Kevan Manwaring's Blog: The Bardic Academic, page 19
June 27, 2019
Hidden Window
Continuing on from my post The Accidental Pilgrim I just wanted to offer along with the new poem some of the photos I took in St Bees — the small settlement I arrived at on the west coast of Cumbria after two weeks walking following Wainwright’s Coast to Coast path (albeit in the opposite direction) — and an anecdote about my experiences at the key site.
[image error]
The statue of St. Bega, St Bees. Photo by K. Manwaring, 2019.
Praise Song to St Bega
You fled your soft green home
to escape the unwanted attention of men.
In a scrap of a boat you braved
the wild Fenian sea.
You made landfall here
on this hard Cumbrian coast
that juts its grizzled chin
out in defiance at all
seabound invaders.
Yet welcomes stray saints
— though you were an errant Princess then,
until you asked haughty Lord Egremont for
some land to create a place of prayer.
He laughed, said, have all that you can see
that is covered by snow on the morrow.
The next day was midsummer
and the snowflakes fell —
angel fists,
claiming this as
Holy Ground.
(the above poem I composed after my arrival in St Bees, footsore and exhausted from my long trek – I found the lovely statue in a garden by the station, sat down and wrote this).
[image error]
Stained glass window depicting St Bega, hidden from public view. Photo by K. Manwaring, 2019.
The next morning, Midsummer’s Day, I visited the church dedicated to St Bega before getting on my train back home. I couldn’t find any shrine (presumably destroyed in the Dissolution) or icon of her, but sat in silent contemplation and found that a meaningful experience in itself. As I got up to leave the sexton came in, turning on the lights – I had been sitting in the gloom without realising it. I asked him if there were anything associated with the saint on display. He said no, but … there was a stained glass window – hidden from public view, in the corner of what is now a kind of utility area. I was thrilled to see it, and take a photo. When I explained my deep delight at being there (a two week impromptu pilgrimage, serendipitously timed to arrive on Midsummer’s Eve, and ‘St Bega’s Day’) he immediately dismissed the saint tale as nonsense – which seemed rather thoughtless, considering my effort. The same could be said, it could be argued, about the far-fetched foundation of his faith (the story of Jesus being the ultimate saint tale), but I didn’t want to be gauche or ungrateful after he had kindly showed me the window. Of course, believing in these saint tales literally is missing the point. It is the imaginative engagement (or act of faith) which is the key – they are, after all, only symbols of the profounder truths they point to, and to literalise them is to confuse the sign with with the signifier. I still felt a visceral response to making it to St Bega’s church on her ‘day’ — it was a private epiphany earned the hard way, and perhaps one that can’t be shared, except with fellow pilgrims. Of course, the very nature of my singular ‘pilgrimage’ made that impossible. I hadn’t met a single hiker walking east-to-west like me, and how many have made the long journey for Midsummer, in honour of St Bega? Very few, I imagine, but with the 900th anniversary of the church’s founding next year perhaps a few more would be willing to honour her on the 23rd and 24th June? The Coast to Coast route seems like a ready made ‘El Camino’ awaiting the feet of the faithful or foolish.
[image error]
The Priory Church of St Mary and St Bega, founded in 1120. Photo by K. Manwaring, 2019.
June 26, 2019
The Accidental Pilgrim
‘We’ve gone on holiday by mistake!’ Withnail and I
A pilgrimage suggests a significant degree of intentionality, a desire to shrive one’s sins, to extirpate some failure of character or traumatic memory, or to reconnect with the ‘true’ spiritual life – by aligning one’s physical path, literally, with a spiritual one. In medieval times, the duration and ardour of the journey had significance: the hard and longer the pilgrimage, the holier it was perceived to be. Thus, three pilgrimages to Bardsey Island, off the tip of the Llyn Peninsula, was thought to be the equivalent of one trip to Rome (in medieval ‘God miles’, so to speak). Not being Christian these traditional holy pilgrimages interest me less than one’s that have personal significance to me – these usually entail literary pilgrimages (to places associated with a particular writer or text), but might also include to prehistoric sites or sites considered to be ‘sacred’ by modern pagans. Glastonbury Tor was my first such pilgrimage (when I was 18), and Avebury another (walking the Ridgeway to it over 4 days); also thumbing it to Crough Patrick in the west of Ireland, and Mon St Michel in Brittany as a long-haired art student in love with all things Celtic. Over the last few years I have undertaken long walks at the end of the academic year – as a kind of ‘detox’ from modern life and the demands of my profession.
Since 2014 these sabbatical walkabouts have got increasingly longer – extending from the 84 miles of Hadrian’s Wall, to the 268 miles of the Pennine Way – but this year I decided to eschew that, going for quality not quantity. Still the Coast to Coast, at 192 miles, crossing 3 national parks (North Yorkshire Moors; Yorkshire Dales; the Lake District) and several thousand feet of peaks (28,235 ft of climb) is not to an easy walk by any stretch. The terrain (and sometimes brutal weather conditions) make it taxing on the legs and morale. With a full pack (one weighing nearly sixty pounds in my case), even more so (I camped along the way and had to take everything with me). Yet I didn’t want to just follow the customary route, from St Bees on the west coast of Cumbria, to Robin Hood’s Bay, on the Yorkshire side. I decided to tackle it in ‘reverse’, (of most guidebook advice and the direction of the majority of walkers) – from east to west, ending at St Bees. This would save the Lakes until last, and align with many pilgrim routes which go from east to west (El Camino de Santiago being the most famous). It is the ‘way of the sun’, and mirrors the Via Lactea, the Milky Way, the celestial pilgrimage route that our solar system is one tiny dancing part of.
And so I planned my trip accordingly. The decision to go east to west was instinctive – it just felt right. It was only when I set out that I discovered that Saint Bega, the 9th Century Irish princess associated with St Bee’s, my terminus, is connected with Midsummer. And so I had unwittingly transformed my long-distance walk into a pilgrimage. After several years of walking mainly national trails I felt a yearning for something more meaningful to reciprocate my effort – not just a random slog between two arbitrary points – and here I had alighted upon just the thing.
Although I didn’t make heavy weather of this spiritualised repurposing of my walk (I had plenty enough of that, spending the first few days walking into the teeth of a storm) it did add a certain frisson to the last few days, as I entered the solstice period and the Romantic Sublime landscape of the Lakes. The weather improved, suffusing everything with a lush, golden immanence. I had saved the ‘best ‘til last’, the Lakes serving as a dramatic final act of my perambulatory fortnight’s narrative arc. And I did feel like a medieval pilgrim when I hobbled into St Bee’s on Sunday afternoon, after approximately 80 hours of walking. What made my arrival especially resonant was the association with the St Bega legend’s and midsummer (eve). She was said to have arrived in the area on 23rd June – she asked the local lord, Egremont, for some land. He, sardonically, said, ‘As much as is covered by snow on the morrow.’ The next day being midsummer shows how niggardly this gesture was. But lo, St Bega, prayed and it snowed on midsummer’s day! And so St Bega built her church on the land covered by that miraculous snowfall. However apocryphal the legend (one that has echoes in the legend of St Melangell in Mid-Wales; and of St Bridget’s cloak in Kildare – and other defiant stories of female empowerment in the face of patriarchal authority) it was enough of a folkloric node to give my journey some symbolic significance, arriving on midsummer’s eve, and visiting her church on midsummer’s day felt like a fitting finale of my accidental pilgrimage. I had turned the trail on its head and shifted its emphasis from Alfred Wainwright (still honoured by a pint at both the Wainwright Bar in the Bay Hotel, Robin Hood’s Bay; and one in the Coast to Coast bar in the Manor House Hotel, St Bee’s) to St Bega, creating a personalised ‘C2C’. I am sure old AW would have approved. Indeed, he advocated as such:
‘Plan your own marathon and do something never done before, something you will enjoy, a route that will take you to places often read about but never yet seen.’
And plans are afoot for a completely new pilgrimage route for next year – one I wish to undertake not solo, but in a fellowship of kindred spirits… I believe anyone can create their own personalised pilgrimage – it doesn’t have to be anything epic or masochistic: it could be a journey to any place of profound significance that requires a degree of effort (in accordance to one’s ability – for some with limited mobility that may be just to the park or to a viewpoint). Sometimes we don’t even know the real significance until we get there. We can all be accidental pilgrims.
Praise Song to St Bega
You fled your soft green home
to escape the unwanted attention of men.
In a scrap of a boat you braved
the wild Fenian sea.
You made landfall here
on this hard Cumbrian coast
that juts its grizzled chin
out in defiance at all
seabound invaders.
Yet welcomes stray saints
— though you were an errant Princess then,
until you asked haughty Lord Egremont for
some land to create a place of prayer.
He laughed, said, have all that you can see
that is covered by snow on the morrow.
The next day was midsummer
and the snowflakes fell —
angel fists,
claiming this as
Holy Ground.
A Pilgrim’s Joy
My feet burn
but my heart is light.
My body aches,
but my spirit soars high.
My worldly goods
are rags and tatters,
but I am wealthy beyond measure.
I have walked the Holy Road
and I am blessed.
I have walked the Holy Road
and I am cleansed.
I have walked the Holy Road
and I am reborn.
Poems and text copyright © Kevan Manwaring 2019
June 7, 2019
Unpacking Psychogeography
Guy Debord, 1955 (?) “Psychogeographic guide of Paris: edited by the Bauhaus Imaginiste Printed in Dermark by Permild & Rosengreen – Discourse on the passions of love: psychogeographic descents of drifting and localisation of ambient unities”
Psychogeography, in its broadest sense, has a long and fascinating tradition. Although Debord claimed and colonised the term in post-war France (first in the Letterist pamphlet Potlatch, 1954; and then in numerous pronouncements via its evolution, the Situationist International, from 1957) there are many antecedents, influences, and developments. In two distinctive traditions, one based in London (the Robinsonade) and the other in Paris (the Flâneur), leys of affinity can be gleaned: although as with Alfred Watkin’s 1922 notion of the ‘ley’, how much is geographical serendipity, geomantic intentionality, or the projection and pre-occupations of the viewer is hard to say. In hindsight, viewed from the hill of the here-and-now, there seems to be a parallax movement emerging autocthonically from the labyrinths of London and Paris. Psycho-geographical commentators like to cite Daniel Defoe as the ‘Godfather of Psychogeography’ (when not citing Blake, De Quincey, Baudelaire, Machen, Poe, or Stevenson), with his Journal of a Plague Year (1722). Ur-texts like Confessions of an English Opium-eater (1821), The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), The London Adventure (1924), and The Old Straight Track (1925) on this side of the English Channel; and the works Baudelaire (e.g. ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, 1863) and the Dadaists and Surrealists, Aragon’s Paris Peasant (1926), Breton’s Nadja (1928), and Soupault’s The Last Night in Paris (1928) act as reliable co-ordinates. Important outliers include Edgar Allan Poe’s story, ‘The Man in the Crowd’ (1840), James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), and the writing of Heinrich von Kleist and Heinrich Heine, extending the ‘leyline’ to Boston (Poe’s birthplace if not the setting of his story), Dublin, Berlin, and Vienna. This anti-tradition has been perpetuated via various literary dérive (Debord’s term for his psychogeographical technique of drifting and qualia capture) by an irregular cohort of free radicals, including Walter Benjamin, John Michel, Iain Sinclair, Alan Moore, Peter Ackroyd, Patrick Keiller, and others. Notably, this inshore drift has been dominated by solitary (white) males and an obsessive focus on the urban. Fortunately, a counter-tradition to all this flâneury has welled up, as articulated in the writings of Rebecca Solnit (notably Wanderlust, 2000), and Lauren Elkin’s book on the Flâneuse (2016). Other variations or subsets include: ‘mythography’, ‘deep topography’, ‘deep mapping’ (as brilliantly expressed by Nan Shepherd in The Living Mountain), ‘cyclogeography’, and ‘wayside inspiration’ (a term the writer Peter Alfred Please coined to describe his particular form of intimate travel-writing). I would add to this parameter space the Immrama (Celtic wonder voyages, e.g. the voyage of St. Brendan); and the New Nature Writing, which blends travel-writing and memoir into the long tradition in works like Waterlog, Weeds, Edgelands, Crow Country, Wild, The Outrun, and The Salt Path. Robert Macfarlane’s oeuvre almost deserves a category of its own – in tomes like The Old Ways, Landmarks, and Underland he deep dives into language and landscape with dazzling erudition and daring, in prose that glitters like mica. None of these later writers would claim to be psychogeographers, but there are important elements in their work – textual nutrients – which psychogeography needs if it is to continue and flourish. The thin soil of the capital city is depleted, and the 21st Century dériviant needs to look further afield for its seeds to thrive.
Copyright ©Kevan Manwaring, 7th June, 2019
Un/Packing Psychogeography – a checklist
As the Psychogeography Editor of Panorama: the journal of intelligent travel, I would like to provide the following (fluid, playful, provocative) criteria for those considering submission for one of our call-outs. See previous post for details
Leaving Behind
Capitals (London; Paris anyway…)
Solipsistic intellectualism.
The pontifications of the lone, white male.
Obfuscation and needless jargon.
A performance of erudition over a sincere, embodied engagement and strong sense of voice.
‘Wikipedia-lit’ and Rough Guide
Self-importance (it’s only going for a walk).
Maps (‘Done with the compass, done with the chart’, Emily Dickinson).
Smart devices.
Footnotes, end-notes, a bibliography (‘death-by-quotes’).
Taking with Us
A compassionate, curious gaze.
A visceral, authentic response.
The Flâneuse.
A multi-dimensional form of exploration, one that is both diachronic and immediate, vertical as well as horizontal, outward as well as inward.
Self-excavation – a form of travel through one’s own history.
Body writing – maps of the skin.
Voices of the marginalized: the psychogeographies of indigenous peoples, BAME, LGBTQ+, Traveller culture, asylum seekers and refugees, working class, etc.
An awareness and acknowledgement of the challenges of the Climate Crisis, and the seismic destabilisation of the Anthropocene (‘The Earth has moved,’ Prof. Bruno Latour).
Humility: a disavowal of omniscience.
An ethical foregrounding. A responsible form of writing, sensitive but not apologetic. An exoticisation of the self, perhaps, but not the ‘other’.
Humour.
Soulfulness: a Psyche-geography, rather than a Psycho-geography.
Mindfulness (mind in one’s feet; mind in the pen).
Contact Kevan if you are interested in submitting: psychogeographyeditor[at]panoramajournal[dot]org
June 6, 2019
Psychogeography – call for submissions
Beachy Head, Eric Ravilious, 1939
PANORAMA: the Journal of Intelligent Travel
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS 2019/2020
Panorama emphasises writing and photography which is created with a deep intelligence, reconnecting us to the world.
Psychogeography: we seek works that eschew the formulaic and solipsistic intellectualism of psychogeography for a more visceral, authentic engagement with the environment, with the other, and with the self: a verticality of exploration, rather than the pose of the flâneur. Writing that is experimental, or from marginalised/under-represented voices, especially welcome. Traditional travelogue format is not essential – beautifully-crafted prose is. Remember it is creative non-fiction we are after, not academic essays. 1500-3000 words. Please send expressions of interest and/or completed works to Psychogeography Editor, Dr Kevan Manwaring. Include a short bio and introduction to your work in the body of your email. Title email: [Theme]/Psychogeography.
For more on our guidelines, read our FAQ’s and Submissions page on the website.
Call Outs:
· Roots (call is out now, until 20 Aug.)
· Love and Lust (for Spring issue 2020)
· Islands (for Summer 2020)
· Childhood (for Autumn 2020)
· Pilgrimage (for Spring 2021)
Send to: psychogeographyeditor@panoramajournal.org
June 4, 2019
Dream Town
[image error]
In a sleepy town on the edge of the Cotswolds extraordinary things start to happen…
One day a young art student wakes up to discover the whole town fast asleep…
A depressed middle-aged man goes for a walk in a local area known as ‘The Heavens’ and discovers it lives up to its name in more ways than one…
A hiker stumbles upon a strange cult in a deep dark wood on the Welsh border…
A soldier doing a runner from the internment camps at Dover experiences a transformative night at a legendary oak…
Hitting the trail with his guitar and a bottle of Thunderbirds, a youth full of dreams of fame encounters a lady of dark enchantment in a Fairy knoll…
A man is led by a raven-cloaked woman along a trail between the borders of the world he knows and one he does not …
A family move into their dream house on the edge of the Cotswolds and discover their new home has a remarkable history that does not want to stay in the past …
Welcome to Dream Town – on the border of the world you think you know …
***
This collection of 7 stories brings together work inspired by living on the edge of the Cotswolds (on the borders of England and Wales) for over twenty years.
Available in e-book and Print Version
Roots – Call for Submissions
January 2020 issue: Roots
Opens for submissions 5/20/2019 and closes for submissions 8/20/2019.
Roots: /ru: ts/ origin: late Old English rōt, from Old Norse rót ; related to Latin radix, also to wort. Noun. 1. The part of a thing attaching it to a greater, or more fundamental whole; the end or base. 2. The origin of something; family, cultural, or ethnic origins; a scion or descendant.
‘Among the great struggles of man-good/evil, reason/unreason, etc.-there is also this mighty conflict between the fantasy of Home and the fantasy of Away, the dream of roots and the mirage of the journey.’
― Salman Rushdie
‘He needed his roots. There is a place in the world where we are born, where we learn our mother tongue and discover how our ancestors overcame the problems they had to face.
He needed wings too. They reveal to us the endless horizons of the imagination, they carry us to our dreams and to distant places. It is our wings that allow us to know the roots of our fellow men and learn from them.’
― Paulo Coelho
‘I’m not sure which matters more—where the seed comes from, or where it takes root and grows.’
― Zetta Elliott
For this issue–the first of our four quarterly collections in 2020– we have chosen the theme of ‘roots’ and are especially interested in travelogues that explore the concepts of rootedness and rootlessness, home and homelessness, the wanderer who moves from place to place with no end in sight and the traveler who seeks to find themselves or their histories on their journeys. Belonging. Immigration. Displacement. Familial ties broken or discovered. Connections to cities, landscapes, and peoples reaching back to one’s beginnings–or the solitary traveler who leaves that all behind. For this call we will not accept queries or pitches, only completed works previously unpublished, with the exception of photography essays or book excerpt selections. Please see our FAQ and Submissions page for more information, and for specific sections and submission length and information, read on below.
Sections open to the public for the Roots issue:
Note: we have chosen the American South as our featured location for the Roots issue. While we will publish a multitude of works from many places, we will also feature several works on this region. If your essay, imagery, or poem features the American South, please make a note of it in your email when you send in your work.
Travel memoir: we seek works of nonfiction travel memoir with a strong narrative arc, about traveling home or elsewhere.1500 to 6000 words. Please send completed works to Editor-in-Chief Amy Gigi Alexander. Include a short bio and introduction to your work in your email to editorinchief@panoramajournal.org, and title email Roots/Travel Memoir.
Travel fiction: we seek works of fiction around the specific theme of ‘imaginary journeys/roots.’ Fictional works must include a journey to a place and hybrid works [a blending of fiction and nonfiction] will be considered as well as experimental works. We do not currently publish science fiction, but we are open to earth-land-sea -air fantastical journeys of any kind, as long as they are travelogue style and modeled on traditional journeys. 1500-3000 words. Please send completed works to Fiction Editor Vimi Bajaj. Include a short bio and introduction to your work in your email to fictioneditor@panoramajournal.org, and title email Roots/Travel Fiction.
Triptych: we seek three works on Miami, either by writers who live in Miami or who have traveled there. We are particularly interested in works by writers of color for this section, which features three perspectives by three different writers traveling a single place. 1500 words. You may email us if you have questions about this section or are an emerging writer of color who wishes to write a piece about Miami. Please send completed works or questions to Senior Editor Ernest White II. Include a short bio and introduction to your work in your email to eewhite2@panoramajournal.org, and title email Roots/Triptych Miami.
Travel poetry: we seek poetry with a strong travel narrative. 1-2 pages. Please send completed works to Poetry Editor David Ishaya Osu. Include a short bio and introduction to your work in your email to poetryeditor@panoramajournal.org, and title email Roots/Poetry.
Book excerpt: we seek a book excerpt with a strong travelogue and roots theme, although it need not be a travel book. We will reprint one chapter of the text in the roots issue, and prefer an upcoming or recent book already published. You may email the Editor-in-Chief Amy Gigi Alexander about your book and its correlation to the theme before arranging the text to be sent, at editorinchief@panoramajournal.org, and title email: Roots/Book Excerpt.
Psychogeography: we seek works of psychogeography that blend landscapism and sense of place or placelessness with traveling to either find one’s roots or lose them. Experimental works are especially welcome, traditional travelogue format is not essential. 1500-3000 words. Please send completed works to Editor-in-Chief Amy Gigi Alexander. Include a short bio and introduction to your work in your email to editorinchief@panoramajournal.org, and title email Roots/Travel Psychogeography.
http://www.panoramajournal.org/
June 3, 2019
Performing Fairy – CFP
[image error]
Beltane Fire Society, Edinburgh, 2018. Photography by Daniel Rannoch.
CALL FOR PAPERS FOR SPECIAL ISSUE: PERFORMING FAIRY
Guest Editors Kevan Manwaring and [TBC]
Revenant: Critical and Creative Studies of the Supernatural (www.revenantjournal.com) is now accepting abstracts for critical articles, creative writing pieces, and book, film, music, or event reviews for a themed issue on ‘Performing Fairy’, examining contemporary and historical intersections of phenomenological fairy practice.
PERFORMING FAIRY:
contemporary & historical intersections of phenomenological Fairy Practice.
Heere is the queene of fayerye,
With harpe and pipe and symphonye,
Dwellynge in this place.
The Shipman’s Tale, Chaucer (lines 813-816)
From Chaucer to Shakespeare, Spenser to Tennyson, there has always been an element of performance in the perceived nature and representation of Fairy. Both the content and the tradition that preserves and develops it operates upon this performativity. The tradition bearers – the tellers of tales and singers of songs – conjured Fairy with their words and music. The Reverend Robert Kirk, author of the monograph of The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies (1691/1815) made the first mention of the phrase ‘Fayrie Tale’, and in his proto-anthropological survey of the ‘Subterraneans’, as he termed them, described how they mirrored the culture and customs of the country they dwelled in cthonically. There are many mentions of their particular penchant for enchantment – glamourye – a weaponisation of illusion to deceive, seduce, control, terrify, bewilder, or drive to madness. Their beauty is their weapon. Icily amoral and wearily immortal, they find amusement in mortals’ fleeting lives. Supernatural Border ballads such as ‘Thomas the Rhymer’ and ‘Tam Lin’ describe perilous encounters between Fairy and mortal. Numerous folk tales dramatize similar bitterly won wisdoms – fortune may be bestowed, but in a flash lost. Those who encounter the deadly glamour of the Fairy become ‘fey’ and fade away, pining to death for the elusive sublime. Yet despite the many taboos and warnings, humans have found Fairy perennially fascinating. As an anti-Enlightenment project the Fairy offered a conciliatory corrective to the hard materialities of Empiricism and Atheism (Addison, 1712/Sandner, 2004/ Pask, 2013) – a counter discourse to the Age of Reason, the Industrial Revolution, Modernism, the Atomic Age, and the Digital. Lovers of folklore, of ‘fairy sites’, and culture continue to turn to its alluring nexus of the supernatural, the Otherworldly, and the hauntingly beautiful. Perhaps this is not surprising. JRR Tolkien cited ‘escape’ as one of the functions of the Fairy-story, defending this emancipatory quality robustly: “Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?” And thus we see in the mass appeal of Fantasy books, TV series, films, computer games, comic books, cos-play, LARP, and so forth (many of which draw upon tropes derived from the Fairy Tradition) a sustained effort to ‘escape’, to breach the walls of reality, or at least experience for a little while re-enchantment (via a willing suspension of the consensus reality). Some go beyond this to actively engage with Fairy in ritualistic ways – Neo-pagans, modern ‘fairy pilgrims’, participants in events like the Beltane celebrations in Glastonbury and Edinburgh. Adopting Husserl’s definition of phenomenology, is it possible to define a ‘phenomenology of fairy’? What is being accessed or recreated by these participants in their lifeworlds? Do any common features emerge in the individual noesis and the noematic act? What effect is being experienced by the reader? the viewer? the audience? And is this the same as that intended by the creator, writer, performer? What fugue states were entered into by the creative during their process of creation – and can any analogies be drawn with folkloric material? Is the act of ‘performing fairy’ – on page, stage, screen, studio – a form of Lévy-Bruhl’s participation mystique? And what, if anything, can be achieved by such sympathetic magic? How does performing fairy critique or subvert the dominant discourse?
Contributing to this discourse, we invite abstracts for pieces that examine the role of the Fairy Tradition and its evolution as a cultural marker and interrogator of societal issues across film, TV, literature, video games, art, or music. These topics could include, but are not limited to:
Folklore and rites of Fairy.
Contemporary performance of Fairy at festivals and events.
Representations of Fairy in popular culture.
The Cottingley Fairy hoax, reception and legacy.
Fairy doors, liminality, portals.
Fairy customs in different cultures.
Contemporary performance practice inspired by Fairy.
Gender representation in Fairy.
Race and class in Fairy.
Fairy theory.
Fairy tourism.
Neo-Pagan Fairy practitioners.
Fairy sites.
Digital Fairy – Fairy worlds online.
For articles and creative pieces (such as poetry, short stories, flash fiction, videos, artwork and music) please send a 2-300-word abstract and a short biography by October 31st, 2019. If your abstract is accepted, the full article (maximum 7000 words, including Harvard referencing) or the full creative piece (maximum 5000 words) will be due April 30th, 2020. The aim is to publish later that year. Reviews of books, films, games, events, and art related to the Fairy Tradition will be considered (800-1,000 words in length). Please send full details of the title and medium you would like to review as soon as possible. Further information, including Submission Guidelines, are available at the journal website: www.revenantjournal.com. Enquiries are welcome and, along with all submissions, should be directed to km468@le.ac.uk . If emailing the journal directly at revenant@falmouth.ac.uk please quote ‘Fairies special issue’ in the subject box.
May 30, 2019
Folk – a review
Folk by Zoe Gilbert – a review
After sampling a few so-called ‘Folk Realism’ novels (a current fad in British publishing) I must admit that I sceptical when I saw Gilbert’s Folk advertised. For a start, it sported the overly ornate ‘wallpaper’ cover design, similarly in vogue, so that wasn’t a good sign. And so – was it also going to be like others in this emergent genre: exploiting the aesthetic of a folkloric world-view in a light ‘window-shopping’ style, a form of literary tourism that exploits the cache of a particular genre in a cosmetic way, denuded of its nutrients? Books like the overly-hyped The Essex Serpent and The Loney are actually Realist novels, masquerading as the Eerie, or the Gothic. Their obsessive mimetic style reinforces a hard reality, an ontological materialism that forecloses mythic possibility. Well, when I finally got round to reading Gilbert’s book I was more than pleasantly surprised – for it is the real deal. The author is completing a PhD on folklore in fiction, and her knowledge shows – not only in the confident dramatisation of classic folkloric tropes (a novelist’s magpie raid on the Aarne-Thompson index), but in her exquisite prose. Unlike an awful lot of modern fiction, Gilbert’s prose does not read ‘thin’ – she clearly delights in the possibilities of language, and her sentences and paragraphs have a poetic charge to them, without being precious. Her style does not get in the way of the story, but rather instantiates it – by reading her heady prose is to be locked into the stifling superstitious mindset of a closed community. Gilbert’s narrative is a composite novel comprising of several tale-chapters which bring alive the lives of the inhabitants of the small isolated island of Neverness (loosely based upon the Isle of Man, where the author spent some time). It is a strange brew which blends supernatural ballads and folk tales with a dash of The Wicker Man, The Prisoner, and even The League of Gentlemen. These local stories for local people feature selkies, water bulls, a boy with a wing for an arm, doomed love, mad bird men, fungal cults, domestic abuse and forbidden pleasures. The villagers are locked into their rhythms and rituals of desire, propitiation, divination, and destruction. Gathering together previously published short stories, stitched into a loose-fitting framing device, one might expect a rather episodic, and uneven feel. There is a quiet sense of progression and causality to the collection – one stretching over generations – but this isn’t a novel driven by a plot-imperative. Narrative traction is provided by the quality of the prose (and richness of the imagined world) itself. Some of the tale-chapters are tour-de-forces of sustained enchantment. One could play ‘spot the folk tale’ or ballad, but that would be missing the point – better to plunge into gorse, even as its flames lick at your heels. Before you know it, the Gorse-Mother will have you in her arms, and you won’t be able to escape.
Kevan Manwaring 2019
Folk is published by Bloomsbury.
May 29, 2019
Hawk Tongue
‘the beautiful youth appears, haloed with green life…’ by Kevan Manwaring 2019
Hawk Tongue
You can be counting sheep when it happens,
in that friable terrain between waking and sleeping –
head heavy, shoulders drooping
(as though laden with a wool-sack)
when in a sigil of summer lightning
the beautiful youth appears,
haloed with green life
golden limbed, quiver brimming
with keen-fletched darts.
Upon his wrist, a deadly weapon of
talons, pinions, beak, and eyes
of angry fire.
You don’t know whether to rise to greet him,
this strange friend, welcoming foe, or flee.
You have known of him all of your life
and now you are terrified
for he summons you from
the slumbering hills.
Fist raised, he releases his feathered prayer –
death-line, as it swoops in for the coup de grâce,
straight into the O of your open mouth,
to small for it, spitting plumage,
as it burrows down your gullet,
exploding lungs, lurching stomach.
Your scream becomes a shriek,
and eyes burn with flame of a stolen sun.
Shuddering, you flap your arms uselessly.
but when you begin to speak
words like wings fly from your mouth.
Kevan Manwaring © 2019
This tantalising folkloric fragment (contained in a letter to the antiquary John Aubrey from the Welsh metaphysical poet, Henry Vaughan) has haunted me for a number of years since I came across it in a tome on bardic lore. I recently worked it up into a story and poem for performance at The Fairy Gathering, Dungworth, held in early May.
May 28, 2019
Pitch Perfect
Pitch Perfect
Within tent, I am blessed
by the benison of bird song,
babble of news from the hillsides
carried by grough and Grindsbrook.
Kinder the moors now, trespasses forgiven.
Ceasefire rules, unless you’re a grouse.
Rivers of wind carry the blood
of the sky in arteries of noise.
The Parliamentarian caw of crows
negotiate their black-feathered borders.
Hiker laughter from the packhorse bridge,
chalkboard squeal of schoolkids.
And blackbird, the soloist,
amid the raucous orchestra.
After the sharp-angled rain the sun
sweeps up the smashed mirrors
of wet light.
And here, in a green chapel,
the campers practise their pitch.
Field Head Campsite, Edale, 25th May
Kevan Manwaring©2019
