devastation and, as a consequence, has chosen a very different way of being in the world.

~

We visit in August during the drought when the fields are scorched and bleached to their very bones. I have come with my daughters, trying to find things to fill the time in the holidays before an actual holiday, something to fit in between juggling freelance work and childcare. They are tweens now, poised between childhood and a fuller teenage independence – they’ve outgrown holiday clubs and, though I *love* spending time with them, it’s getting harder and harder to find things for them to do that they enjoy and I have this lurching feeling that we’re mindlessly killing time. Dragging out the days with activities that are just something-to-do, instead of seizing the days and yielding to the utterly unreasonable online pressure to make memories.

Whoever said that the years are short, the days are long was not wrong.

We have a picnic on a bench in the orchard, a hastily put together lunch of cheap crisps, cereal bars and bits picked up on route. My youngest gasps, half-joking, half not,

‘Sushi! We must be rich!’

I feel guilty about the tiny plastic fish that’s filled with soy sauce and think about it going into landfill or, worse, ending up in the sea like some ghost double of an irl sardine. Such waste. We watch the sheep grazing in the field beyond the orchard and the red kite circling overhead, its chestnut body glinting with every direct turn towards the sun. After we’ve eaten, dusky purple clusters of plums lure me to the tree by the fence. I touch them to see if the skins give with ripeness, but the kids have already plucked one each and are making hmmmn sounds about their deliciousness. I bite into the one that’s offered to me. It’s sharply and retchingly sour and astringent, a drying kind of bitterness on my tongue. A damson. The kids both bend double with laughter.

~

A kleptomaniac who spent his days prancing about the Manor in costumes and playing with objects he'd bought in English house clearances and auctions, Charles Wade seems to me to have been gloriously and wildly eccentric. Yes, the acquisition of private property and the accumulation of wealth through nefarious means has enabled this eccentricity, but there’s something interesting going on here. The volunteer on the door tells us proudly that there are no labels to explain the contents of the house. It’s up to us to interpret it how we like, which is just as well, because the volunteer in the first room can’t remember anything she wants to tell us about the collection and keeps scratching her forehead and sighing.

There are a few costumes on display from the collection – a jester’s cape, a beefeater outfit, a dress made of the first cooperplate printed fabric that signalled the start of fast fashion. Cabinets of curiosity are stuffed with trinkets – a test tube of emerald beetles, another of iridescent moths, carved ivory puzzle balls, a fan, a collection of hat pins, a tin chicken on wheels, a laughing buddha, a glass tiger. The kids pull me on by the wrist to look at this, look at that! On the top floor there is an entire room full of bicycles and carts. Penny farthings hang from the ceiling. There are boneshakers and all manner of lethal-looking contraptions and a volunteer leaning forward to tell us about them as we pass briskly by. There is a glass case full of dolls whose eyes follow us around, half a carriage attached to a wall, rooms full of samurai armour (26 sets in all), musical instruments, swords, clocks. It soon becomes bewildering.

‘Over consumption,’ declares my youngest.

On the wall above the long pendulum of a clock, ‘THE LIFE OF TIME IS MOTION’ is inscribed on a beam. Charles bought his first acquisitions with his pocket money as a child – among them, three small bone-carved shrines of St Michael.

St Michael, patron saint of soldiers, defender of truth and justice.

Opponent of evil.

~

On the way to Snowshill we stopped at dad’s gravestone and pushed back the weeds, found a trowel we recognised and must have left there when we last came. The girls asked me if they ever knew dad. No, I said, he ran out of time. But he would have loved them very much. We cleared the weeds away from the granite, rubbed the dirt out from the lettering and left a small bunch of scabious and sow thistle on the stone.

~

Wade’s collection tells of a life of smoke and mirrors. A dramatized life of fantasy and play, the pursuit of every interest. But what was behind it? ‘Let nothing perish’ was the motto Wade chose for his own coat of arms. A gesture of expansive generosity perhaps, but it’s hard not to wonder what ghosts haunted him, what it was that motivated him to gather so much stuff.

The place feels and smells like it needs a good clean; it has the air of an oily wooden spoon languishing in a deep drawer that hasn’t been washed for years. Wade’s own quarters were not in the house but in a small cottage in the manor garden, consisting of a bedroom and a bathroom which he’d fitted out with a flush toilet and hot running water.

The kids squawk at the desiccated woodlice piled up in the plughole of the bathroom sink. A thick blanket of dust drapes over the furniture, the objects, the beams in the ceiling. Outside the pond is covered in algae – the kids comment on that too, ‘like bro, you could at least give that a clean.’

I notice the gardens, by contrast, are cared for, the colours of the high summer dahlias and gladioli orchestrated in deep purples and pinks, petunias and verbena tumble from pots that flank the stone steps. The gardener must have been in just this morning, leaving little fresh clippings of grass in the gap between path and lawn. I decide that it’s these very imperfections that make Snowshill such a fascinating place. The messiness of it. The celebration of fun and humour, the open-door policy of friendliness, the realism of its chaos somehow seems gently pitched against austerity, against doom, against sober order and moronic convention. A glimpse of a spirit that might hold something we need to know now.

~

The last time we visited Snowshill was with my mother-in-law. We wanted to take her on a day out that would be accessible but out of the ordinary. I think we got her a mobility scooter from the National Trust reception and cruised the smooth tarmac paths down from the carpark to the manor. Prompted by the birth of our first born daughter and some gentle encouragement, my partner had reconnected with his mum after years out of touch. None of us knew that she was dying at the time and would have only a few months left to live, but we were aware of making the most of our time together - of making up for lost time. It would be the last visit she ever made to our home.

We were a little awkward, finding conversation difficult and stilted at times, not the free and easy talk we had hoped for. But there was a sense we were prepared to accept that getting to know each other would take time. The kids were tiny; there were years ahead. Reason enough to make the effort.

I think about that reservedness, this stiff inaccessibility as I weave again through the dark corridors and garden rooms of Snowshill – passed off as politeness, it seems to be at the heart of so many family dynamics and so many social interactions too.

What are we all so scared of?

I wonder if Wade recognised and understood this awkwardness, saw it as a kind of failure of the human spirit, a waste of time indeed. There are black and white photographs dotted around of Wade and his house guests posed in fancy dress. Word of his collection spread among writers and artists in the early twentieth century, and he welcomed several famous figures to Snowshill, including J B Priestley, Graham Greene and Virginia Woolf. The photos picture scenes of easygoing, frivolous pleasure. He seemed to be able to bypass discomfort by using costume and theatre to orchestrate events. Was that a further denial of reality, a masking - or, by using disguise, did he offer an invitation to his guests to be even more themselves?

Frivolity is defined as ‘lack of seriousness'; silly, funny’ … but Wade shows us that this world of play can be subversive, a radical reimagining of how we spend the time of our lives, a reframing of imaginative plenty as a kind of pleasure that’s an antidote to the apocalypse.

I come away from Snowshill feeling something different about life, about the ways frivolity has been dismissed – most likely because it’s ‘unproductive’ – (yawn) and the ways in which abundance (of creativity, connection, generosity, play) can be not only the reality of our daily lives but the guiding principle.

We take the path down from the flower gardens to the vegetable patch where purple beans are growing in trellises. There are courgettes, rainbow chard, pears and apples. The kids see a tree laden with mirabelle plums at a turn in the path, whole branches sagging with untouched fruit.

They jump up to grab the plums, reaching for the red ones, the sweetest fruits, letting the juice run down their chins and arms, giggling and running on when new visitors appear on the path behind us.

Below, I’m sharing ‘Fire in the Grain,’ a poem for Lughnasadh which came out earlier this year in the US journal Stone Circle Review. I’m also sharing two poems just out in the publisher Nine Arches’ magazine Under the Radar . The first is part of what I realise is now a series of poems going in to my next collection about the forgotten women of west country history, the so-called Queen of Birdlip; the second is about a blackbird’s egg - from my residency at Sladebank Woods. I hope you enjoy.

Fire in the Grain

The walls are playing
with light, just before
twilight, colour of ripe
wheat at Lughnasadh,
the space between
shadows, dog alert
for the fox on the road.

In this time of lean
harvest, just for
a moment, the quiet
song of us beats
in the wisteria,
lambent leaves
on the ceiling.

The gladioli are the reddest
they’ve been all day,
vulvas lit by descending
sun, you, the grip
of my thighs
a vase, calling in
the dusk.

Rearview 

The amber was already ancient by the time 
you were born, resin oozed to salve a cut 
in the bark of a tree, already extinct. 

And the mirror, discovered in the boat 
of a quarry, wreckage of a life 
unknown — your grave goods the only wake.

The websites all say the same (verbatim): 
a mirror ‘highly polished for reflections.’ 
Bronze incised with swirling trails,

orbits of cross-hatched moons and suns, 
godlets of fungi, fans. A code we do not know.
And is it such a bird’s leap —

how we want to see ourselves in you,  
in the bowls, the beads, the rings, the mirror. 
Native, defiant — healer, Boudicca?

To circle back round to ourselves
and a thing that could be true, cut 
away from our living shame. 

But the rear view is all conjecture, 
only as clear as the amber 
strung round your neck.

The resin that heals 
the wounds of a forest.	
 

Blackbird 

I stumbled into the woods, 
    past the rotting fly-tipped 
        shed, took the dark path 

of bark fragment, twig, 
    leaf casement, ground simmering 
        with bluebottles on scat. 

Cleavers and drizzle were dragging 
    me earthbound 
        when I saw the eggshell —

blue-green and speckled, 
    sticky-soft and ragged-edged, 
        a glossy ovoid 

shouldered from its cup 
    of grass and mud. 
        The shell was veined inside, 

sinewed ancient map 
    of cells divided. Embryo, hatchling,
        tumbling generation of genes 

poured onto the path — 
    this gift from the solar system, 
        this cluster of atoms 

on the brink of another spin 
    round the rock cycle. 
        Ordinary as day.

Like that, the woods 
    imagine the future, 
        setting green fruits 

or the pink edge 
    on sycamore keys after rain. 
        Earth releases its gifts

and the stormcock 
    sings the trees 
        back to themselves.

Sun high again, 
    making skylights 
        of beech.

And the answer 
    they return is nothing
        more or less than

abundant life, 
    a flicker 
        of wing to my bones.

If you have read this far, thank you. You may have seen my previous post, Tenderfoot, about looking for an agent for my book about pilgrimage just as The Salt Path scandal broke. Well, against all expectation, I am really pleased (and slightly disbelieving?) to have been signed by Matt Turner at Rogers, Coleridge and White. Level 1 of working towards nonfiction publication complete :)

With love x Juliette x