Tag: climate crisis

Bending The Arc Submissions Open!

July 7, 2025

What an incredible time I had in April being part of a magazine launch with fellow authors, Alice Willitts, Hilary Watson, Kath Stansfield and Laura Baggaley. It was a huge learning curve, commissioning and curating pieces, getting to grips with Substack and spreading the word on social media etc etc. We had some amazing feedback with so many positive comments and one of the best things was spreading the word about a more connected and possible future. There are more people than you can imagine taking small steps to bridge the gap from where we are now to what may be possible. I’ve learnt about hundreds of community led projects, education events, farming and nature conservation initiatives etc. We have run workshops, written articles, given readings and above all tried to inspire people to realise they can do something to change.

So here’s the next exciting step – our first submissions window is open and we’re really excited to see what will come flying into our inbox!

Poems, short stories, novel extracts, hybrid pieces are all welcome. Please also contact us if you have proposals for articles or reviews.

All submissions should have a strong thrutopian element, imaging ways through to a world we would be glad to leave to future generations. Check our submission guidelines for more details and read our first edition for ideas and inspiration.

We will be launching the second edition of Bending The Arc on 29th October 2025 (Sustainability Day).

We look forward to reading your work!

Bending the Arc

April 16, 2025

At last it’s time to reveal what I’ve been occupied with for the last few months!

Along with 4 other amazing women; poets Alice Willitts and Hilary Watson and novelists Katherine Stansfield and Laura Baggaley we have been immersed in writing and thinking about the future in a slightly different way. We were all interested the environment and were concerned by the many crises the planet was experiencing but were finding that much that was being written was either bleakly dystopian or unbelievably utopian. We wanted to learn about what was possible for the planet rather than a future that was only full of doom and we wanted to find a way of writing about it that was different.

So, we followed Manda Scott’s (self-study)* Thrutopian Masterclass. Each week for six months, we heard from changemakers and practitioners in a dizzying range of disciplines and discussed how we might incorporate these lessons into our own thinking. It was a crash course in practical, concrete information, covering (to name just a few) net positive cities, regenerative business practices, alternative political structures, new currencies, circular economies, renewable energy projects, new employment models, theatre collectives, sustainable agriculture, heroic myths, sociocracy, ecological civilisations…

We were inspired, and started writing our own stories of how to negotiate the world we’re in and how to write thriving desirable futures into being. We realised that in order to make change, people need to be able to be able to see what is possible and want to go there, if there are no narratives, how can they make the choice?

We then realised that we needed to spread the word and encourage others to find their own ways through the world we’re living in to a future that is hopeful and liveable, so we decided to create a Substack magazine filled with ideas and writing across all genres and traditions and after several months of writing and planning and more writing and asking people we were particularly admired to write for us; here it is – Bending the Arc: a Thrutopia magazine!

https://bendingthearcmagazine.substack.com/p/welcome-to-bending-the-arc

Come and join us!

*Thrutopia is a term coined by the environmental activist and philosopher Rupert Read in an article in Huffpost in the context of trying to explain how we get from where we are now to a future that is sustainable. https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/rupert-read/thrutopia-why-neither-dys_b_18372090.html