writing

Sharing Darkling

| Sheree

I share my new poetry collection Darkling, come 7 November, 6-7.30 pm (GMT). I’m excited about speaking these words aloud in company. There’s something magical happens when we give voice to our creations. Allow the words, language to reverberate through our bodies. We come to the words almost anew, a fresh and feel all the emotions and meanings as they enfold again and for the first time.

I know it’s going to be an emotional session to share as this book was a long time in the making. I’ve changed so much in its creation. But I’m ready.

I share a poem with you today from Darkling. And please join me in its launch next week.

found poem: we arrived here with stars in our hair and needles between our toes*

after drea brown

be autumn/ be siskin/ be slick

twilight licks our dark skin

deep within the forest

straining through spruce/ larch and pine

(trial & error I learnt their names/ names

are never easy on black bodies)

living within the unknown (out)side

where history is wet/ with memory/ & muchness

within the shadows/ within the wake

we search/ for a tenderness in the brokenness

breathing in/ in-between spaces

tongue locked/ tongue packed/ tongue tied

we be/ but not be/

unfurling like tight fisted ferns

brown bruised/ violence against ourselves

into the woods/ in flight/ in creep creek/

in restless/ motherless moan

shapeshifting/ combing the black air/

what would happen/ if we linger

in the midst/

/////////slow////////down////////slow//////motion///////

refusing to be absent for ourselves/////////slow///////breathing//////

together/ listening to each other/ listening

to this haunting presence/refusing to play dead/

stay dead/

*the title is inspired by something within Paul Taylor, ‘Black Aesthetics’, Philosophy Compass 5/1 2010.

<https://sites.hampshire.edu/blackaesthetics/files/2017/03/taylorpaul-blackaesthetics.pdf&gt;

Morning Pages – 24/10/24

| Sheree
From a morning wander/ stagger!

I’ve just started a new course with Lighthouse Writers Workshop called Manifestations—Reading and Writing Speculative Nonfiction! with Kanika Agrawal. It works out that it’s early morning for me at its run on mountain time. This might help my speculative imaginings but maybe not. We’ll see.

After waking late this morning, I went to the page to complete my morning pages over coffee. And this is what came out:

Good morning, good morning. ( This sentence ran into the date I’d just wrote moments before).

Wow at least I’m just doing mistakes on the page & not in real life. Do I avoid real life? I know when I’m off social media or when I shy away from the news, it is to protect me from the real world because the ‘truth’ they are peeling is direct & fake and flawed. (And hurts me. My soul.)

But it’s still facts & information & journalism & biased & not ‘for real.’ I mean we say it’s a fact about the time and the date. But ‘time’ is a construct. It was a construct to make money – colonial time. I took it as a fact but really it’s all fake or a mechanism of control. The same for ‘race’.

I was thinking it was a given but again ‘race’ is a construct. It was created to justify the exploitation & extraction & brutalisation of one group of people by another. “They can’t feel pain right so what we’re doing to them doesn’t matter”, they said. “They don’t exist on the same plain, the same level as us. So chill your boots. It’s okay. They’re not human.”

All this musing feeds into what I’ve been reading of late, especially Fugitive Feminism where Akwugo Emejulu who argues that because humanity is tied to whiteness, Black Women, who I am interested in, will never be human. So why bother? Why engage with society on their terms/ these terms hoping one day you’ll be accepted when you know that label, that status of being human will never be attained? Instead, why not speculative about alternatives, about other ways of being, other ways of knowing ( conjuring) which do not depend on being human?

What possibilities could I begin to conjure?

This is where I’m at this morning. Tired and drinking my coffee but already allowing my imaginings to run wild. To be fugitive.

After a busy and brutal period of being out in the world working for the man, I’m resting. But already just after a couple of days rest, I’m coming back to myself. Coming back to what floats my boat, and gets the creative juices flowing. Thank you.

An Ivory Tower Heart

| Sheree

I must make my heart, my queen for the love she once poured out, an ivory tower, a silent, giant, jagged-edge mountain of harsh rocks, wood and ruin.

Reaching up under a pale night sky, reaching for the stars, for some kind of spark, being witness to so much unnecessary, preventable violence, l choose to transmute fear into rage.

l choose to transmute fear into rage.

l choose to transmute fear into rage.

Do not mistake these rose-tinted cheeks as doll-like innocence or fairness. I’ve grappled with my myths and the myths you’ve fed me about my place. And passion, flames and fire have risen yet threatens to consume you more than it could ever harm me.

Burn whiteness to the ground. Burn that construction of whiteness and all that shit down to the ground once and for all. For all.

See I’m still carrying that tired old play script that a Black Woman is the mule of the world, saving everybody else when no one gives a fuck about me.

I’ll keep working on that, my queen, my heart, fixing that ivory tower to remain out of reach and impenetrable and safe.

Darkling

| Sheree
Cover design

I’m not sure how much I’ve shared here. I’m not sure if I wanted to speak it into existence out of fear of jinxing it. Maybe.

Last year, my last publisher Andy Croft got in contact with me asking for my poetry collection. Smokestack Books is planning to close its publishing doors and Andy wanted to go out having published my next collection.

We have a history as Andy published Laventille (2015) and stood by me throughout the whole ‘shit-hit-the-fan’ experience when my life and profession and writing were ruined ( or there was an attempt to ruin me as I’m still here to tell the tale).

So I said yes, maybe naively. As since then I’ve been on a rollercoaster of feelings as I attempted to bring the collection into existence.

Darkling was the result.

At some point I will share some of the poems within the collection. Some of the poems started within this blog. But even though I just got asked last year to complete this collection, I feel, no I know, this collection has been nine years in the making. Ever since Sheree Mack was cancelled in May 2015, I’ve been making my way back to Sheree Mack, someone I didn’t even know existed until she was forced to start again from nothing to building a much stronger and truer foundation.

Darkling is Smokestack Books swan song. Darkling is my rebirth song.

There will be a reading planned of the collection with special guests as support. Check out the details here. Thursday 7 November, 6-7.30pm (GMT).

How might we divest from the human?

| Sheree

I’ve been reading. When I read, I feed my wonder and imagination. When I read, I fill up with ideas and dreams and plans.

Reading expands my mind and expands my understanding of the world I navigate.

I cannot stress or emphasise enough how much my world has been rocked or even burnt down since my reading and continued reading of Fugitive Feminism by Akwugo Emejulu.

This isn’t like anything I’ve read before because it goes against everything I’ve been trying to do for the last 50 years; to prove the humanity of Black people, of myself so we can finally be accepted and loved.

But what if we’ll never be accepted? Never be accepted as human beings because who gets to claim humanity is bound up with whiteness, bound up with white supremacy culture?

What if being a human is a construct and is defined by those with the power and was never constructed to allow us, people of the global majority to be as such?

So if I claim non-human what are the possibilities for my being?

This is where I’m heading. This is the space I’m navigating now. I’m making changes from the inside out. In a cellular level this speaks truth and blessings to me. How I {BE} is changing and it includes a whole more ‘fuck offs’. Well that’s how it’s shown up my so far!

October Fall

| Sheree

I love this season. This is my season. This is birthday season. And I usually have so many things planned that I blink and miss the season. And I also feel a bit gipped because this season is taken up by Halloween and Christmas celebrations that no sooner that I have my autumn leaves wreath on my front door that I’ve got to replace it with the Christmas one.

So as a gift to myself as well as some breathing space, this season I’m bringing out the poetry and I’m writing a poem a day to cherish the moment. To live and breathe into the season.

I hope to share my creations here.

I know I have a lot to share here about the last few months too. I’m not sure what I have shared here. But I do know it feels good to take the time each day to exercise my imagination and be inspired to write again for me. But I’m sharing too.

I was thinking this morning back from the school run what can I do this season to support myself. Support the ease into hibernation mode but still get through the last few commitments and chores of the year. And I feel in my heart that writing poetry or attempting to dive into my dreams ( and nightmares) is a way of giving myself that much needed support. Keeping me creative but also keeping me sane.

I hope you join me in this journey one more time.

Reading into Fall

| Sheree
Current Squeeze!

The days are growing shorter. The nights are drawing in. And I’m very grateful for a number of things. One of them is that I spent some time this summer getting back into reading.

Maybe it was the long drives or the long light nights, but I scratched an itch and came out 10 books down by the end of August.

I rested up over the summer and I also pulled out some books and dived head first into a bunch of summer reads. Physical books, kindle books and audio books.

I’ve been on a rollercoaster of emotions as I made my way through some class act reads and I wasn’t sticking to my usual crime.

I’ve read romance, erotica, literary and comedy. And now with September here, I’ve continued. I’m also keeping track. Keeping a record of my reads.

There are times I’m knee deep in a story and I have to stop because I’m reading that fast and I want the goodness to last.

You know that feeling right?

Other times I have to stop because I’m enjoying myself so much, loving the story and have to give thanks for finally getting back into a reading streak.

I’m not sure how it happened. I think I just kept turning up. Kept turning up to the page. I think it helped that I found a good book series too. And then I found it being read by actors so well that I was hooked.

I found BookBeat and Amy Award’s Cocky Kingmans. I’ll write more about this series and what it opened up for me but if you’re interested in getting a free trial of BookBeat for 70 days just check it out here.

No catch just the chance to get into reading/ listening at a good time of year to snuggle and get cosy with a good book.

For Blackbirds

| Sheree
Book cover

Things are happening this Autumn.

I was invited to submit my chapbook, for blackbirds pushing against glass, to a new press, The Wildheart Press, created by Eleanor Cheetham.

I was part of Eleanor’s Soulbook course offering in 2023 where I had the time and space to explore my creative fugitivity. Breaking the rules were welcome.

So Eleanor was familiar with my work when she approached me to submit my feral words to her press. I jumped at the chance because the words were already created. This was an opportunity to share my words further. And I just love supporting a person and a press who recognises that I do not colour within the lines. My writing does not stay on the straight and narrow path. My words like to wander and meander and that is mighty fine with me.

I’m grateful to find a home for them in The Wildheart Press.

Website image

Please consider ordering an advance copy of the chapbook. There are four other chapbooks coming out for the Autumn series too. Go and check them out

There will be a launch reding event on the evening of 26th September if you’re interested in meeting the writers and hearing our words.

Check out The Wildheart Press for details.