Review of the Year 2024

Image: Performing ‘Mary Shelley Unbound’ – a Bournemouth Writing Festival commission on Mary Shelley’s birthday, St Peter’s Church, Bournemouth, August 30th 2024.

It has been a very busy and productive year. It is one of the weird things about age: I seem to get busier, not less! The year has not been without its challenges – it would be a falsehood to claim otherwise. It is harder and harder to remain hopeful amid so much shameless knavery, malfeasance, suffering, heartache, and sorrow — but I shall focus on the positive here. So forgive me if this comes across as trumpet-blowing, but if I don’t, no one will. And it is important to celebrate the good things. And my foremost wish here is to express gratitude to all those who have shared the road, lightened the load, and brightened the way this year. Thank you!

The year was dominated by the development, marketing, and launch of my MA Creative Writing course for Arts University Bournemouth. After a year of hard work behind the scenes (and a lifetime’s professional development which led to this point) it saw the light of day late May. I designed and led on the introductory unit, The Writer as Researcher, and it was a delight to meet my first cohort of students. I do love working with mature students who bring rich life experiences, skills, resources, and a real willingness to engage with the materials and push their practice. I also developed and led on Im/Possible Worlds later in the summer, and I’m currently developing my third unit, Writing in the Anthropocene, to launch next summer. It has been great to invite talented and experienced friends and colleagues to help work on these and other units, ensuring that the students have the breadth and depth that such a team can bring. It was a new experience – to step into a managerial role (within HE – I had once managed a charity shop, and a community resource), but one I was ready to embrace. It feels right for my stage of life and experience. I have often found myself in the role of not only taking the initiative to instigate something (when I have perceived a lack, a need, or an opportunity) but then having to run it, e.g., my small press, Awen Publications, which I was the director of for ten years. I have been doing that with my annual gathering, Bardfest, for a number of years, and this year I decided to dedicate it to a local charity encouraging the swifts, so renamed it Birdfest. I booked the town hall, organised the programme, and hosted the evening, which turned out to be a great success: another heartwarming evening of poetry, storytelling, and song with my talented friends stepping up to contribute something avian-related – and all for a good cause! The money raised will go towards an anthology celebrating swifts published by Little Toller/Common Ground.

I have been using the arts to raise awareness about environmental issues since 1991, when I organised by first charity benefit concert – for Greenpeace. These days I run my annual Writing the Earth programme for Earth Day; and a monthly eco-book club, Green Reads.

And, after a couple of years of hard work, my non-fiction book from Palgrave Macmillan, Writing Ecofiction, was finally published in late summer. I held a launch event at the lovely Beaminster Books.

Image: Launching Writing Ecofiction at Beaminster Books, Dorset

And I’m currently hard at work on my next publishing contract – a book on environmental aspects of Fantasy for Routledge. Somehow I manage to fit this in inbetween my lecturing, etc. Often it involves making the most of windows of opportunity, eg. I booked a cabin in the first week of September down in Cornwall to bash out another chapter, and I’m currently staying in a converted chapel in Brittany over Yuletide while I work on another two. Seize the day!

While we are on the subject of writing and publishing, I also took over the editorship of the BFS Journal for the British Fantasy Society. This involved a steep learning curve getting my head around InDesign, the DTP software used to prepare it for publication. I posted a call for submissions seeking articles on the Scottish visionary writer, George MacDonald, whose bicentenary we celebrated this year in December. I assembled a great team of regular contributors, and was delighted to receive submissions from an international cross-section of academics. After (again!) a lot of hard work (including contributing several articles, reviews, and artwork myself to fill in the gaps of this transition issue), BFS Journal #25 was published in December, and I hosted a lovely online launch showcase with the team. We wetted the baby’s head, toasted George MacDonald, and instigated a new chapter in the Journal’s history. Here’s to the future!

Yet it wasn’t all hard work, and no play.

I enjoyed a delightful weekend with two poet friends undertaking the Dorset Bard Hike – a route we created between Bridport and Dorchester and Durdle Dor, visiting sites associated with Dorset writers and reading out their work, and our own, in situ. It involved plenty of pitstops and turned into a kind of ‘Last of the Summer Cider’. We sang as we walked to keep our legs moving and spirits up. It was great fun, and a meaningful way to honour the writers of the past, and the special landscape we live in.

Image: Cheers! Rob, Kevan, and Roger share a well-earned drink at the end of the Dorset Bard Hike in The Sailor’s Return, Chaldon Herring.

I managed to fit in holidays to Paris, the Quantocks, Cornwall, and the lovely island of Vis (Croatia). Yet the highlight of all my vacations was a two-week cycle-camping tour around Brittany. I tied this in with the John Muir Trust ‘Journey for Wildness’ campaign, and raised money for their conservation work by cycling over 500 miles around the beautiful Breton peninsula, spending four rest days in Lorient to enjoy the Festivale Inter-Celtique, which was an amazing celebration of the 8 Celtic Nations in music, song, dance, costume, and crafts. The festival took over the whole town, and the atmosphere was very relaxed and family-friendly. I met a couple of fine fellas from Ireland there – musicians – and we became good friends, as we enjoyed the craic together. I had my phone stolen at a campsite, but meeting Mick and Tucker more than made up for it. Companionship is more important than possessions. Nevertheless, I had to draw upon my orienteering skills to get myself back to St Malo – thank goodness I know how to use a map and a compass! It turned the everyday into an adventure and I found my senses were far more alert than just relying upon a satnav. And it also stopped me from instinctively reaching for my phone to take a photo – encouraging me to be ‘in the moment’. At one point, as I sat on a bench by a canal to brew up one of my ’10-mile cuppas’, quietly enjoying the stillness on what turned out to be my longest day (80 miles in the rain) a family walked by with a couple of lovely big shaggy dogs. One of them, a husky, came over to me and instantly befriended me. He sat by myside and didn’t want to leave. A man’s best friend!

Image: Day 1 of my Journey for Wildness, heading west from Roscoff as the sun rose – two glorious weeks of cycling ahead!

Back home I gave a trio of sell-out performances: for Mary Shelley’s birthday; my Literary Landscapes of Dorset talk at the Dorset Museum; and Ghost Stories for Christmas at AUB. I also enjoyed storytelling in the Bridport Community Orchard over the summer, and I even joined in with the odd folk session at The Woodman, playing my bodhran and bones. It is good to have a hobby not related to words and work. Similarly, I have enjoyed getting into nature journalling at Kingcombe Nature Reserve, Dorset Wildlife Trust’s beautiful HQ. This encourages you to ‘stand and stare’, or sit and sketch/paint, and notice the minute incremental changes of the natural world throughout the seasons.

I enjoyed discussing my ecobardic approach on a couple of podcasts: the fabulous folklore podcast The Three Ravens, where I was one of their ‘Local Legends’, discussing my old home county of Northamptonshire and my research; and on ‘Unsee the Future’ with the impressive Timo Peach. You can listen to the first here, and watch the latter below.

So, a lively year, all told! And it doesn’t look like it’s going to slow down any time soon – I have lots of projects on the go. But I believe quality of life, and quality of soul, are the most important things, personally. No matter how busy I am I always find time for spending time in nature and spending time with friends. We have to cherish this one and precious life, in the same way we need to savour and defend this one and precious planet. There is much to be grateful for, and much to do. Many challenges await us, but with a deep connection to the land upon which you live, and with the ecologies of communities who live within it, one can find the resilience and inspiration to persevere and even to thrive.

Love & Awen,

Kevan Manwaring, Brittany, 30th December 2024