ThenDoBetter Grant: Elspeth Wilson

I’ve award a grant to Elspeth Wilson. She writes:

For me, writing is a way of exploring and understanding the world around me and how myself and others move through it. I am interested in how we live in our bodies and how we make them homes, and also exploring joy from a marginalised perspectiive. For the past year, I’ve been exploring Scottish mythology in my poems – these were the stories I was brought up on and it’s been both joyful and revealing to return to them as an adult and see how creatively rich they are for expansion and retellings.

Recently, I’ve been increasingly drawn to the selkie mythology – the selkie is a seal who can turn into a human – and I plan to write a series of poems using this mythology as a jumping off point to explore neurodiversity. Then Do Better will help me focus on these poems – which I hope will become a new collection – through dedicated time to write. The grant will also help me develop a new method of working; exploring climate crisis and living in a traumatised body both at a personal level and a global one is crucial to my work and I will be developing a site-specific way of writing. Through visiting places associated with selkie mythology, I hope to bring the body and place into my writing in a very literal way.

The grant will also enable me to have some mentoring sessions with an experienced poet so that I can make sure the poems are the best they can be and develop my craft with guidance. I’m really keen to bring these poems to a wider audience through publication, and hope that the grant will enable me to have a solid first draft that I can edit myself before submitting to publishers.

Her website is here.

More info on the grant is here.

To Jane To Sue

From this

comes this

And this

Witnesses this

I am. We are. Stewards.
Pass it on. Pass it on.

It is passed on. It is.

This mind. This memory.
Passed on. In your words.

In your touch. In your sound.
In your eyes. In your being.

We pass it on. We pass on. We pass. We.

I-we-you-she painting
an impossible song of love.

For Sue Dunkley and Jane Bodie.   Arts.  Autism.  Investing.

David Jones. Works grow over time.

I'm reading over writing I did 10 years and I'm amazed on what still seems relevant. It reminds me of some Ernest Hemingway (attrib) advice (commented on here and book here), don't compete with living writers. It's the dead ones that matter.

My neighbour and friend at Harvard, who was training to be a priest (and now is a wonderful priest - what makes an impact in Church work today - must be a whole other series of thoughts) gave me a book on David Jones.

Jones’ poems In Parenthesis and Anathemata are great works I come back to time and again (poetry foundation page here). They are not easy first reading but very rewarding.

letter to Colin Hughes on his work.  

The way the works grow on me... 

(or am I growing up? cf. Mark Twain (attrib)   - "When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years." 

 ...over time intrigues me in a world of seemingly ever faster, more connected instant media.  

[As an aside, Mark Zuckerberg in a remarkable letter that alters Facebook's fundamental purpose (at least articulated by him) does acknowledge some of these factors about connection and echo chambers. ]

David Jones was also a brilliant visual artist.

from his manuscript for In Parenthesis.  

He is known as a painter-poet.

From In Parenthesis, part 7

And to Private Ball it came as if a rigid beam of great weight
flailed about his calves, caught from behind by ballista-baulk
let fly or aft-beam slewed to clout gunnel-walker
below below below.
When golden vanities make about,
you’ve got no legs to stand on.
He thought it disproportionate in its violence considering
the fragility of us.
The warm fluid percolates between his toes and his left boot
fills, as when you tread in a puddle–he crawled away in the
opposite direction.

David Jones was born in south-east London to a Welsh father and a London-born mother. As his father had been discouraged from speaking Welsh as a child, David Jones did not speak the language. Yet Wales, Welsh and Welsh mythology would remain a significant component artistic influence.

He studied at Camberwell College of Arts, where his work was described as ‘leaving everything out except the magic.’ He enlisted at the beginning of World War One, serving from 1915 to 1918. He served longer on the Western Front than any other major war poet in the UK. This shaped his whole life.

He had traumatic breakdowns through out his life. Certain breakdowns would then make turning points in his artistic practice.

(C) David Jones estate, Tate collection

Jones also made beautiful type and engravings and post-war David Jones became a Roman Catholic. His Christianity would become increasingly important in his art. Post war, he came under the influence of Eric Gill, a religious artist.

TS Elliot and other poets of the period considered Jones work important.I believe if you compare In Parenthesis and Anathemata to Elliot's work you can see why.It must be someone's PhD thesis or more.

More recently In Parenthesis was turned into an opera by Iain Bell and WNO with Librettists Emma Jenkins and David Antrobus  (I'm not jealous, honest). It has also been a recording made a while back at the BBC.