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