news
photo credit Annie Spratt
I've just published a new creative essay with Manchester's Commonword:
'Landfill - the search for home in art, class and gentrification'
It took a long long time to write, and is also the first time I got a continuity edit from my parents!
This is something I have been trying to/wanting to write for many years, as it weaves through immigration and housing and the creative lives of the dismissed. As it weaves through my family and the opportunities we had and didn't have. As it moves.
I have a long held fascination with landfills and tips and recycling centres and the lyrical part of my mind says that's from having lived above them, knowing that the offcuts of thousands of lives lie below. All that plastic, all that past.
Commonword commissioned me to dive into their 40+ year old archive and write what it inspired - so here it is. Working class story, working class art.
'Landfill - the search for home in art, class and gentrification'
It took a long long time to write, and is also the first time I got a continuity edit from my parents!
This is something I have been trying to/wanting to write for many years, as it weaves through immigration and housing and the creative lives of the dismissed. As it weaves through my family and the opportunities we had and didn't have. As it moves.
I have a long held fascination with landfills and tips and recycling centres and the lyrical part of my mind says that's from having lived above them, knowing that the offcuts of thousands of lives lie below. All that plastic, all that past.
Commonword commissioned me to dive into their 40+ year old archive and write what it inspired - so here it is. Working class story, working class art.
listen
transbareall podcast!
Alongside Emil Green I've been talking with some of the artists and writers featured in the TransBareAll book - about art and food and home and ageing and the ways we move through the world. These are trans artists on their own terms, speaking from the heart about what matters to us.
This was initially planned as a live book tour for the launch of the TBA anthology, but of course the pandemic demanded change - so we went audio! We are currently working on transcripts for each of the episodes, and those will be available on the TBA website - I'll update here when those are live.
Listen for wolves, sharpie pens, expressionist film, zines, Turkish drag and more at anchor.fm/transbareall or in your podcast player of choice.
about
I'm a British-Canadian writer and artist. I've performed at many festivals and live events across the UK and beyond, solo and in collaboration with other writers, musicians and visual/digital artists. I have most recently co-written a literary-geographic hybrid piece for an anthology of creative-critical work - Sandscapes: writing the British seaside, out now with Palgrave Macmillan. My stories have featured on BBC Radio 4, in Short Fiction Journal, and on the literary mapping app LitNav, among other places, with poetry appearing in numerous anthologies. My short story collection, Jebel Marra (Comma Press, 2015), was nominated for a number of national and international awards, and my novella exploring Manchester's housing crisis will be out with Comma Press in 2023. I am now working on my second collection, an audio and digital short story map of Hayling Island. See the Hayling Stories page for more on that.
Find me online at: