An Alternative Writing Retreat
Maps aren’t boring. Or, at least, they’re not boring enough for some people. The Royal Society for the Presevation of Boring Grid Squares is the largest organisation of individuals who dream of more boring maps, more blank grid squares, and a more featureless, relaxing world…
Take a ruler. Take a map of Wales. Draw a straight line from border to coast… then pack a bag and walk it. To anyone familiar with the brambly, moist, sometimes-rocky terrain of the Welsh countryside this might seem like an insane idea…
Picking up a copy of this single-sheet newsletter from a plastic folder sellotaped to a lamppost, in this tense atmosphere, felt like a risk. It was touch. It was connection, of a sort. But it was a risk we took, and it paid off well. As hyperlocal micropublications produced during a global pandemic go, The Usher is in a class of its own…
SJ Bradley participated in the Alton Towers Residency in April 2019. We spoke to her about the theme park, the Northern Short Story Festival, and writing both short things and long.
A Google search for “Voldemort’s grave” will return more than 100,000 results, most of them pointing to Greyfriars Kirkyard – a modest graveyard in the middle of Edinburgh, best known as the final resting place of Greyfriars Bobby…
And then you realise that everyone around you – a crowd of thousands, all along the quays – are almost completely silent. There’s no wind, no rain, no massive heat from the fire, nothing, like everything else on earth has stopped…
Journalist Mackenzie Weinger travels in the footsteps of Thomas Hardy, through the partly real, partly dream-country that inspired his fiction…
Gaynor Jones participated in the Alton Towers Residency in April 2019. We spoke to her about making the complex simple, Alton Towers memories, and how fear becomes creativity.
Claire Fuller participated in the Alton Towers Residency in April 2019. We spoke to her about abandoned structures, sculpting, and how her writing career began…
Julia Deakin participated in the Alton Towers Residency in April 2019. We spoke to her about landscapes, writing poetry, and her connections to Alton Towers…