This event will be held at the Maddermarket in Norwich [Entrance St John’s Alley, NR2 1DR]. Doors will be open at 7pm for a 7.30pm start. We are suggesting a donation of £3 for those who attend. The venue includes a bar. It will be possible to sign up for an Open Mic slot when you arrive.
Helen Ivory is a poet, collage and shadowbox artist. She teaches online for NCW/ UEA and edits the webzine Ink Sweat & Tears. Her fifth collection from Bloodaxe Books, The Anatomical Venus examines how women have been portrayed as ‘other’; as witches; as hysterics with wandering wombs and as beautiful corpses cast in wax, or on mortuary slabs in TV box sets, was published in 2019. It was shortlisted for the East Anglian Book Awards and won the East Anglian Writers ‘Book by the Cover Award’. Fool’s World a collaborative Tarot with the artist Tom de Freston (Gatehouse Press) won the 2016 Saboteur Award for Best Collaborative Work. A book of collage/ mixed media poems, Hear What the Moon Told Me, was published KFS in 2017, and a chapbook, Maps of the Abandoned City, by SurVision in 2019.
In 2020 she received Arts Council of England funding to research and write her next collection for Bloodaxe: Constructing a Witch which looks at cultural representations of the witch archetype, the menopause and the monstering of women, and will appear in 2024. She has work translated into Ukrainian, Polish, Spanish and Croatian as part of Versopolis. This year, MadHat Press (US) published her Wunderkammer: New and Selected Poems which is a wunderkammer of all of the above . . .
Joanna Guthrie’s first collection, Billack’s Bones, was published by RIALTO in 2007. Her second collection, Her Whereabouts, was published by Pindrop Press in Spring 2023. She has been widely published in poetry journals, was selected for Aldeburgh Eight in 2014, and has been awarded three times in the Gingko Ecopoetry prize. She also writes creative non-fiction, and has been awarded for this as well as published in Dark Mountain and The Guardian. She is currently working on a non-fiction project around the climate and ecological crisis, funded by Arts Council England. She appears in Out of Time: Writing from the Climate Emergency, which was published in 2021 by Valley Press and was a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation. She is involved in XR and XR Writers Rebel, and locally, the Stop the Wensum Link campaign. She lives in Norwich, and in her day job she works at MAP, the young people’s charity.
Her Whereabouts looks at personal grief and ecological grief: how does the line between these spheres hold, and how do the parallels between them manifest? How do we articulate and honour pain and unthinkable loss – for ourselves and for our world? And how might we learn to navigate the storms that are presenting themselves? Tiffany Atkinson has called it “an ambitious and accomplished second collection. Fierce, tender, resilient and frequently dazzling in their control of phrase and image, these are poems of clear-eyed compassion that will leave you freshly attuned to the ways in which acts of observation may themselves become a form of care and activism.” While Gillian Allnutt says: “Her Whereabouts is a collection brimful of the courage, energy, common sense and humour we are all in such need of now and in the time to come.”