It’s hard to know where to look.

It’s been so long since I wrote a post. So much of what is going on in the world is dumbfounding.

The main project I am working on at the moment is a collaborative graphic novel. Still under wraps, it is all about what happens when one group of people dehumanise another group. And the re-humanising potential of art, no matter how dire the circumstances.

Painting, poetry: I’ve been relying on them for decades to help get me through unavoidable reality onslaughts from within or without.

Here’s Anja Bihlmaier conducting the London Philharmonic Orchestra, playing Beethoven’s 7th at the Festival Hall in January. Thanks to Andy for taking me to listen to this.

The graphic novel is heavy, though shot through with odd shafts of light. Alongside this – to my great surprise, I have taken up watercolour.

Bellagio – a picturesque and touristy town by Lake Como, painted from the hillside opposite at Griante.

Painting from life – or direct observation, was something I was trying to learn all through my youth and into my early twenties. I wanted to stare and wonder and get down what I saw as honestly as possible.

Then at art school in the 80s it felt incredibly retrograde and uncool to be assembling still lives, and trying to find and mix the exact colour in my palette to match the shadow on the far side of a jug. It wasn’t seen as an acceptable end in itself, more like practicing scales.

Recent watercolour of my kitchen shelves

Why wasn’t I using video? Finding a way to express my indignation at the sudden appearance of homelessness in my own city? Making work about the miners’ strike? I mean – fair point. So I began to use ink, to document my own and my peers’ daily life as young people in London, trying to make relationships and a living. We still had our small grants, no tuition fees, and were able to sign on and subsist in college holidays, even as Thatcher was dismantling the benefit system (and almost everything else that had been set up for the common good.)

In my art school days – thanks for the pic Rebecca Fortnum ! (I’m proud to say that so many of my peers from those days are wonderful artists now.)

I branched out from ‘straight’ observation to a combination of ways of responding – to the city, it’s voices and the stories I found. Eventually I suppose this led me to all the ways I still work. Writing and drawing the days and the places where words and image meet.

A recent collage zine made from a discarded drawing

In September 2023, I was the lucky recipient of a second Hawthornden Foundation writers’ fellowship, this time in Italy, at the magnificent Casa Ecco, beside Lake Como.

Casa Ecco, is it a dream? (colour me sauce Marie Rose)

And maybe at a writers’ fellowship – where language really is the currency – it was my contrariness that took me straight towards paint again. Well it was partly that, and partly another resolve.

I was to stay there for six weeks of concentrated writing time, with a small group of international writers who also had projects to be getting on with.

L to R: Samira Negrouche (Algeria) Jennifer Grotz (USA) Anuradha Roy (India) Ellyn Toscano (the director of the Hawthornden Fountation), me – and Kimberley Blaeser (USA). That’s a portrait of our benefactor, Drue Heinz, & Ecco her dog, on the wall behind Samira. The decor is from a bygone era, but believe me we all got used to that fabulous wallpaper at aperitivo time.

I was blown away by the landscape, the house and the support such an opportunity offered me. I could devote most of every day to the dark and complicated project in progress.

This Posy Simmonds drawing sums up some of the paradox of my time in Italy- this is from her 2003 book: Literary Life

It was looking around Villa Carlotta one afternoon, a nearby grand mansion open to the public, that I saw something else that inspired me. Some sepia studies of the locality made by anonymous visitors in the nineteenth century – whilst on the grand tour. These tiny ink drawings had an everyday charm – nothing of ‘being an artist’ – just the act of looking. And making a modest record of beauty courted and encountered.

Smart arses of the world – at Villa Carlotta

The cafe at Villa Carlotta

I began painting every day – as counterpoint to war – both as it haunts my book project, and as it unfolds it’s current horror onto the passing days. Painting became imperative. I chose to concentrate on what I could see in front of me.

I bought a bottle of sepia ink for time travel, a nod to tourist predecessors & perhaps a way to be in a timeless or at least – slower – landscape.

As I saw and heard news from Israel and Gaza I had a burning sense of fury, helplessness and despair. I am, as poet Charles Bernstein put it, ‘a Jewish man trapped in the body of a Jewish man’ and although I wasn’t raised speaking about Jewish history, I have done enough work on related projects, including the ongoing one, to know exactly where these spirals of hatred and violence end up. Anything anyone says next to the daily reality of seeing families destroyed, ordinary life made impossible, children slain – becomes: like grief, unsayable. The rise of both the far right and the water levels makes it hard to imagine a peaceful future, (yet we must.)

The London Philharmonic Orchestra play Dvorak. The collaboration of all the players creates the opposite of war.

French horn players of the London Philharmonic Orchestra

A real help then, that fellow Casa Ecco guest, novelist Anuradha Roy, turned out to enjoy painting too. We both raided the stationery shop in Bellagio, and most afternoons, together or separately – we’d make a small painting or drawing of something or somewhere we could actually look at.

Lake Como, from Breglia

This added the bonus of comradeship to the bounteous sop already offered by the mysterious colours and shifting light on water, on mountains.

Anuradha Roy, with a little portrait I made of her over lunch in Varenna – one of our ferry fun afternoon adventures.

We both found our watercolours improving the more we looked and copied the life in front of us. I posted some of my paintings on Instagram, and the response was encouraging. A couple of nice insta pals expressed hopes that I’d carry on painting even when I got back home.

Trying to keep going once home, portrait of a sofa we found outside & my printer. Turns out I like painting cushions almost as much as sitting on them. Not so much natural light though!

I was back in London for November – and the big catch up: family, teaching, friends and other projects that had been jumping up and down stamping holes in my diary. I found that watercolouring around the edges of my days was still possible, if I got up early or was prepared for the painting to be very rough – just a small attempt to be present to what is there, in my own field of vision.

Eg. – A cedar in Toddington, before a long workshop leading day at the Mulberry Bush Archives making books with an inspiring group from On the Record

Here’s the view from Deborah Alma’s top window at The Poetry Pharmacy – where I went to help launch her latest book, Poetry Projects (for which I papercut – cover, and in which I have an essay that details elements of my path only touched on here.)

View of the Shropshire Hills from a window in Bishops Castle

Slightly acid note: When I take my watercolour set to events or round to friends, it is so tempting to give the paintings away. It’s the hard to vanquish people-pleaser in me. But I can’t afford to give work away, it’s still my work, even if this part of it seems rather like a hobby. If someone offers to buy it however, even splitting the money with a donation to Women Wage Peace or Women of the Sun or Save the Children, I will likely be both pleased and amenable.

Sometimes I make an exception. This young woman was delayed for 5 hours at Milan airport, as was I, and needed to get back urgently to take care of a loved one. Giving her the painting I made of her seemed like the right thing to do.

Delays at Milan airport on the way home

I have a lot of watercolours piling up now, and it would be great to show and sell them in a gallery one day. Another stuffy dream from my art school years was having a dealer and selling my paintings! Imagine! It just seems so old fashioned, like painting from life, fossil fuels and war.

Sheltering from the rain in Griante Cemetery.

If you are a gallerist and have an interest in this or any of my other work, do get in touch. Meanwhile, thanks to all who read my blog, and thanks to all who contribute to sustaining life in its complicated glory, in whatever way is possible with imaginative work: especially in caring or creative practice. We really need it.

A budding magnolia at dusk in the walled garden in my lovely local Brockwell Park, spring coming.

Under the Big Tree

Some time ago, I was approached by innovative Leeds university linguistics professor, Dr Maggie Kubanyiova, to join in conversations she was curating with an international team of academics, artists and many others – called ETHER .

Three of my ink and gouache drawings on the ground at the University of Leeds, photo by Mark Epstein

Maggie got in touch initially, because she’d come across my 2017 collection Velkom to Inklandt, and used it as a resource with her linguistics students, as a way for them to encounter and enjoy the Chelinchiss of foreigness and incomprehension in their own work around Lenkvitch.

When I was invited to be part of the ETHER provocations seminars around ‘encountering the other’, which began online during the pandemic, I submitted a video about my live story collecting and drawing. I was part of several day long events in which different practitioners – musicians, researchers, theatre makers etc, shared ideas on making work that really connects people.

ETHER is a form of activism that questions hierarchical learning, art and engagement, and makes us all equal in the process of listening and being listened to. The ideas are cooperative, and perhaps aim to help with a more epic task of empathy beyond identity.

This playful publication is the result of a multi faceted collaboration – initiated by Dr Maggie Kubanyiova of the University of Leeds.

Maggie wrote to me again, about a research project of her own, conducted by her in her native Slovakia, around how language is wielded in a small but fairly typical village in which two communities co exist, bisected by a river. The main settlement is mainstream Slovak, and across the river live a community of Roma people.

One of my ink drawings created as metaphor for two communities divided by a river

Discrimination is endemic, the Romani language is suppressed, the schools are in the Slovak part of the town and only Slovak is used or taught on the curriculum.

The researcher is here, from England!

Maggie’s fieldwork involved listening to the children and adults in the main primary school and looking at the expectations and trajectories around the education system there. She approached me with the material she’d collected, to see if by using paint and poetry in response to her fieldwork and findings, a change in methodology could arise, in which there could be connection and fun, rather than another layer of othering. Could paint and poetry make one ‘us’ out of the people we find ourselves to be, either side of a river?

My poem River, translation into Romani by Anna Koptová

The village itself, out in the middle of rural central Europe, is surrounded by abundant nature: forest, mountain, meadow. Naturally, none of the surrounding landscape is bothered about the identity of the citizens swinging about or splashing in the water. One of the poems I wrote is a kind of duet for these two communities – I also wrote in the voice of the river, and the mainly locked and swish – school library.

The poem Duet, on the left in English, on the right in Romani, translation by Anna Koptová.

After a few very interesting sessions, listening, talking and wondering with Maggie – and taking on the playful stories and chatter of the children in the recordings, I wrote some poems and painted and drew and shared my various responses.

School, a poem I wrote based on the language wielded by the group of children in the study, translation into Romani by Anna Koptová

A painting featuring elements of the children’s chatter: including St Nikolas, the devil, biscuits and ‘the big tree’.

Maggie then worked with a distinguished Romani scholar and translator, Anna Koptová to translate my poems into Romani and create a format for them that the children of the village could enjoy and play games with.

An enterprising artist-designer who makes books with communities, Sarah-Jane Mason, has devised a playful book and set of cards in English and Romani – and these will be used by educators, community groups and children in Slovakia – and perhaps elsewhere, giving some extra pride to those learners who grow up in, or want to learn, the Romani language.

A book and educational resource, designed by Sarah-Jane Mason and published by Next Generation Publications

The irony of an inaccessible school library

One of my delights in this project was guessing that the exceptionally helpful man in a phone shop advising me and my learning disabled son was Roma. If it wasn’t for this project I would never have asked him. I wrote a prose poem based on this story, here it is – and in the lower photo, as it appears in the publication.

A double sided card from the publication: Under the Big Tree – Šuńiben Kamibnaha

I was honoured to present this work at a talk with Maggie in Leeds in the summer, and think further with a diverse and passionate audience about the many ways in which language can be – and is – used as a tool both of connection and hostility. This work is as powerful and relevant as any in pursuit of peace – and finding a path towards dialogue and communality without giving up on the many joys to be found in difference.

Dr Maggie Kubanyiova and myself at the presentation of our collaboration based on her research, University of Leeds, 2023, photo by Mark Epstein.

Here is a link to the online version of Under the Big Tree – thank you for reading.

Petrolhead Pies & the Pienancial Pimes.

I used to say – whatever the question, the answer is poetry, but I realise that sometimes that’s just not true. Sometimes the answer is pie. An email out of the blue from a friend I’ve rarely seen (busy lives!) since we were at Chelsea School of Art some time last century, landed in my inbox recently. It made me smile. Would I, she wondered, be up for making a pie with a cut out pastry picture on it of a restaurant waiter bringing a giant bill?

She’d seen the pies I used to make every Sunday evening for my petrolhead learning disabled son, which I’d usually post on Instagram.

Fiat pie with racing flags & leaves

The deal with those pies was that he would choose a car logo & I would cut it out of pastry & lay it on the lid, alongside any extra decor of my own choosing. A Sunday night pie made going to school the next morning a bit more possible, because there was always enough leftover for that daunting transition: a nice custard laced breakfast to move him from weekend to week.

MG pie with portraits of our pets: Yeti (named after a Skoda yeti) Zippy (after a zip van) the cats & Morris (Minor) the dog

The pie that my old pal from art school, Hilary Kirby, was after, was to be for the front of the Financial Times, Life and Arts section, for which she is picture editor. It was to illustrate an article about the spiralling costs of eating out. The pie-ce was by Tim Hayward – food writer and restaurateur.

Monday morning MG pie with custard

Luckily I have a wonderful rolling pin. Made for me by Conrad, the aforementioned son. He has taken great pride in making one for me and one for his sister in his green woodwork class at Ruskin Mill College.

Stage 1 pie drawing – but the readers of the FT are not ANIMALS. Though I do wish my cat would bring me coffee.

I had a couple of days to answer the FT brief. I drew some roughs & did some try outs in sugar paper & then shop bought puff pastry. Hilary gently steered me away from animal characters & other spiky haired characters. She has great vision and diplomacy as an art director. Poetic too, she asked me to make the female diner’s hair more ‘opulent’. Then she came round, as did her colleague, photographer Rick Pushinsky, also a painting graduate as it turned out, to my kitchen on the following Wednesday morning. Us three spent all morning lavishing painterly attention on the pie. We channelled Chardin, it’s not easy to find the timeless silence of a good still life. As soon as Rick had nailed it (blue background, looming shadow of a spoon) we divvied up the pie (apple and apricot, basic recipe below) and fell upon it gnashing like hungry art students, dousing our portions with double cream.

Pie shoot: Rick & Hilary in my kitchen getting the shadows right.

Cutting paper is so different from cutting pastry. Besides – where was the waiter?

Oh dear, quite a bad rough in factory puff. And anyway I burnt it.

I am grateful that my mother was a good cook. Did you grow up making pastry? For me and my sister making jam tarts was a regular childhood diversion. Rubbing the fat into the flour till it made crumbs had a special word. Mum called it ‘frickling’. When my daughter Rosa was two, I directed her and her friend Toby in a Teletubbies film called Apple Pie. They were so pleased that Lala’s tummy was the one it appeared in. Twice! I loved the argument between the toddlers about the frickling process: (Rosa: “feels like a sandpit”. Toby: “feels like BUTTER!” This may not have made it to the final edit, links below. Credit to Toby’s dad Mickey Whelan, who was a wreck by the end of that all day shoot!

Full episode here:

https://youtu.be/r7ZGKMMAdS0

Or, cut straight to the pie!

https://youtu.be/ZcMto0KqSwQ

Some years later, (friendship lasts longer than pastry,) Toby joined forces with Rosa this spring on her trip taking Conrad on a dream trip to Italy: pasta, ice cream, the Lamborghini factory!

Here’s a recipe – adapt it as as you like. The pie in the article was savoury, but I like a plain sugarless shortcrust anyway – works for any type of pie. If you have a nice rolling pin and a small sharp knife for cutting out the decorations – it feels like a veritable sandpit of fun. Quite cheap too!

Local flour – rolling pin made by Conrad in his green woodwork class.

Recipe: Twice as much flour to fat. Eg 400g flour & 200g butter. I like to use at least 50% fine wholemeal, especially if it’s been ground at my local windmill on Brixton Hill. (Sometimes I put ground almonds in the dough, sometimes a tablespoon of icing sugar, and if it’s for a tart I might add lemon zest.) Frickle the fat into the flour with cold & dainty fingers. Bind it as briefly as poss into a ball with a confident dash of cold water, or if it’s for a tart, a beaten egg or part of one. I wrap the dough in grease proof paper & leave it to rest on the side while I assemble the filling. Often for Conrad’s pies – cooking apples are the favourite. But rhubarb is good at this time of year, or a mix of fruits. (Peel &) chop the fruit into bite size chunks. I add half a jar of good apricot jam & a slug of brandy or calvados. I also mix in about a teacup of sugar & a hefty shake of cinnamon. Or if it’s rhubarb I might mix in some honey and orange zest. Pile the fruit into a pie dish, roll out the pastry, loop it over the rolling pin and back over the dish, crimp the edges, or add a trim round the edges first & crimp into that with the tines of a fork. Cut out whatever shapes are required from the surplus pastry & arrange them on the surface. If you have some beaten egg you can use it as glue. Then egg wash the whole scene, as varnish. Prick some holes in the top with your fork to let the steam escape. Strew more sugar over if you like. Bake in a preheated moderate to hot oven for about half an hour/40 mins. Serve with cream or custard.

Do read the article here & enjoy the online pie pic https://www.ft.com/content/2c03d947-52e9-441f-b5d4-4c4aace3faac

With thanks to all concerned & to you, dear eater, for reading.

Voices of the Holocaust

A recent commission took me back into this dark history of the twentieth century, through the voices of some of its witnesses and survivors.

I was asked by the British Library to make 16 new web banners for heading the newly organised archive recordings and transcripts online, according to various themes. As I am an analogue creature and do not use a computer to generate my work, I cut out the proportions of the banners and stuck them on my studio wall next to the transcripts so that I could begin to assemble images that would offer ways in to each ‘chapter’.

Working on 16 web banner collages as a cohesive block – taped to the studio wall in the order of appearance (on the web.)

I was also asked to write a guest blog post about my approach to this work. Here it is – and a link to the whole incredible online resource as well. You can click on this link, or just read a slightly augmented version of it that I have pasted below – with a couple of bonus images and thoughts.

https://blogs.bl.uk/sound-and-vision/2023/03/from-vocal-to-visual-with-family-scraps-.html

Thanks to Miranda Schiller, Charmaine Wong, Chandan Mahal and the rest of the team at the British Library, who are making such sensitive connections between the material held there, generators of that material and audiences now and to come. This resource is rich, complicated and inspiring, a great help in the unlocking of history in accessible, personal dimensions.

Studio wall with work in progress

Artist Sophie Herxheimer, creator of the artwork for the British Library’s new Voices of the Holocaust website, reflects on her approach to contextualising and representing the voices of Holocaust survivors.

This collection of interviews with Holocaust survivors encompasses many themes as well as war, suffering, imprisonment, exile and loss. There are also things that made me laugh, many surprises, sharply conjured memories and images – and a lot of detailed insight about Britain, and its relationships with refugees and European politics, much of which still resonates today.

We discussed how we could better reflect the dignity, courage and long term contributions of the people in these interviews, their often long and settled lives in the UK – their legacy as parents, workers, friends and neighbours, whose identities were not ossified in victim mode. We thought of the liveliness of these extraordinary testimonies which help to shed light on who we all are, and what really happened, as well as the contribution these immigrants made to post war British culture.

The commissioning team at the British Library approached me about the idea of creating a different way in to this dark chapter of history: something to replace the grainy photographs of hollow-eyed victims of atrocity that so often accompany this type of material. 

Banner for the theme ‘Kindertransport’

My father, aunt and grandparents arrived in London in November 1938 from Berlin, saved by an inventive job offer for my doctor grandfather, from the hastily set up Council for Academic Refugees (it’s still going!). The family spoke German at home in North London, but never spoke of Germany or the war years. Nor was our Jewishness referred to, we were head-down, assimilated, secular Londoners; on my mum’s side too, though her forebears were from a much earlier wave of immigrants from Russia. 

My first step towards realising the commission was to listen. The next steadying thought I had was to devise a palette that would immediately suggest an atmosphere, and use colour to loosen any oppressive sense of worthiness, horror or ‘explanation’.

I mixed gouaches based on the furnishings that I remembered from my paternal grandparents’ house. It had a strong middle European accent, with its whiskery upholstery, heavy wooden furniture and fern green window frames. Coffee was a colour too, so was herring, paprika and beer. I painted paper in these shades and went through my collage scrap bags for period ephemera. (I hoard scraps, like any self-respecting child of a refugee.) I found pages from 1930s journals, family letters and postcards that I have in a beribboned bundle, some books written in German Gothic script that I’ve picked up on scourings of charity shops and cupboards.

I began to compile and cut out images for each themed banner, by careful listening to the voices and their stories, both for particular images from the recordings, e.g. ‘my dad was still shaving’ or ‘an enormous troop ship’ and ‘the smell was disgusting, of rotting beetroot’ – and also for vocal tone and texture, e.g. hesitation, indignation, mirth, age, accent – these were all keys to the sensations I wanted to convey, texture is an essential tool when making work to be seen online.

I like to fight the flatness of the screen with chunky textural heft, it’s another enlivening way to disrupt the surface and get beneath it. I composed the banners with reference to a mid-century graphic aesthetic – a lot of which was pioneered in the Bauhaus, during Germany’s short-lived, but eternally influential, Weimar period.

I found this postcard from Tante Paula – my dad’s ‘favourite aunt’ in Vienna – she was one of the millions who perished. I recount part of her legacy via a cardigan she knitted in my poem ‘Vosch by Hendt, Lern by Hart’ in my book Velkom to Inklandt (Short Books, 2017) there’s a link to a pdf of this poem at the bottom of this post.

Using photocopied strips cut from family correspondence, with its fluent handwriting in varied scripts and gestures, as well as the soft ephemerality of its faded paper, added immediate authenticity, as well as offering structure to my collages – I used the writing to make shapes: stripes, rays, squares, buildings… I could cut figures from different pieces of found material, e.g. a ‘situations wanted’ page of The Times, 1939: “Educated Viennese Jewess seeks domestic work…” or a page from a child’s comic my father had grown up reading, which was seamless Nazi propaganda written into sentimental stories about ‘sacrifice’ and ‘the fatherland’. I also used scraps of printed wrapping papers if they seemed evocative, or had adjacent colours, or suggested period through pattern.

I hope by making these collages from largely discarded materials, to also echo in a small way the resourcefulness and practicality of the people in the recordings, who had to use whatever they could find, including imagination, to emerge from the horrors of war and persecution.

Wishing all readers of my blog good rummagings – in scrap collections, web resources, family histories – and in making new knitwear from old – whatever form it takes. Below is the poem I wrote about the immortal cardigan knitted by Tante Paula, (whose name is different in the poem,) and its ever innocent wearers!

Vosch by Hendt, Lern by Hart! 3.pdfDownload

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Notamerica, and Other Epic Lands.

I’d been looking forward to a recap and recce back in Berkeley for some weeks in February and March. Peleh Residency manager and fellow writer Dan Schifrin and I had been talking about a possible book collaboration over the years since I left mid pandemic in 2020. Sadly the visit has proved impossible – so I am still in Inklandt. It is challenging to progress this book idea at a distance – but a lot of what we are addressing in the book is challenging, so this not-visit may end up being useful material.

Old Europe walks around California thinking of her Cactus Family.
Sophie Herxheimer, gouache, 2020

When it comes to Esthers I have done okay with the queenly variety, as a new deck of playing cards by four women artists including me, that tell her story, is now available from publishers Print-o-Craft in Philadelphia.

A heap of story, you can shuffle the narrative in any way you wish at Purim. Featuring playing cards from the new ‘Deck of Esther’- art by Mirta Kupferminc, Tilla Crowne, Jacqueline Nicholls – and me.

Esther is one of the only putative female writers of the bible – and her book famously doesn’t mention god. It’s mostly about power, sex, and parties, with quite a lot of slaughter thrown in. The festival of Purim which commemorates her story, is all about chance and reversals of fortune. It’s the season, beginning now, where the commandment is to get drunk and party till you don’t know good from bad, or right from wrong.

10 of hearts – Mordechai overhears a plot against the king.
Sophie Herxheimer, papercut, 2021

This project was initiated by artist Jacqueline Nicholls in conversation with Shaul Bassi of Beit Venezia – it was originally going to involve us all traveling to Venice to work together on setting the story in that city: HQ of dressing up and casinos.

Queen Esther, before she reveals her identity, Sophie Herxheimer, papercut, 2021

But covid struck – so as in the opening story – we convened online. We inhabited a virtual Venice and began thinking about the story and how to picture it afresh. Making a deck of cards seemed a great match for the content, tied as cards are, to gambling and chance.

David Zvi Kalman – publisher at Print-O-Craft has done a great job with the box, I love the seal printed with a tiny chariot motif from the ancient Persian Empire… there is also a book available. In which the text of the book of Esther is actually written – and in the right order. With new accompanying texts from Shaul Bassi and Marc Michael Epstein.

We each had our own suit, I was allocated hearts – which represents the first section of the story, where we first meet the characters. Over zoom we made close readings of the text, sometimes joined by invited scholars, who shed new light on aspects of Venice or the text/context. Our uniting constraint was to make the artwork A4 portrait format and limit our palette to black and red. Like all my experiences of working with Jacqueline, there was a lot of learning and a lot of fun.

Haman is the knave. He wears a tricorn hat resembling his eponymous seasonal pastry.
Sophie Herxheimer, papercut, 2021

Mirta Kupferminc painted the clubs, Tilla Crowne was on diamonds – and Jacqueline dealt herself the spades. We launched the deck at JW3 where you can see the exhibition of giant cards in the foyer and shuffle over and purchase your own deck. Happy Purim – here’s my brand new poem to help celebrate the festival.

pastrybabyDownload

May you wash it down with pastries & whatever hard liquor you favour. Tea I recommend.

If you are also trapped in London this spring, why not exacerbate that feeling by coming to an IRL poetry reading? Next Sunday – March 5th I’ll be reading a good handful of poems at Jewish Book Week. As will Jill Abram & Adam Kammerling. We are part of an afternoon of free literary events being hosted by Tsitsit Fringe. Our section starts at 3pm.

Esther has to be ointmented and buffed up for many months by eunuchs in the harem.
Sophie Herxheimer, papercut, 2021

Then back in the south at Chener Books, one of my favourite local bookshops, I’ll be at the launch of brand new anthology called Living With Other People. It’s edited by three women poets who go under the banner Corrupted Poetry – I wrote about it in the previous post. I am one of several of the contributors who will be reading – on the spring equinox – March 21st.

Pomme and I in our satins –
having just done an online performance of a specially devised show ‘The Night of the Goddess’ – for a wonderful friend and Kickstarter supporter’s birthday last year.

Also big book news for March – Sally Pomme Clayton and I are getting very excited about The Mighty Goddess, our new collaboration and our fifth book together, the first one for adults. We look forward to launching it later in the spring. Pomme has written 52 diverse and fascinating myths that she’s gathered over many years of storytelling and research – I have snipped 52 original paper cuts. More details to follow – but meanwhile here are some snowdrops from the book – for Brigid – as it is the season. If you’d like us to do a performance/reading/ in conversation – invitations and suggestions of dates and venues are most welcome.

And may your path be all shades of daff and primrose as we move into the longer days at last.

Fresh baked Hamantaschen!

Some January proliferations

I’m charmed by a new book that recently arrived in the post: The Camden Town Hoard is a catalogue of detritus that’s been given a new spin.

It’s creator and curator, Natalia Zagorska-Thomas, has published, with the consistently fabulous small press C B Editions, a collection of images of incomprehensible objects dredged from the Grand Union Canal as it galumphs through Camden, and beside each one is a learned label, elucidating the object. Natalia invited a group of writers to choose an object to write about. I was late to the party, as I had been too deadline-hectic to notice the project’s beginnings. But she kindly roped me in and sent me a picture of this horrible thing.

I didn’t write and I didn’t write. But after some nudging from Natalia, I pulled myself together and wrote something, (which of course I really enjoyed, just like making myself go for a walk) despite my initial blood-out-of -a-stone resistance. It’s lovely to be asked. I expect all these weird lumps and barnacled pipelets are metaphorical portraits of the people whose words accompany them. There are some spectacular writers being inventive in here, and the book is a tenner.

My learned museum label

I have also been savouring a new anthology: Living With Other People , (another tenner well spent) edited by a small team of poets under the banner Corrupted Poetry. They are Fiona Larkin, Nic Stringer and Michelle Penn. This book modestly contains no poetry by them, but pulls together a kind of gritty survey with work by so many poets I admire, and interwoven with original drawings and other visual experiments by people (like me) who are not pure advocates of one medium only.

I have two quite personal, and very slowly written, poems in the book: ‘Cold Buffet’, marks an abrubtly ended friendship, and ‘Some Mirrors Held up to the Child’ is a poem I’ve worked on on and off for about 15 years, a kind of cubist portrait of my autistic/learning disabled son, made of language used by him, by us his family, and by many of the professionals that step in and out of our lives: culled from reports from teachers, occupational therapists, psychologists. I am grateful to be cushioned by a chorus of other voices who hit different notes and angles on the pain and delight that come from living with other people! Look out for a launch in London in mid March where some of the featured poets (including me) will be reading.

Two more by me in the latest edition of Cyphers – a long established literary journal based in Ireland. The underlying theme for this issue was ‘heritage’. One of my poems is a prose poem called South London Jew, and the other contains a story. Seeking Artemisia recounts an interail pilgrimage I made in my art school twenties, to see the paintings of Artemisia Gentileschi. Both poems put a solitary woman in a world that might or might not be her own and leave her there. Cyphers is a beautiful magazine and its editor, legend Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, was part of the original group that set it up in 1975. It was exciting to connect with some brilliant Irish poets at Belfast Book Festival last summer, and this feels like a nice way to continue that conversation.

Hanging out with some Irish poets in Belfasts Botanic Gardens, 2022

Huge thanks to all the editors mentioned, for giving me the opportunities to get my work into the world. Thanks too, for reading my blog – about which please read on! It has now mostly migrated to its own page on my evolving new website.

I made these puppets for the stage show of Velkom to Inklandt – the child in the cardi is ready to welcome you to my website – please don’t be put off!

Because of my work spiralling off in so many media I have tried to limit the section headers – I resist putting different strands of my practice in separate categories, everything is just ‘the work’.

Is it a poem, a stage set or yesterdays walk?

The website design is being ingeniously devised by artist Joe Bradley Hill who has done a revolutionary job of helping me get organised and sort out my long built up layers of studio activity – do take a look: new website in progress – sign up for the newsletter, and have a rummage. Many pages are still empty or in their early stages – but if you do go to the embryonic poetry page & click on the word INDEX – at least you’ll find a brand new prophesy at the top to add its seasoning to your day. (If you don’t like the first one, click refresh!)

May fortune smile!

Connections in Storyland.

Over 2022 I was back on the live story collecting and drawing road, taking my ink and brushes both round the corner in south London – and all over the UK.

Fresh ink drawings pegged up under a mulberry tree in Mecklenburgh Square at a story collecting gig this summer at a party for Jewish Renaissance magazine.

To recap: this process is one I’ve written about before. It usually involves me sitting with a person and having a conversation, often on a theme, (like food) which I then draw and write live in front of them, using ink and brush and a distilled selection of their own words. Each narrator gets a copy of their story to keep, either on the day if we have a helper and access to an A3 copier, or later, by post.

Drawing at Marie’s house in Brixton

Early in the year I worked with a group of women from across the African diaspora, who are meeting to cook together and share stories with Brixton chef and teacher Marie Mingle, and doctoral researcher Natasha Dyer. We spent a day in Marie’s kitchen, and as well as doing one to one story drawing, I was invited to cook and eat with the group. I learned about some fantastic spice mixtures and recipes, as well as hearing of many tough situations that the women I met are dealing with, both here and back home. The food and company were delicious, also, bittersweet. I took home a jar of Marie’s green sauce which gives everything a lift.

Violeta’s wonderful mother

Building a house on a nurse’s wages: a topical story from Vimbai.

Still in London and still with the African diaspora, the people at UK book HQ – ie The British Library, are in the middle of a major project to connect their Sound Archive back with some of the communities the recordings represent. Chandan Mahal and Emma Brinkhurst from the BL team got in touch to see if I could do some listening with a group of Somali Londoners, together with Mancunian East African poet, Elmi, and a bunch of recordings from the 1980s – collected by ethnomusicologist John Low.

Maryam Mursal, Somali star.

To begin with, we all listened to the magnificent voice and music of iconic Somali singer Maryam Mursal . I drew her from a video clip and wrote down some of what she said, as well as what was said about her, by the people gathered for the session. Over subsequent weeks we listened together to lullabies, house building songs, herding songs and other examples of Somali music.

This is Ubah, from the Camden community group.

There were parts of conversation that were so poetic no pictures were needed.

A high spot for me was listening to the women sing and ululate live in the room where we gathered. Their voices animated the air – a spell to mend post-lockdown hearts.

‘ it’s like confetti!’

I’d brought coloured pencils along as well as ink, in case there would be kids there who might like to draw too. As it happened only the grown ups came that day, but I was glad to attempt to catch the colour in Hinda and Halima’s aleendi (woven scarves.)

As a thank you to the group and for continuity, the library produced this booklet based on the project, with pictures by me, a new poem by Elmi – many quotations and insights from the participants and a QR link to the music recordings. I think you can request one from the British Library as they have a few.

Booklet produced by the British Library Sound Archive. The painting on the cover is an attempt by me to translate the sound of a particular song into colour and form.

Elmi Ali, making me wish I’d paid attention as a child to my friend Navyn, who turned up at my primary school in 1972 from Tanzania, and tried to teach me Swahili.

From Elmi, whose grandmother was the survivor of a shocking and wild tale.

In September, I travelled to Glasgow, where the university, along with those of St Andrew’s and Edinburgh, is working with a newly set up body called the Scottish Council on Global Affairs. The SCGA has been set up to ‘deepen the debate’ around migration and citizenship, amongst other things. I was very proud to participate in such conversations, invited by two enterprising doctors of History: Rachel Chin and Sarah Dunstan. There were speakers from the worlds of law, local and international politics, grassroots migrant organisations – and many practical and potent ideas were expressed to challenge ongoing Brexit rhetoric.

Members of the morning panel at the Citizen Witness Seminar L to R: Joseph Brady, Dr Sarah Kyambi, Jennifer Todd, Dr Rachel Chin

After the talks I listened to and drew stories from some of the participants. Every story was a glimpse into the hidden worlds we all carry, of family, memory, home.

Here I am with PhD candidate Pinar Aksu, who gave a talk about the work she does with refugees and asylum seekers, helping them to raise their own voices to campaign for rights and opportunities to education and work.

A story collected from Pinar. She is a marigold too! Bright, bold and energising.

A feast to hear about the sequin runner and golden rice pudding.

Now I am referring to all blankets as kavatourts. A great word coined by Nathalie’s gran, whose own language was spurned. The day I returned from Glasgow, my train sped along under a grey kavatourt of rain.

I heard more treasures of inherited language at a recent gig at JW3 . As the event was to thank people who had supported the charity – I was asking narrators to tell me stories of things they’d been given, or learned from their parents, or things they would hope to pass on… Debby’s rather roguish dad had a family whistle, her mother: a Yiddish lullaby.

Dad, uh, how embarrassing!

Marcel didn’t know his parents, but became surprisingly conversant with the glamour of the Folies Bergère, aged four. He still speaks, with an almost indiscernible French accent, and great pride, of his astonishing rescuers.

What Marcel didn’t tell me, but another guest did, is that having become a successful dentist in the UK, he was able to pay for Olga and Esther’s care in their old age.

Here are a couple more stories from London Jews: I heard these in the summer and include them here for their thematic resonance. Language: lost and found.

I heard these two in the summer at the party in Mecklenburgh Square. Like Daisy below, part of what settled Fozi into her sense of self was the comfort of a half remembered language.

The surprise of understanding Arabic!

On another type of story jaunt – project Phakama was participating in a brand new festival in Brighton, and so myself and fellow associate artist (and dear pal) Charlie Folorunsho headed to Wildfest, in glorious Stanmer Park.

Charlie and myself at the end of our LORE workshop, photo by poet Pauline Sewards.

Charlie and I were trying out an IRL version of a project initiated by him, with support from a Phakama Digital bursary in 2021. Called The LORE, which stands for Language Of Resilient Expression, it started online as part of an artistic response to the pandemic. We’ve been joint facilitators: getting together with small groups of people online, sharing stories of the ways we have managed to cope and keep going through the challenge of covid and austerity and difficulties with health. This was our first go at presenting the workshop face to face. People came and practiced listening to and drawing each other’s stories. Charlie asked participants to reinvent the LORE, and try alternative R words that might help us survive – we heard ‘revolutionary’, ‘rebellious,’ ‘resourceful’ – please add your own, however ‘regrettable’ & join us. We hope to make a book of the LORE one day, in which we collate all we have heard and drawn from and with participants. A kind of survival kit.

Yet a different variety of live drawing was called for by poet Kirsten Luckins, who asked me to record the goings on at an inaugural Women Poets’ Festival, which she was organising with The Rebecca Swift Foundation, to be held at The National Centre for Writing in Norwich, in their epic Tudor Dragon Hall, as well as online. I travelled up with the day’s first speaker, ace poet and friend Jacqueline Saphra.

Her talk followed a guided meditation to begin the event in calm, led by poet Ros Goddard.

As my participation in the guided meditation I also let my ink and water slowly sink into the quiet moment.

Jacqueline gave an inspiring talk on rhyme, which she packed with dazzling examples from some of her favourite poems. I drew what I could catch – trying not to get so absorbed that I forgot to move my brush across the paper.

After a sonnet by American poet Jericho Brown

Some of Anne Sexton’s groundbreaking boldness

Jacqueline’s talk was followed by a presentation from Debris Stevenson who got us all to shake, and talked about what had provoked her towards her path of poetry and performance.

Debris was fired up by grime music and her dyslexia, among other things.

Can’t argue with that.

The last speaker was current TS Eliot prize shortlistee Victoria Adukwei Bulley who gave a talk on the practicalities of getting funded to make work, and showed us clips from her fascinating film, Mother Tongue, which explores language in exile and the poetry born from and inherent in that. Notice a theme?

Shaping one’s thinking through pertinent questions, with Victoria Adukwei Bulley

Translations: A mother is a kind of gold you can’t buy in the market.

There was a great buffet lunch and a fallow period to follow, in which I ran a kind of rolling collage studio – and also read peoples’ fortunes from INDEX.

My scraps find a page of their own in Norwich

The last part of the day heralded the grand announcements of who had won this years Women Poets’ Prize. There were three winners chosen from a shortlist of thirty. You can read more about the judges, all the poets and their brilliant work, on the Rebecca Swift Foundation website, as well as on social media.

The first winner to be announced was Prerana Kumar – a natural performer with a glowing poem.

The huge and ancient wood-beamed hall fell silent. Intimate worlds were spilled by the poets into the room from the stage and even from the video screens. Suddenly after all the busy whir of chat, meeting friends and jotting down ideas, we were in a different space. A mirror to the morning meditation we’d begun with – a contemplative zone.

Winner Dillon Jaxx read their poem via the video link. A fearless piece moving between family dinners to mountain and sea.

I had made over 35 drawings, and was pleased to see that many of the assembled poets had also made fabulous collage poems and zines in my portable studio. It was a truly creative day.

One of the three winners, Jennifer Lee Tsai created a beautiful, distilled atmosphere with this poem inspired by her grandfather

Huge thanks to all those who have shared stories with me, and all those who have found the imagination, space and funding to commission me to do this ongoing work which means so much to me.

And of course, thanks for reading my blog. Wishing you peace and poetry in 2023.

Velkom to ze Staich, olt Frentz

New papercuts: Kaddish for ze Tvince

Over recent weeks I’ve watched astonished – my poems from Velkom to Inklandt coming freshly alive in rehearsals for a stage adaptation that is coming to North London in November. Talented actor Sarah Malin, (who is also a friend and lives on the same street as me in Brixton) succeeded in getting Arts Council funding to develop the book into an hour long show. So now together with director Lucy Richardson and musician Nico Brown, and myself as designer/set maker, we are in full swing towards this new collaboration.

A large scale paper cut to hang as part of an evolving backdrop

Sarah’s late father Morris was cared for in his final years at Nightingale House, a Jewish old peoples’ home in Wandsworth. Initial performances and workshops are taking place there, with and for the residents and carers. The home has generously provided rehearsal space as well.

Transformations in progress – Sarah Malin rehearsing at The Nightingale.

Sarah is also a wonderful writer, and has devised a story to help structure the poems into a framing narrative. She plays the grand daughter, as well as Liesl.

Cutting out Liesl’s garden – for the poem Beink Prektikell

I have found it so fascinating and enlightening to watch and listen to the intense work – as ideas, language, gesture are tried, discussed, inhabited, fused into performance, met in exactitude and inventiveness with music and direction. Nico has been insistent on a real piano, we are lucky that two of the three venues have a baby grand, and for our last night at Camden Peoples Theatre he has hired an upright. We are also lucky to have found theatre maker Carlos Piña to do the lighting, and trainee director Chi, a blaze of iniative, to assist Lucy.

Violins ‘for ze Tvince’

It’s a real education to be part of this detailed journey from poems into drama – keeping to the precision and rhythm that poetry creates and demands, and at the same time offering pace and a relatable story to an audience.

Eppels, Kewkumpers, Ekks, Kepbejjis.

I’m grateful as ever to live near John Purcell Paper who delivered a roll of Japanese mulberry paper and a roll of thick black Canson mi-teintes paper to me early last week so that I could snip into the small hours and not run out.

This week (Thursday) I am also doing a poetry reading at the lovely Chener Books, a story collecting session in Brighton (Saturday) with Charlie Folorunsho at Wildfest, as part of our ongoing work as collaborators and associate artists with Phakama – and then I’m running a poetry collage workshop with Laura Mitchison of On the Record next Wednesday. If you are coming to any of these events THANK YOU and see you soon.

If you’d like to book tickets to see Velkom to Inklandt, there are two live performances in the building and an online offer, at JW3, the big Jewish community centre on Finchley Road, on November 13th. Details and booking via the link.

The following night Monday 14th, we’ll be on at Camden People’s Theatre, I’ll be around at all the public performances and would luff to see Reeters oont Frentz. Meenvial, sanks as effer, for reedink my Blok.

Late last night in the snipping saloon

Leaning on the Goddess

Flying & landing – book collaborators!

Besides a lot of scooting about lately, and the heat, I’ve been staying grounded with some focused paper-cutting in the cool vaults of mythology.

I’ve been laying into sheets of black paper with scissors and scalpel, and summoning a great variety of goddesses, and their assorted props and consorts for the next book. The Mighty Goddess – a collection of 52 myths and stories for adults, gathered over many years with intrepid care and respect, and written in her own inimitable style by old friend and collaborator Pomme Clayton. This is to be published next spring by The History Press. We raised extra funds to create the book via our Kickstarter campaign. Thanks to all who supported that.

Laying out the stories with their pictures and post it notes on the floor.

Some of the stories are very familiar to me. Pomme and I have had four of our children’s fairy tale and myth collections published over the years. I’ve painted Durga, Ama Terasu, Demeter… Our first book together: Tales of Amazing Maidens, came out with Orchard Books in 1995. It featured Inuit goddess Sedna on the front cover. So I enjoyed revisiting her (as an Arctic elder must inevitably also do – or she will be in discomfort under the sea with her tangled hair. ) Richard Price has dived into this material too, in his beautiful collection The Owner of the Sea. Sedna provides fish and poetic inspiration in equal measure.

I was glad to discover a creature called the ribbon seal, lolling about on the internet, graphic as a papercut. And Sedna. Without her, no plenty more fish in the sea!

As with previous projects, like INDEX, & 60 Lovers to Make and Do, I have branched out from using only plain papers, to finding tone and texture in old black and white photographic images, which I use as collage material.

Green Tara – a goddess/saint from the Buddhist pantheon – cut from a book called Collectible Spoons.

I like the playfulness of scale between the objects in the photographs (spoons, cakes, shrubs) and the grandeur of a deity – a being so large it cannot be seen or comprehended, let alone fit on a page.

Hekate – she looks three ways at once. I cut her from a page in an old cookbook and was gratified to see her turn the puddings into timeless stone.

Then again – some goddesses are known through their small scale manifestations, St Bridget is in the snowdrops, Persephone sparkles on in every pomegranate seed –

Snowdrops for Bridget

The crowned majesty of madam pomegranate

Other stories were familiar in another way: Artemis/Diana the huntress, turning Actaeon into a stag for spying on her naked beauty as she bathed… I remember copying Titian’s version of this, that hangs here in London at the National Gallery.

Diana and Actaeon, by Titian.

We Camberwell foundation students of 1982 were each set a painting to study as an exercise in composition. We were instructed to make three versions: reducing it further in each incarnation – eventually making it into a 3 colour abstraction. I recall that laborious absorbing afternoon.

I returned to Titian for help with my papercut, loving how he caught Actaeon’s bodily astonishment at the moment of transformation.

Actaeon as papercut – turned into a stag and devoured by his own dogs.

There’s another Artemis story in the book too – of the young girls apprenticed to the goddess – who dressed as bears to play hunting games in the forest.

Bear faced chic! A papercut I made for the story of Artemis, whose apprentices accompany the goddess, learn to hunt.

Other stories were a total revelation. The violence and incest, sex and torment in many of the tales – from Māori creation myth to ancient Egypt. Stories to make even the most jaded Twitter user gasp.

Sekhmet. Lion headed goddess loves to eat awful human law breakers.

I felt nervous about making images of Isis and Sekhmet, partly because I so love and admire Egyptian art – and did not feel I could add anything to the perfect depictions we know so well from the tombs and the looted beauties I grew up staring at in the British Museum. Of course that made snipping these goddesses and their head dresses all the more exciting in the end. ‘Only do something that you know you CANNOT do’ – as I’m fond of telling my students.

Isis and her brother/husband Osiris – Lord of the Underworld. Again, I found them in the spoon book.

On the road: I was at some different tables over June, luckily paper, blades and goddesses are portable entities

Reading and rereading these ancient myths was a balm in these times. These stories remind us of our own impermanence and solidity at the same time, always useful. Thank Goddess for the power of imagination.

Lilith becoming a snake, giving birth to demons

In other news, I was grateful to poets Kathryn Gray and Andrew Neilson, the editors of online poetry journal Bad Lilies for including my poem Eggs and Bacon in their latest issue. A poem that also skirts around power.

I grew these ones. Amazing colours, quite weird smell!

Those bad lilies sure got a nose for a poem. One they published last summer in their second issue: Pollen, by the amazing Clare Pollard has been nominated for best single flower in the Forward Prizes.

Athena: paradoxical and mighty goddess of wisdom and war.

Congrats to the wondrous Chrissy Williams too, poet and editor of online journal Perverse. Two poems first published there have made the same auspicious list – one by Louisa Campbell and one by Cecelia Knapp. No shortage of goddesses in this post as it turns out.

Hindu goddess Lakshmi has elephants to splash her with water in the heat.

And nobody creates new work entirely alone. We only get good by reading/looking/listening to/rubbing shoulders with other people who read and make, so this goes out to all those who aren’t on a shortlist either… and who are slogging away anyway! May Lakshmi’s elephants cool you & may Athena’s owl toot wisdom instead of war!

Poem for Alison & her wasps nest

Here is a non prize winning wasp poem I made from phrases clipped from a child’s encyclopaedia I found on a wall near my house. I made it for my poet friend Alison Winch who inspired me with her wasp poems. They’re not published yet, but watch out! Thanks for reading my blog & strength to all creative resisters in the long hot jam of now.

Belfast – what a blast

Like a lot of Londoners of my era, all I knew of Northern Ireland was from the relentless news of the Troubles throughout my youth. Luckily I’d met people from there over the years who’d also shaped my imaginings. It was the good influence of one of them, the painter Patricia Doherty, that made me extra curious to go and visit the city that had produced my funny and talented friend. So it was great to be invited to read and run a workshop as one of several poets at the book festival this June.

I arrived the day before I was due to read, and was taken aback to find that the hotel room I’d been booked into was painted dark grey. Comfy & all, but like, almost black.

Needed colour dabs to save me from decline

I walked into town & bought myself peonies and a scroll of Chinese paper and when I got back made the first of two backdrops, ostensibly for the reading, as I like to have something painted in a room, but also to vanquish the gloom. I was glad to find an amazing bookshop run for Self Help Africa and relieve them of some old volumes that got pressed into action at my workshop as well as in my emergency backdrops.

Emergency backdrop nervously begun in hotel room

The first event I went to was that night, about Belfast poet, the late Padraic Fiacc. Poets Tara McEvoy and Joelle Taylor were there to read some of his work and lead a discussion of it – following a screening of a grainy and great 1970s German documentary about him, unearthed by the festivals intrepid poetry curator Natasha Cuddington. It was a revelation to hear him and his powerful writing of conflict, inner and outer. Many people in the audience had known him and were engaged with his work. He’d read and anthologised poetry across the sectarian divide, and often feared for his life in doing so, but made it to 94 in the end.

some of the works we read from

The next day Christodoulos Makris arrived and we got talking about our shared reading which was to be hosted by Natasha that night. I attended Christodoulos’ workshop in the afternoon, where we constructed poems from that days newspaper, before rushing back and making another emergency backdrop, & changing into my poetry dress for the evening.

I incorporated words from my ‘newspaper poem’ written in Christodoulos’ workshop on backdrop no. 2

Both Christodoulos and myself invited the audience to read poems with us at points during the evening, which was fun. We talked about instinct and spontaneity and some of the poetry projects we have been working on. I read some fortunes from INDEX as well as other poems and Christodoulos read from his book this is no longer entertainment (a total must-read) as well as his collaboration with the brilliant Kimberley Campanello – an online work called sorry that you were not moved.

We spoke of poet Tom Jenks of course, bold publisher of poetry objects by Christodoulos, Kimberley and myself amongst many others, with his press zimZalla. It was so enlivening to be live with a live audience.

After we’d recovered with a large dinner at The Woodworkers – I wandered back to the hotel and was spared immediate re entombment in the charcoal interior by friendly shouts from the pavement.

Joelle Taylor & Cathy Rentzenbrink – lighting up the Belfast night – the perks of a book festival- great writers & readers.

Joelle Taylor and Cathy Rentzenbrink – both amazing people, writers and festival headliners, were having a chat at the outdoor tables in the balmy Belfast night & invited me to join them. I read their cards from INDEX (‘spookily accurate!’ said Joelle) and we had a wonderful conversation.

There were still ace chats to come. Gail McConnell & Julie Morrissy read at a hybrid event the next night, Gail in person – Julie by zoom from the USA. Natasha again asking the questions.

Poet Gail McConnell reading in Belfast June 2022, ink pen in notebook.

Gail’s book: The Sun is Open is a moving, questioning, elegiac work – using archive material from her father’s life. It’s incredible, and currently a fiver in the Penned in the Margins July sale!

I don’t know Julie’s work yet, it sounds powerful, connecting the threads of close family with political histories via feminism. I liked drawing both of them in my notebook.

Poet Julie Morrissy on zoom, drawn with my ink pen – June 2022

Back at the Woodworkers there was more illuminating chat, I sensed a very alive poetry community in Belfast, the layering of centuries of Irish and English, not just as languages. It was refreshing to be far from home and find people arguing, laughing and sharing poetry as a home.

A bunch of excellent women turned up to my own workshop session. I tipped my cornucopia of scraps onto the table – and the room hummed with industry, as book manufacture took hold of those who love to rummage, snip & glue.

Made by Hannah Wilks

By a wonderful poet called Paula

by Natasha Cuddington in a ballet and battenberg palette

Rama & Sita find themselves in a new book made by a participant called Ruth ‘I’m never going to an ordinary poetry workshop again!’ she said.

The collage game in Belfast is strong, and I’m glad to say I found a willing recipient of my scrap bag – which saved me lugging it to my next destination.

I hope to see what gets made next as the scraps are given their next meanings – I left this in the hotel bar & Liza picked it up…

Poet Bebe Ashley had a residency at the festival, with a 3D printer, with which she was recycling plastic food packaging into braille poetry. Here she is with her poem Tom Daley dives for David Hockney and David Hockney paints Tom Daley.

Bebe Ashley with a poem 3D printed in braille.

I had a go at translating it just from its spacing and the colours used. If you’d like to try this – look carefully at the picture and try to read what you see! Bebe kindly let me take two of her little chips of braille – they spell the words alive and heartbeat and I keep them in my wallet.

Coded amulets for my travels, slid into my Mongolian wallet

In between readings and chats I walked in the city. Two favourite discoveries were the Botanic Gardens – very nearby, free and stunning, and independent bookshop No Alibis, where David the bookseller told me about his late friend, choreographer and dancer Helen Lewis, an extraordinary woman who survived Terezín and Auschwitz to pioneer modern dance in Belfast. She taught dance for years at the Crescent Arts Centre where the book festival was taking place. I was glad to read her memoir, A Time to Speak , a beautifully written book and more fuel for my Terezín project.

In the hothouse at Belfast Botanic Garden

The Crescent Arts Centre. Home to Belfast Book Festival as well as a thriving arts and education programme for the city. Squint & see the plaque honouring Helen Lewis between door & window on the left.

Thanks as ever for reading my blog. Thanks to Sophie Hayles, Natasha Cuddington and the whole team at Belfast Book Festival for their warm welcome and their tireless and good natured running of the many incredible events.

A friendly stranger took this snap
of me in my poetry dress as I was walking past – so I made them air drop it to me!