Tag: poem

We’ll Meet You There

June 24, 2026

Writing on the hottest day of the year so far, I thought it appropriate to share an image of our collaborative poetry collection We’ll Meet You There (Dialect Press 2026). It is a gorgeous sunshine yellow which signifies the brightest joy and optimism but yellow can also can also signify caution and decay, appropriate for a collection of poetry about the future.

In 2024 I became more and more disillusioned with the trend in eco-poetry for a seemingly endless catalogue of loss and destruction which just seemed to have the effect of creating a state of climate anxiety and paralysis of action. I found other like-minded poets Alice Willitts and Hilary Watson and writers Katherine Stansfield and Laura Baggaley and together we searched for a different approach to the climate and other crises the planet was experiencing. We found Manda Scott’s ‘Thrutopia Masterclass’ and spent 18 months immersed in the study of thrutopia, working our way through topics such as regenerative agriculture and landscape adaptation, regenerative cities and architectural solutions for climate change, economic models and circular economies, community action groups and initiatives and much much more. Thrutopia charts a path between the horror of dystopia and the fantasy of utopia by using practical examples of adaptation and change to get from where we are now, to a future that is possible and achievable. It reinvigorated us and transformed our writing, at last here was something that brought us out of our state of hopelessness and inactivity into a place where we could promote change and encourage others by writing positively. We were sparked into a phase of creativity and inventiveness. We invented repurposed and retrofitted poetic forms to uncover expressions for this new way of looking at the world. We also found joy in our writing and in the collaborative process. We’ll Meet You There is the result and is the first ever collection of thrutopoetry (Alice invented the name for this new genre!) We asked the question ‘what do we need poetry to be in this time of immense and rapid change?” and we hope the collection provides some of the answers. We need to act and we need to act now and we need to spread the word more urgently than we’ve ever done before.

Thank you to Juliette Morton of Dialect Press for having faith in us and publishing this book.

This pamphlet is urgent and restorative – deeply attentive to the world in its precarity and insistent about the possibility of healing.

https://www.dialect.org.uk/bookshop/p/well-meet-you-there-preorder

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