Wandering and pondering

A couple of weeks back, on Thursday 24 April, I launched my latest poetry pamphlet, Wanderland, a Poetry Book Society Summer 2025 Listing and nominated for the prestigious Wainwright Prize. We celebrated with a wonderful evening of readings, including kinepoetics from Scott Thurston and poems about concrete (but not concrete poems) by Lydia Unsworth, who even agreed to revisit the Oulipian collaboration we made for European Poetry Festival a bit back.

So Wanderland is out with Red Ceilings Press (the same publisher as Lune), as they make lovely little A6 numbers, perfect for popping in your pocket and taking for a wander and a ponder, which is what Wanderland was inspired by and what it aims to inspire in its readers. Wanderland brings together three sequences about wandering and pondering. It lifts off with ‘Flight Patterns’, inspired by the RSPB’s Manchester origins and a pioneering ornithologist uncle, tours the watery world of Ilkley’s moorland spas and springs (from my Ilkley Literature Festival residency), and ends up visiting various urban-rural edgelands via a series of 100-word prose poems, which appeared last spring in the special Urban/Rural edition of Spelt Magazine.

Anyway, the Red Ceilings online store has already sold out of their copies of Wanderland, but I ordered extra, so numbered and signed limited editions are still available direct from me. Indeed, this weekend, I'll be reading from the book at this year’s Weaver Words Literature Festival in Frodsham, where I went to high school, so you can snag a copy then; I'll bring my best pens. 

I'm going to perform the sequence of poems from the collection called ‘Flight Patterns’, featuring endangered British birds, written in tribute to Emily Williamson, who, 135 years ago, launched her Wear No Feathers campaign and subsequently set up the forerunner to the RSPB near to where I now live in South Manchester. I was commissioned to write ‘Flight Patterns’ for Didsbury Arts Festival and premiered the 12 poems (one for each month of the year, and for each of the 11 newly red-listed birds at that time, plus one for "all the birds") to a packed room at the Old Parsonage on a sweltering day in the summer of 2023. The performance, complete with birdsong and church bells and Ladybird books and poetry map and a bit of background on the process of making it, went down really well and received lots of lovely comments. I'm not yet quite sure how I'm going to squish it into half an hour, but I'm sure it'll work out fine.

So a bit more about the book. Wanderland is a meditation on getting lost in nature without venturing too far from the North of England’s urban sprawl. From the feathered friends of Manchester to the watery world of Ilkley’s moorland spas and springs, these poems urge you to take a moment to breathe. Welcome to the Wanderland journey – two poetry maps reconnect you with the hidden wonders sharing our towns and cities; a third sequence is for wherever you find yourself in the edgelands. Pop the book in your pocket and discover the paths yourself or escape from that bus commute with a virtual wander in the great outdoors.

I said on the Red Ceilings mailout: “I’m inspired by nature and the North, and fascinated by place and language. I’d like everyone to feel welcome on the Wanderland journey – follow in my footsteps and read the pieces in situ or join me for a virtual wander, getting lost in the great outdoors from the comfort of your own armchair.” Here are some rare ducks I spotted on the River Mersey down the road.

Wanderland has had a fabulous reception, with me offering lots of little sneak peeks into it at different readings, trying to keep it so noone has to hear the same thing twice. Last night, we were in Prestwich, at Crooked Poets, where there were, happily, some paintings of birds hanging just to the right-hand side of the microphone as I wittered on to the audience. 

Will Mackie, in New Writing North’s New and Recent Poetry from the North: Spring 2025 round-up, said: “Sarah-Clare Conlon’s Wanderland is full of gorgeous observational poems about nature that are lovely to read and greatly skilled. Poems like ‘Colour by Numbers’ and ‘Thoughts on Silence’ have beautiful, memorable lines that conjure precise visual images.”

I garnered a cover blurb from Rachel Bower: "This is an intricate collection of wonder and maps and journeys. Some of the poems carry us through the year; others guide us through rivers and woods; streets and skies; birds and storms. The series of poems anchored by the specific site of Ilkley Moor brings the landscape vividly to life. Beautiful poems of treasure and nature and light." 

And another from Jennifer Lee Tsai: "In Wanderland, Sarah-Clare Conlon takes us on an odyssey through nature and the edgelands of the North West. In these lyrical poems, we encounter ‘heartening aerial sights’, ‘sikes and sandbanks, marshes and margins’. There’s a sense of playfulness in these sequences of sudden reveries as Conlon invites us to ‘close your eyes and listen’, to see ‘starshine/in the gutter’. Her arresting use of language exhorts us to ‘imprint a pattern’ and ‘create our own ripple effect’. This is a gorgeous pamphlet – stylishly crafted, attentive and attuned to the surprises of the world around us, mindful of our place within it."

And as for the cover itself, the watercolour is by Susan Platt, who called it Poetic Nuthatch. The nuthatch is the second bird to feature in the book, "all disco eyeliner". Sue studied Fine Art at Manchester Polytechnic in the 1980s and has worked extensively within gallery education, lecturing in Graphic Design at Manchester Metropolitan University for over 20 years. I'd been following Sue's Instagram account intently during lockdown as she painted and posted bird upon bird, so I knew she was the person for the job. She's a mad keen birdwatcher and recently exhibited in “Fledge - A Year of Birds” at Contemporary Six gallery in Manchester. Be sure to go and see when she next has a show! 

And check out my "Live" section for my own upcoming readings. (And apologies for the state of these fonts. Even with my ability to code, now ageing Blogger is full of glitchiness.)

A record of records

To celebrate Record Store Day 2025 (Saturday 12 April), writers and musicians have teamed up to pen ten tracks for Sleeve Notes, a unique collaborative project and live performance. I'm one of the writers.

The artists have responded to how records have shaped their lives and thinking, each creating a brand-new track combining spoken word and music. The pieces will be available as a limited-edition cassette and premiered live by the writers and musicians at Manchester’s International Anthony Burgess Foundation on the evening of Record Store Day (doors 6.30pm, £5; tickets here) – giving you plenty of time to head shopwards beforehand to get that all-important vinyl. You can also hear a preview of the album via Bandcamp here.

The project has been featured on BBC Radio 6 Music by both Guy Garvey and Marc Riley, and there's a write-up, including the full line-up of writers and musicians involved, on Creative Tourist here. I was asked to write a bit for Joyzine about the inspiration and process behind my contribution, "Breathe Silence", with artist and musician Jez Dolan. Obviously, I wrote probably way too much and it's unlikely to all get published*, so here you go...

Sarah-Clare Conlon x Jez Dolan “Breathe Silence”
When I was asked to be one of the contributing writers to Sleeve Notes, I began by nailing down a narrative, which led me to think about the ritual of selecting and playing records, especially in the context of growing up and going round to friends’ houses to listen to music. 
My jumping-off point then was messing about with the sounds of words – my aim is to imbue my poetry with an aural quality, for example through assonance and alliteration, percussion and sibilance, to create an evocative soundscape. I’ve been performing regularly since 2010, and I love creating work that will have impact on both page and stage. 
I invited artist and musician Jez Dolan to work with me, as I thought his double bass would provide the perfect backdrop to my words, and, after an initial chat about influences and ideas, I spent an evening riffling through my vinyl collection, picking out artists I listened to as a teenager – Talking Heads, OMD, Prince, Kate Bush – and making notes on the noises of putting on a record, not just the songs themselves. I have a Pro-Ject deck and it doesn’t have an automatic arm lift, so the stylus just goes round and round at the end of a side, and it turned out each LP had a different kind of rhythmic quality. 
I sent Jez a draft of the text – which I’d approached slightly as a song, with I suppose verses and a chorus, and a refrainy thing – and a quick recording so he could get an idea of how I sounded reading the words. Jez then spent a bit of time with the words coming up with some options, including a riff and some drone, and the next step was me meeting Helga (the double bass) and spending an afternoon playing around and nailing down a firmer direction for Jez to go down and develop. One thing we agreed was that my words needed to be edited down, while Jez wanted to create an extra musical element, so at our next get-together we had a more streamlined version of the written piece and a more sophisticated composition. We practised this and once happy with the end result – called “Breathe Silence” – we recorded it, then drank some wine to celebrate.

Update: *indeed (also I note I did more than one "nailing down" in the original) – you can read the Joyzine article here. It says mine and Jez's track has a "beat-generation, jazz-vibe". Niiiiice.

Tootally Wired lives on

Thrilled to have ‘Repetitions and Pauses’, originally dreamed up for the Tootally Wired project in September (thanks to Nic Chapman for the photographic evidence of part of the creative process as well as the performance event, which I also compèred), accepted for publication by Long Poem Magazine.

Issue 33 is due out in May. I was asked to send the editors an introduction to the writing process of the poem, which I think is a great idea! Sometimes I spend ages doing research and working out how to approach the actual piece – what it should look like, what it should sound like, what will stand it apart from the other pieces being written for a project – and that whole teeth-pulling procrastination part is often lost in time, like tears in rain...

‘Repetitions and Pauses’ was conceived for a commissioned performance project as part of Manchester Histories Festival. Six writers and a sound artist were each invited to respond to the Tootal scarf, a Manchester export, premiering their pieces live in September 2024 at Manchester’s Central Library for a sold-out event called Tootally Wired. I enjoy working within constraints and my approach to writing the piece was to consider the construction of the garment, and how this might be applied to my own creation. Traditionally Tootal scarves are woven and repeat printed silk with hand-applied tassels, and I wanted to incorporate this into the fabric of the poem – the ‘choruses’ not only evoke the process and the product, but also the musicality of the looms and machinery used in the manufacture, and the rhythmic back and forth of the supply and distribution network involved. As a former journalist on fashion glossies, I was interested in exploring both the history of the brand and the craftsmanship involved, so I spent some time at Edinburgh’s world-renowned tapestry studio Dovecot and with a textile artist at Manchester’s Rogue Studios, who explained the intricacies of passementerie and other weaving practices. As they require a hands-on, human skill, and with silk a natural product, I was also compelled to consider the industry’s impact on, or implication in, the landscape, where, even in the most urbanised and polluted of settings, nature manages to creep into the cracks. This in turn had me thinking, and writing, in a circle.

The Tootally Wired writers were, in performance order, Emily Oldfield, Tom Jenks, Wendy Allen, David Gaffney, me and Nicholas Royle, with a musical interlude from sound artist Gary Fisher. We had a Tootally Wired ident created by Zoe McLean, Tootal-related footage from the North West Film Archive, and mannequins sporting Tootal scarves. It was funded by Arts Council England.