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).
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!
So come the storms in winter,/ and then the birds in spring again
as Sandy Denny sang and already Christmas is a month gone, easter eggs have been in the shops for at least a fortnight and friends are starting to talk about summer holidays. How does time seem to pass so much faster the older you get? I learnt this week, that one theory is that it’s all to do with experiences and perception. The more information your mind processes, the slower time seems to pass. When we are young and our brains are encountering and processing new experiences every day, time seems to move more slowly as we accommodate all the new things. When we are older and following much the same routine every day, our brains lump together similar events, so it makes it appear that time goes quicker. Time speeds up with increasing age because we have fewer new experiences and our perception is less vivid.
My thoughts kept coming back to this and how so much of a day or week can slip away when you’re doing the same things and how we can stop time speeding up (in our perceptions) by bringing new experiences into our lives. Also how the most interesting people are often those who carry on trying new things as they get older, keep reading, keep exploring, keep questioning. I think it’s also one of the reasons it’s so important as poets to keep reading new poems, trying different authors, pushing yourself beyond the familiar and comfortable, try to keep finding new ways of expressing ourselves.
There’s always a lot going on in the poetry scene, whether in person or online and there are quite a few interesting poetry events coming up in the next few months, so there’s no excuse not to keep our brains active. I’ll be restarting the poetry events at the Farmers Arms community pub in Lowick Green starting with an open mic on Thursday 27th February 6.30-8pm, followed by readings, workshops and more open mics throughout the spring. Details are here on their website: https://lakedistrictfarmersarms.com/event-category/workshops-courses/
I’ve been working on an exciting new venture this autumn with the amazing community pub The Farmer’s Arms in Lowick Green near Ulverston. The pub is run by Grizedale arts and is a hub for community events, including workshops, talks and music as well as having great beer and delicious home cooked food and now I will be running a programme of poetry events there! We have already had the first poetry reading and open mic evening which was fantastic. There were some experienced poets and some people reading their poems for the first time. I always love it when someone says, I don’t really know if this is a poem and then comes out with the most beautiful poem ever! The first poetry/ creative writing workshop is this Saturday and has sold out aleady.
The next poetry reading/open mic is Wednesday October 25th and the next Writing workshop is Saturday 18th November. Book directly through the Farmer’s Arms website. I look forward to seeing you there. Poetry in a pub, what could be better!
Its my favourite time of year again, we’ll be making the long drive down to Sidmouth folk festival on Thursday for a week of folky madness; song, dance, storytelling, music and of course poetry, which has found a little corner of the folk festival to call its own. In fact the ‘corner’ is the splendidly luxurious Edwardian Drawing Room of the Glen hotel on Glen road. Inspiration is never far away as we relax in the comfy armchairs under the crystal chandeliers and drink our morning coffee!
This year I’ve prepared a series of workshops on ballads, love, writing the body and how to write about everyday objects from quilts to pineapples. The final workshop will be the ever popular poetry games, if you haven’t played Poetry Countdown, or Poetry What’s in the Bag, you haven’t completed your poetry journey 🙂
The workshops will be held from 11.30- 1pm on Sunday 5th to Thursday 10th August at the Royal Glen Hotel, no booking necessary, just turn up on the day, you don’t have to be a festival participant to join the workshops, they are open to all. The workshops are supportive, encouraging and fun. No previous experience in writing poetry is required but they will also cater for more experienced poets or writers. The workshops are all stand alone and there is also a chance to collaborate on a piece of work and join in performing it in Friday’s Showcase concert.
If that’s not enough there is also a Poetry Open Mic – 5-6.30pm Thursday 10th August at the Royal Glen Hotel. Experienced writers or newcomers welcome, just sign up on the door to read your own work or bring a favourite poem or two to share. Or if you just fancy relaxing and experiencing the splendour of the Edwardian drawing room whilst listening to some poetry, come and join us!
It seems incredible to realise that Auscultation is two years old! I hardly dared dream when I was working long stressful hours as a veterinary surgeon that I would ever see my poems in print but when I was around 45, something changed. I started to take my writing more seriously, go on courses, join local poetry groups and start to put the hours in. I think I came to understand that to write good poems, you do have to work at it, they don’t arrive fully formed in your head, you have to draft and redraft, edit furiously and critically, leave them and go back to them and even park some for years in the ‘not quite right’ folder. I learnt to accept that there will be many more rejections than acceptances and came to love the joy when they were published and to realise when they’re not, it’s just a numbers game, there are so many good poems and poets out there, only so many of them can make it into print.
I was lucky that Amy Wack, the editor of Seren Books, liked my poems and chose my pamphlet The Dogs That Chase Bicycle Wheels as the winner of the Mslexia Poetry Pamphlet in 2015 and then had enough faith in me to accept my first collection Auscultation too. I shall forever be grateful to her. Sometimes you need a bit of luck along with the hard work.
So to celebrate the 2nd birthday of Auscultation, here is a poem from the book
Miss Freak’s Whelping Forceps
Wrapped in cloth in a Gladstone bag
boiled in second best saucepans, now here
laid out on velvet in this museum case;
delicate, slim shanked, small angled loops to cup
the head and ease it through.
Mr Hobday’s at the front,
the pioneer with his rigid rings of steel
to clamp the foetal skull and lined up behind,
McLean with longer shafts for deeper access,
Elliot with thicker loops for crushing action.
How they laboured, these men,
with their unforgiving fists of metal
but in the feral hours where instinct loosens
itself from shadows it’s Miss Freaks we reach for
to coax the unborn to crown the light.
Maybe getting your poems out there is a little like coaxing them out into the light after a long labour, harder than anything you’ve done before but so worth it in the end!
We look forward eagerly to Ilse Pedler’s appearance as our Guest Poet at our next monthly meeting on Zoom, at 7PM on Monday 6th March.
Ilse wins prizes for her poetry and practices veterinary medicine in the Lake District, trying to juggle writing with the unpredictability of sick animals – she has also found time for thirty years of Morris Dancing! Her poetry has appeared widely, including in Stand, Magma and Poetry News – Ilse was a winner in the Poetry Society Members’ Poetry Competition in Spring 2022 with These are the days of snow and ice – and in anthologies. She was shortlisted for the Rialto Nature Poetry competition in 2014 and 2015, for the Bridport Prize in 2016 and the Hippocrates in 2017
Ilse won the Mslexia Pamphlet Competition with The Dogs That Chase Bicycle Wheels, published by Seren in March 2016. Her poetry reveals high levels of skill in observing and recording the natural world, remarkable even from a poet who is also a trained anatomist, allied with a sensitivity to landscape and the lives of animals and humans:
Ilse published her first full collection, Auscultation, with Seren in June 2021. Auscultation, the action of listening or hearkening, has also a technical sense: the action of listening, with ear or stethoscope, to the sound of the movement of heart, lungs, or other organs, to judge their condition of health or disease (Oxford English Dictionary). This metaphor captures Ilse’s very serious commitment to her poetry: I … explore the idea of listening and being listened to through poems… I interrogate the importance of the types of care we give and receive. We are in for a special evening!
Delighted to have a poem commended in the Cafe Writers Competition.
The poem is called My Body is a Map of all my Journeys and is a meditation on the journeys a body takes over its lifetime and how life events can alter it. It also describes how we perceive our bodies and how we try and alter them. I’ll be reading it and another of my poems at the competition winners event on Monday 13th March at 7.30pm. It’s on Zoom, so contact Cafe Writers for the link. Hope to see some of you there, can’t wait to hear the winning poems!
I’m really excited to be one of the poets featured in the first series of Seren Poetry Podcasts. Each one is an interview with the poet and includes them reading their work. I’m in the company of some amazing poets including Kim Moore, Polly Atkin, Rhian Edwards, Eric Ngalle Charles, Christopher Meredith and others. I spent a lovely couple of hours at Wordsworth Grasmere with Chris Gregory from the audio production company Alternative Stories being interviewed. We talked about life and death, what a heart sound like, how poems come to you at the most inconvenient times, the different qualities of rain in the Lake District and of course animals; pigs, sheep, what it’s like to assist in the birth of a calf and how being a vet gives you a unique perspective into the lives of animals. He also asked me about the experience of being a mother and stepmother, we found we had a shared love of folk music and I think morris dancing even made an appearance! There is a preview of me reading one of the poems here https://www.buzzsprout.com/2035359/11391669-preview-five-auscultation-by-ilse-pedler and the whole podcast will be out on Thursday 12th October, just search for The Seren Poetry Podcast in any of the usual podcast apps, Spotify, Google, Apple etc.
The first podcast with Polly Atkin was released on 6th October and is full of interesting information about living with chronic illness, the beauty and the rain in the Lake District ( I think there’s a theme emerging. here) and the life of Dorothy Wordsworth. You can listen to it here https://www.buzzsprout.com/2035359/11442854-polly-atkin-much-with-body
I’m really excited to be reading with two other wonderful poets, Kerry Darbishire @KerryDarbishire and Kelly Davis https://www.kellydavis.co.uk/ in Kendal on September 15th. We all had books published last year but due to Covid haven’t had an in person launch and as there’s nothing like the buzz of reading live to an audience, we decided to hold one together. Kerry and Kelly’s book Glory Days is a collaboration exploring the different phases of a woman’s life and the expectations if you’re growing up as a female and there’s also a moving sequence of poems about he relationships between mothers and daughters. My book Auscultation contains poems about my life as a veterinary surgeon, mother and stepmother. Do come and see us on September 15th at Outside In Beezon Rd, Kendal, LA9 6EL from 7-9pm. There are also open mic slots available, just sign up on the door, admission is free. Oh, and there’s also tea and cake, what’s not to like!
Test tubes are remarkable objects, simple in design, robust enough to withstand acids and high temperatures and used every day all over the world. They are basic items of scientific equipment and yet they are also things of beauty. Over the centuries they have facilitated experiments leading to life-changing discoveries and as well as having a practical use, a certain alchemy takes place within them.
When I inherited a box of old test tubes I wanted to do something different with them. I felt torn between the scientist and the poet in me and then realised that there were similarities between the creation that can take place in a test tube and the creative process of producing a poem and I wanted the test tubes to somehow contain that alchemy of the poem. So I wrote a series of short poems about natural objects that also have a certain magic about them, how a feather facilitates flight for example or how wood shaving produced in the working of wood, once made a tree. Each test tube contains the scroll of a poem and an example of the object it relates to; a feather, a shell or a wood shaving. I also wrote an introductory poem In Which a Poet Considers Her Similarities to a Test Tube which is a playful introduction to the concept of this project. You can view the poem on my poems page.
The test tubes are available to buy direct from me, just email me at ilsepedler@protonmail.com
I have been a stepmother for 30 years and a mother for 27 and this has inevitably found its way into my poems. People sometimes ask me what it’s been like to be a stepmother and how it differs from being a mother. The comparison I make is that it’s like wearing different shoes; as a mother I feel like I’m wearing my old walking boots; they’re comfortable, reliable, I feel in control and if there are mountains ahead, we’ll climb them together. As a stepmother I sometimes think it’s like putting on my party shoes, they feel a bit unfamiliar and edgy but also special and when the party goes well it’s exhilarating but they can also pinch and blister and sometimes you just want to take them off. Which stepmother hasn’t gone from being upbeat and positive to sobbing behind the bathroom door all within the space of a few hours?
For a long time, the experiences of being a stepmother were not discussed, we were consigned to the background, described as not being the ‘real’ mother and worse had to fight against the evil stepmother stereotype in fairy stories. The truth is that there are hundreds of thousands of stepmothers all over the country quietly making packed lunches, checking that homework has been done and remembering the P.E. kit; just trying to make it work on a day-to-day basis. Things have changed enormously since my early days of being a stepmother in the 1990’s and I was really impressed with a series of Radio 4 programmes recently by Katie Harrison called ‘You’re Not My Mum : The Stepmum’s Side https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0b5l9wc/episodes/downloads.
They were a refreshingly honest examination of being a stepmother today and brought back a lot of the situations and emotions I remembered.
Like a lot of writers, I write to try and make sense of things and the section at the end of my first poetry collection Auscultation contains a sequence of poems about my experiences as a stepmother. The first poem in the section Fairy tales and Step Monsters is an exploration of being a stepmother. The hesitation I felt about not doing it ‘right’, when now I realise I should have worried less and enjoyed it more.
I wish I’d held your hand more often.
it would have been easy.
I wish I’d worried less
and made a nest of my fingers
for it to curl inside,
it used to slip into mine anyway.
Then the sense of trying so hard to make everything work for everybody
me holding things together
while the glue dried.
and finally that feeling of being so closely connected to someone but there still being an almost invisible barrier because they’re not quite your own.
However hard I tried I could only see
you through a window, hear your voice
on the other side of a door,
touch your arm through your sleeve.
The full poem can be found on my poems page. The section goes on to describe the traumatic experience of going through a court case with my husband so he could get regular contact with his son. A situation where there were no winners and we were all left scarred. As I was writing, fairy tale themes and motifs wove their way into the poems, perhaps it was a way of counterbalancing the trauma of the emotions, perhaps it was the sense of surrealism I experienced at times.
It wasn’t thirteen fairies that sealed your fate
but a man in black robes, a king in his own little
castle and because those closest to you turned
on a spit of loss and hurt and jealousy.
The final poem in the section was written as a reconciliation. In the heightened emotions of a stepfamily situation the relationship between the birth mother and the stepmother can become fraught, but in the end;
The truth is, neither of us was evil,
we both laid a trail of breadcrumbs
for you back to our doors.
I would also like to make it clear that I write from my own perspective and how I experienced those heart wrenching few years; the joy of falling in love with a man who happened to have a little boy and then falling in love with that little boy too, who taught me so much and revealed a side I didn’t know I had. My stepson has his own poems to write and his mother and father theirs. We can only write most honestly about what we know and that is what I have done.
There are so many good poetry events around these days, like the launch of Sarah Mnatzagianan’s new pamphlet, Lemonade in the Armenian Quarter, this Sunday 20th March,(details available at Against the Grain Poetry Press) or Stav Poleg’s first collection, The City, on 6th April (go to Carcanet website to register). These are both on Zoom which has been fantastic in extending the reach of poetry events in the last couple of years and enabling the poetry world to stay connected but I have missed the excitement and camaraderie of attending actual physical events. These are now starting to reappear and I’m very much looking forward to one on Saturday 26th March; the Carlisle Poetry Symposium, at Tullie House. I’m extra excited because I’m running a workshop there from 11-12.30 and also doing a reading in the afternoon. The workshop will include writing exercises using poems and other objects as prompts and there’ll hopefully be time for a couple of poetry games. if you haven’t played ‘Poetry Countdown’ yet, you’re in for a treat! The afternoon will consist of readings from poets interspersed by open mic slots all coordinated by the wonderful Andrew Hopkins who started the symposiums a few years ago. There is also a pop up poetry bookshop, with books available from all the participating poets. The workshop will be suitable for everyone and you’ll hopefully end up with several drafts of new poems by the end. Tullie House is a lovely venue, so do come along and join me. To book your place for the workshop go to https://andyhopkinspoet.wordpress.com/workshops/
What an exciting evening we had; poems about animals, surgical instruments, being a step mother and morris dancing! Here is the link to the reading, I hope you enjoy. There is a poem about the death of an animal which a friend said should carry a ‘mascara warning’ as it made her cry, so be prepared for that one all you mascara wearers!
Ilse Pedler Poet 