Sarah James, "Darling Blue"

 

Sarah James (also published as S. A. Leavesley and Sarah Leavesley) is a prize-winning poet, fiction writer, journalist and photographer. Nine out of ten of her solo poetry titles have won or been shortlisted/highly commended for an award, including Darling Blue. Her many individual poem competition wins include the Pre-Raphaelite Society’s Poetry Prize 2024. Author of a touring poetry-play, an ACE-funded multi-media hypertext poetry narrative > Room and two novellas, she also runs V. Press, publishing poetry and flash fiction. Her website is here. Her substack is reedlike whispering through wind & water, here.

About Darling Blue, by Sarah James
Darling Blue interweaves ekphrastic poems with a book-length fictional poetry narrative of love, lust and letting go. The poems inspired by Pre-Raphaelite artworks include QR codes, which readers can scan to view the pieces after or alongside their reading. Blue here is more than a colour or inspiration; it is desire, secrecy and sorrow – the essence of "feeling / really alive," yet "distance’s illusion."

While the poems may be read sequentially to give a longer narrative, each one is also a complete  piece in itself, so that readers can dip in and out in any order they choose. Darling Blue was one of the two winners of the Geoff Stevens Memorial Poetry Prize 2024 and also features Sarah’s poems that won prizes in the 2022 and 2023 Pre-Raphaelite Society Poetry Competitions.

You can read more about Darling Blue on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection. 

From Darling Blue

Bluebell Blue

          after ‘April Love’ by Arthur Hughes

In this painted pose, everything
except for her hair, face and arm
is the blue of a spring flower.
As if he’d picked the stem of her,
then let the dress shape a bell
around this green heart, drawing

up from the earth and turning
towards the sun. Only, her eyes
remain downcast, gazing into
the space of absence beside her.
The firm tree trunk at her back
is a tangled web of clinging ivy

and shadow, leaves twisting away
from their own heart shapes. Parted,
her lips open without budding. 
The fabric flow of her skirt’s silent
petalled bell is an un-swimmable ocean.
When she steps out of this scene,

this love, will she take her scarf
with her, clasped close as a dream?
Perhaps she will let it drop instead,
leaving its soft curves of sky and river 
to soak up more rain, another scrap of blue
slowly drowned by the weight of mud.

 
Your Fingers

At the hotel room, pressing your key card 
to the door, pushing open my heart. 

A gasp or two later, clicking off light 
and noise, turning on fires inside.

Tracing my lips like the brimming rim
of a wine glass learning how to sing.

Cat’s-cradling my head afterwards, while
I drink the bright sky from your eyes.

It takes hours for my breath to shrink
back to the size of your finger-tip;

I almost believe this moment could last
as long as my life, outrunning our pasts.

Then your fingers wake once more,
to tap-dance on your phone and reach for 

the remote.

Sophie Haydock, "Madame Matisse"

Sophie Haydock is an author, editor and journalist based in Folkestone, Kent. She is also curator of Folkestone Book Festival. Her debut novel, The Flames, was published in 2022. Her second novel, Madame Matisse, about the women who were integral to the life of the French artist Henri Matisse, was published by Doubleday in March 2025.

Sophie will be giving a guest talk, "Madame Matisse: The Women Who Made the Artist," at the University of Leicester on Wednesday 30 April 2025 at 5.30pm. With Harry Whitehead, she will be discussing the women who shaped the life of the artist Henri Matisse, and the process of turning history into fiction. You can see more details about the event and book a place here. 

About Madame Matisse, by Sophie Haydock
Madame Matisse is an fictionalised exploration of the women who played pivotal yet often overlooked roles in the life of the iconic artist Henri Matisse. Through the lives of three extraordinary women, Sophie Haydock paints an emotional portrait of art, love and sacrifice.

At the heart of the story is Amélie, Matisse's wife, whose quiet devotion to her husband's genius leaves her own dreams to wither in the shadows. Her unwavering support is the foundation of Matisse’s career, but it comes at a steep personal cost.

Then there is Lydia Delectorskaya, the dazzling Russian émigrée who becomes Matisse’s muse and confidante. With her fierce independence and enigmatic past, Lydia’s relationship with Matisse is as passionate as it is fraught, as she grapples with her own identity and her complex role in his creative world. 

When his wife, after forty years of marriage, delivers a desperate ultimatum, a question is born: who will Matisse choose? And what explosions lie ahead?

Finally, Marguerite, Matisse's daughter, emerges as a voice of resistance, forging her own path and confronting the turbulent undercurrents of her family dynamic. As she struggles to define herself outside her father’s shadow, Marguerite challenges the boundaries of art, family and love.

Set against the vibrant canvas of 1930s France, Madame Matisse is a tale of ambition, betrayal and the indelible impact these women had on Matisse’s artistic legacy. Their stories of resilience and sacrifice offer a powerful reflection on the often-unseen forces behind the creation of greatness.

You can read more about Madame Matisse here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the novel. 

From Madame Matisse
Make no mistake: Lydia doesn’t care for beauty, certainly doesn’t chase after it as currency, though she understands the privileges it affords her, as a woman about to turn twenty-nine, with pale skin, ice-blonde hair and blue eyes. She has caught the eyes of enough men in her time, usually the wrong kind. But Lydia knows such beauty is not a thing to build a life upon; it will not last for more than a handful of years, nor would she want it to.

She’s sitting alone in the dark with the cool instrument clasped to her breast, lost in a meditative daze, when she hears Monsieur Matisse calling for her. There’s a shift in his tone.

Lydia returns the gun to her father’s briefcase and checks the clasps are locked securely, pushing her thumbs up against them to test for weaknesses, to see if Amélie’s meddling has inflicted permanent damage. Then she conceals the case once more, hidden until the time comes.

Once it is safely put away, she passes from her room, down the stairs, to the studio where Monsieur Matisse spends his days. Birds call from their cages, wings darting. The artist has his back to her as he tops up their seed. She notices the slope of his shoulders, pulling at the centre of his taupe jacket, the material tight between his shoulder blades. He feels her eyes on him and turns expectantly. Her gaze roams to the fireplace. She looks at a pair of pressed violets, long past their best, their colours faded after many years trapped behind a pane of glass.

"There you are, Lydia. It’s not like you to keep me waiting," he says gently.

There’s a seriousness to his features, and Lydia knows something has changed.

"Your wife was looking for you. Did she find you?" she asks.

He nods, and gestures that she take a seat.

He inhales. Pauses. Her body tenses as she waits for him to continue, her heart pounding. She waits for the words she knows are coming.

"I’m afraid my wife has given me an ultimatum," he says slowly.

Sue Hubbard, "Radium Dreams"

Sue Hubbard is an award-winning poet, novelist, broadcaster and art critic. She has won numerous prizes and, as The Poetry Society’s only Public Art Poet, created London’s largest public art poem, Eurydice, at Waterloo station, which has now been carved in Portland stone and permanently placed in the crypt of St. John’s, Waterloo.

Her poems have appeared in The Irish Times, The Observer, The London Magazine and many leading poetry magazines and anthologies. They have been read on Radio 3,  Radio 4 and RTE, and recorded for The Poetry Sound Archive.  Twice a Hawthornden Fellow and twice awarded bursaries to Yaddo, US, she has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia and in 1999 was awarded a major Arts Council Award. She has published four previous collections of poetry, Everything Begins with the Skin (Enitharmon), Ghost Station and The Forgetting and Remembering of Air (Salt), Swimming to Albania (Salmon Poetry). God’s Little Artist, on the life of Gwen John, is due later in 2023 from Seren.

She has also published a collection of short stories, Rothko’s Red (Salt) and three novels, Depth of Field (Dewi Lewis), Girl in White (Pushkin Press), Rainsongs (Duckworth, Overlook Press, US, Mercure de France and Yilin Press, China). Her fourth novel, Flatlands, is due from Pushkin Press UK and US, and Mercure de France in late spring 2023.

As an art critic she has been a regular contributor to The Independent, Time Out, The New Statesman, The London Magazine, and published a book of essays on art, Adventures in Art (Other Criteria). Her website is here. 

 

About Radium Dreams, by Sue Hubbard

For Radium Dreams I invited the artist Eileen Cooper RA to team up with me to pay homage to one of the world’s greatest female scientists, Marie Curie. Our poems, drawings and collages form an exhibition at the Women’s Art Collection, Murray Edwards College, Cambridge, along with an accompanying book, that follow her through her Polish childhood, her studies and research in Paris, her marriage and very public affair, giving texture and depth to her extraordinary life. It is more than eighty years since her death, but her story remains as compelling as ever.

My poems, accompanied by Eileen Cooper’s drawings and collages, conjure Curie’s life through closely observed moments of struggle, tenderness and joy. Both exhibition and book explore the theme of creative support: between Marie Curie and her sister, and between the scientist and her husband, Pierre Curie. This is reflected in the collaboration between a female poet and artist and resonates with The Women’s Art Collection at Murray Edwards, which was created by women as a college dedicated to educating academically outstanding young women.

Marie Curie’s own feminism was always demonstrated by her actions rather than by theories or words. She believed that progress in science would benefit the world and broke down barriers to pursue new ideas and theories, never allowing herself to be defined by the standards of beauty of her day or the behaviour conventionally expected from a woman. When she got married, she chose to do so in a plain dark gown that she could later use in the lab. Would she have described herself as a feminist? Whilst she was concerned with the education of young women, her abiding interest was always science and the truths it revealed. Stubborn and determined, she believed that knowledge equalled freedom. The men in her life, her husband Pierre, and her lover Paul Langevin, were colleagues with whom she shared her intellectual passions, giving weight to the words of the American writer, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, that “There is no female mind. The brain is not an organ of sex. Might as well speak of a female liver.” Marie Curie was a woman of conviction and courage. Radium Dreams presents her not only as brilliant, intense and uncompromising but also as passionate, flawed and compellingly human.

You can see more information about the exhibition and the collection on the Women's Art Collection website here. Below, you can read two sample poems from Radium Dreams. 

 

From Radium Dreams

Sorbonne
 
She sets up the kitchen chair,
her petroleum lamp,
a porcelain washbasin
 
printed with a rose
in the attic room of Rue Flatters.
Lives a monastic existence
 
patching and mending
her shiny, old-fashioned dress.
Doesn’t even know
 
how to make soup,
survives on buttered bread and tea,
faints in the tiny boxroom.
 
The laboratory is home,
its brass instruments, bell jars,
and test tubes with their brew of elements.
 
If only she can move them
close enough, she knows
that hydrogen atoms will fuse.
 
Standing in her linen smock
among the men, she rehearses
who she’s about to become,
 
steps forwards,
burette and Bunsen burner in hand.
She’ll not be found wanting.

 
Uranic Rays
 
Once they’d have called her
an alchemist for her pains.
 
Now, moving through the laboratory
among glass wash bottles,
 
Bunsen burners, the brass microscope,
quiet as an inhale of breath,
 
a wooden chemistry bench to her left,
the ionization chamber and electrometer
 
on her right,
she follows Becquerel’s experiments
 
to expose uranium salts to sunlight,
to see if radiation -
 
discovered one cloudy day by chance -
can be spontaneously emanated,
 
pass through metal foil to print,
ghost-like, on a photographic plate,
 
She wants to discover the cause
of this force, which seems
 
to violate Carnot’s law
that energy can be transformed,
 
(though like Time or God 
never be created or destroyed).
 
Now, lying beside her sleeping Pierre,
she dreams of particle waves,
 
an invisible necklace of opaline ash,
illuminating her bleached skin.
   

The Sound of Music: Ekphrastic Review Contest

By Lorette C. Luzajic, editor, The Ekphrastic Review

The Ekphrastic Review is pleased to announce a new flash fiction and poetry contest called The Sound of Music. Explore our curated collection of music-themed artworks, and use them to inspire your stories and poems. 

The judge is Jonathan Taylor, from the University of Leicester. 

The deadline is March 25, 2023.

Selected works will be published in The Ekphrastic Review. First place wins $100 CAD.

Entry is $10 CAD for five poems and/or stories. You can read the rules in full for the competition here. 

You can read more about The Ekphrastic Review on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

F. C. Malby, "Dead Drop"

F. C.Malby graduated with a first-class joint honours degree in Geography and Education. She has travelled widely and taught in the Czech Republic, the Philippines and London. She writes novels, short stories and poetry. Her debut novel, Take Me to the Castle, won The People’s Book Awards. Her debut short story collection, My Brother Was a Kangaroo, includes award-winning stories published in literary journals and magazines worldwide. She is a contributor to anthologies including In Defence of Pseudoscience: Reflex Fiction Volume Five (Reflex Press), Unthology 8 (Unthank Books), and Hearing Voices: The Litro Anthology of New Fiction (Kingston University Press) alongside Pulitzer prize winner, Anthony Doerr. Her website is here.

About Dead Drop

Liesl is an art thief and an exceptionally good one. She steals priceless paintings from Vienna’s art galleries and delivers them to wealthy private collectors. This life of anonymous notes and meticulous planning, of adrenaline-fuelled dead drops and dramatic escapes, suits her restless spirit and desire for solitude and anonymity. But when Leisl finds a body on Stephansplatz underground steps instead of the expected note, she understands that she’s involved in a deadly game and that her own life is in danger. This fast-paced, intelligent thriller exposes the undercover world of art heists and takes us on a journey through Vienna’s galleries and museums until Leisl comes up against a truth that makes her question everything she knows.

You can read more about Dead Drop on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the novel. 

From Dead Drop, by F. C. Malby

I hear the roll and clunk of the train’s wheels on the steel tracks below, feel its vibrations in my toes and through my thighs as it leaves the platform. The wind rushes into the tunnel from Stephansplatz, its caress warm as it whips down the steps to the underground platform and fills the void. 

The Vienna spring brings with it cherry blossom and azure skies, the blues becoming celestial in the late afternoon light. Most count the short, hot summer months. I count the winter months until spring, and then when the leaves turn to a deep, burnt amber, I begin again. 

As I reach the top step, a body lies on the pavement, feet contorted, laces undone, socks pushing through holes in the soles. A red, woollen hat rests on the concrete slab by his head, hands clutch an empty bottle of Kaiser beer. Not a soul stops to look. A body littering the pavement is a familiar sight on this part of the underground. It’s not always clear whether the person is alive or dead. 

I am here for the note. Stepping closer to avoid the people coming up the steps behind me, I spot a corner of paper in his top jacket pocket and pull it free. Without reading the words, I slide it into my jacket. Checking the pocket on the other side of his jacket, I feel something hard and rough and pull out a brooch shaped like a star. I count the spokes, ten of them, and run my fingers across its surface. It lacks the pearls, but at a guess it would have been handcrafted by Hapsburg jeweller, Rozet and Fischmeister. I slip it into my pocket. An unexpected treasure. Reaching down and taking his wrist, I feel for a pulse. I should have checked it first but this is new territory for me. All signs of life have drained away and death was recent. A touch of heat still lingers on the skin, rough and calloused. I pull the hat down over his face. The beer bottle, I suspect, will have been planted to make this look like a natural event. He should have been alive when I reached him. 

Lorette C. Luzajic, "Winter in June"

Lorette C. Luzajic writes from Toronto, Canada. Her flash fiction and prose poetry have been widely published, including in Cleaver, The Citron Review, JMWW, The Miramichi Reader, Unbroken, Ghost Parachute, Cabinet of Heed, and numerous anthologies. She won first place in a flash contest at MacQueen’s Quinterly and was longlisted at Furious Fiction Australia. She has been nominated three times each for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize. Lorette is the creator and editor of The Ekphrastic Review, a journal devoted entirely to literature inspired by visual art. She is also an internationally collected collage and mixed media artist. Her website is here. 

About Winter in June, by Lorette C. Luzajic

Winter in June is a collection of flash fiction and prose poetry, small stories haunted by art history and memories real and imagined. Each piece is inspired by an artist or a work of visual art, but stands alone. You will meet a monk, a stripper, a man obsessed by taxidermy, and take a ride on a train with a man who isn’t there. You will smoke salvia divinorum, the most psychotropic plant known to humankind. You will sample salami in Italy, and join a pilgrimage to the shrine of Saint Death in Mexico City. You will see the phantom of Flatwoods for yourself, reluctantly attend a bullfight, fall in love with a convict, search for Andy Warhol’s grave, and ask a machine to grant your deepest longings. You will swim with a barracuda and watch a man eat his own grandmother. You will also visit a safe space, an art gallery where there is nothing to see but clean white walls. Even with all this terror and enchantment, it is really just a scrapbook of snapshots of everyday moments and ordinary magic.  

Winter in June is available here. You can see more details here. Below, you can read a sample piece from the collection. 

From Winter in June

Night Flight

Imagine, we were half bird. Our flight is fleeting, yes, but still we sometimes slipped into the sky. You are new to this world and don’t know the half of it. Even so, you show us the way. How to slay the dragons, how to turn the page. We gnaw on plastic poultry legs and rubbery bananas and you fake punch a random price into a toy cash register, hold your grubby paw out for my pocketful of coins. I wouldn’t have wished the world on you, but here you are. You have arrived, starry eyed and surprised. You have a blue-green bike and a matching bow in your hair. You love cucumbers and mangos and the frilliest pajamas. Every word is a victory and you’re starting to string them together. We were dancing in our sock feet in your toy room, stripes and polka dots a blur in your swirl. If only we had more ice cream, you say when I pull out the goodnight story. You stall for time before lights out and I guess it’s the same for all of us. Lord, just one more year, just one more day, just one more hour. But soon you are drifting through the clouds and I watch sleep soften your small face. The moon is your witness, I think, kissing you where she does on your dimple. I cover you in a thin sheet, watch your shifting shoulders, small wings dark as earth.  

“Night Flight” first appeared in Gyroscope Review.

Ruth Stacey, "The Dark Room: Letters to Krista"

 

Ruth Stacey is a lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Worcester, England. Her first poetry collection Queen, Jewel, Mistress was published by Eyewear Publishing, 2015, and her second full collection, I, Ursula, was published in January 2020 by V. Press Poetry. Her pamphlets include Inheritance, published by Mothers Milk Books in 2017. A duet with another poet, Katy Wareham Morris, the collection explores 19th century experience of motherhood, contrasted with a 21st century mother's voice. Inheritance won Best Collaborative Work at the 2018 Saboteur Awards. Three books have been published with the Knives, Forks and Spoons Press. A poetic memoir, How to Wear Grunge, was published in 2018. An experimental pamphlet, Viola the Virgin Queen, illustrated by Desdemona McCannon, was published in 2020, and Ruth's latest work, The Dark Room: Letters to Krista, a collaboration with Krista Kay, was published in 2021. Stacey is currently writing an imagined memoir in poetry of the tarot artist Pamela Colman Smith, as part of her PhD study. 

Ruth's website is here. You can read more about her collection I, Ursula on Creative Writing at Leicester here.

About The Dark Room: Letters to Krista

By Ruth Stacey

I contacted Krista (a Portland, USA, based photographer, who photographed some of the people from the 90s Seattle scene) about using a photograph of her friend Demri Parrott for the cover of my poetry memoir, How to Wear Grunge, but due to a message being missed that didn't happen and I commissioned a painted portrait of Demri instead. Following the publication of the HTWG book, Krista saw the message and contacted me in early summer of 2020, during the pandemic. What followed was a correspondence that revealed many common interests and enabled conversations around the themes of loss, nostalgia for youth, memory, vibrant life and tragic death, preserving memories, whilst sharing our photography and poetry. Those conversations become prose poem letters in The Dark Room, which Krista answered with her enigmatic and compelling photographs. I really enjoy working collaboratively with a visual artist. Creating a sequence with text and image to tell a narrative allows different pathways through the stories that are told. Being able to meet another artist and create a new artefact, and a friendship, was an uplifting experience during a difficult year of lockdown, and these poems reflect the light that is found through art and friendship.

By Krista Kay

This book, The Dark Room, is a collaboration between Ruth Stacey, a sensitive, lovely, deeply talented writer, and myself. We have built a friendship and exchanged letters over the past year or so and many topics we have discussed revolve around memory, nostalgia, regret, love, loss. Ruth has written about Demri before (How to Wear Grunge) and I was struck by her profound ability to think deeply and encapsulate with words the importance of understanding complicated lives. Demri has often come up in our conversations. Demri inspired everyone she touched and made the people around her feel beautiful. I have wanted to share her in a way that honored her bright energy and this book is one way to begin to do that. Ruth and I honor others in our lives that we have lost and together we seek to make sense of their absence and our lives forever changed. https://www.instagram.com/kristakayphoto/

Below, you can read an excerpt from The Dark Room.

From The Dark Room: Letters to Krista

"Desert Scene": An Exercise in Ekphrasis, By Colin Gardiner

By Colin Gardiner

The following poem was written in an ekphrastic experiment during my studies at the University of Leicester. I was drawn to a painting by Jane Domingos called Saguaro Blossom Night (2011) on display at the Leicester New Walk Art Gallery.

Immediately, I was struck with the stillness of the desert scene, and the suggestion of movement in the centre of the picture. As I observed the painting, I allowed my mind to drift. I began to imagine a cinematic moment. This day-dream state left me open to ideas and feelings. Associated thoughts about music and films entered my mind, which enabled me to start sketching out ideas for a poem. Further research revealed the artist’s intent to portray the "otherness of life left behind" and this further inspired my poem.

I feel that this was truly a collaborative effort, between the artist and myself. I found that my poetic response to the painting added an extra element to the two-dimensional image. I tried not to edit myself too much in my note-taking. Through this approach, I found power in the more "naïve" aspects of the rough drafts that followed. Overall, I found ekphrasis to be a creatively stimulating process.  

 
Desert Scene

I think they're cooking up magic, 
In the blue/black hour before dawn. 
Lights on in the bullet-shaped trailer
As a car approaches, hissing over gravel,
Tail-lights squeezing tumbleweeds
Into orange crush.

A broken spine of hills, prone behind 
Restless rolls of dessert. Helplessly 
Stalked by pin-pricked stars,
That tattoo the night’s sleeping skin.
Silver whispers of steel guitar tweak 
Aerials, slowly evaporating. 

I’m parked up by Mr Cactus, 
Stoned silent in his cotton crown, 
His incessant needles bristle at my company.
The delivery just came in.
Three shots. Puncture night-watch stasis 
Echoing across heartbroken dunes.

An aerial prolapse of popcorn stars 
Slither on butter trails and gather 
In my lap. Too hot to move and
Shake out this hidden greasy take-out 
Nest. Too hot to take a rest in 
This rattlesnake windscreen interior. 



Reference
Domingos, J. (2011). Saguaro Blossom Night. [Oil on canvas] Leicester: Leicester New Walk Museum and Art Gallery. 


About the author
Colin Gardiner is currently studying an MA in creative writing at the University of Leicester. He is originally from Birmingham and now lives in Coventry.

Poem by Michelle McGrane

Michelle McGrane's collection The Suitable Girl is published by Pindrop Press in the United Kingdom and Modjaji Books in South Africa. She lives in Johannesburg.

Michelle writes of the following poem: "The poem was included in a beautiful anthology of poetry and art, edited by Agnes Marton, called Drifting Down the Lane. For a while I've been intrigued and enchanted by the magical work of French scientist, botanist and artist, Patrick Blanc, and his creation of green walls and vertical gardens, the new life he's created for buildings' exteriors and the positive effects these living walls have had on people's lives. I wanted to write something that I felt would be relevant to our lives in cities today all over the world: environmental devastation; the decline of wildlife in urban areas, and spiritual decline, too - the effect that being surrounded by soulless, lifeless places and a lack of greenery has on our psyches."

                   

The Architecture of Leaves

It's a breathing tapestry, a solar shield,

a canvas of ferns, vines and epiphytes

rising six flights in a city besieged

by billboards and exhaust residues.

It's a hydroponic lung, a capillary song,

a glissando of blooms, shrubs and grasses

colonising nooks and crevices, meshed

roots threading through propagation felt.

It's a verdant beacon, an urgent semaphore,

a nitrogen enriched, drip irrigated 3-D mural.

It's sedge, old man's beard, mile-a-minute,

coral bells, mandevilla and climbing fig.

It's riotous bougainvillea, feathery acacia,

mauve wisteria, plumed buddleias and shy violas.

It's long-awned stipa, creeping jenny,

saxifrage rosettes and dusky pink sedums.

It's a wind-borne destination, a butterfly haven,

a rendezvous for starlings and sparrows

amid ovate, palmate, dark glossy trifoliate,

white-veined, heart-shaped, variegated leaves.

It's arachnid hieroglyphics, a ghost in the machine,

the ciphers concealed in spores and seeds.

It's a pulse among blue-chip glass and steel,

above footsteps, fag-ends and fast food debris.

It's a chlorophyll dream, a green hallelujah,

a living tourniquet, a shrine to Gaia,

an antidote to banks and strip-lit malls,

heat islands, car parks and concrete flyovers.

Cathedral Stories, by Hannah Stevens

On Friday 3rd March Leicester Cathedral became a gateway to an alternate universe, a place where hidden treasure was discovered, where angels fell to earth, where wooden carvings began to talk.

As part of the BBC Storytelling Festival over 100 children from local schools joined lecturers, tutors and writers from the University of Leicester’s School of Arts for a Flash Fiction workshop. Using objects and artefacts all around the cathedral as inspiration, the young people wrote their own flash fiction (or very short stories) and shared their work to applause from the rest of the crowd.

Here is a story inspired by the Ypres Cross in the Cathedral:


The Ypres Cross


I visit the cathedral every week. I come to see the Ypres cross, to touch the glass that covers it, keeps it safe.


The broken beads wound around the crucifix remind me of the beads my grandmother used to wear.  She wore them for special occasions: for nights she wanted to feel beautiful. She looped the string around her throat and they looked pale against the dark blue of her blouse.


Next she added colour to her cheeks, lipstick to her mouth. She knew her own face well and did this with precision. Later, she slipped a shawl over her shoulders, stepped out to dance with her friends.


My grandmother doesn’t wear her beads anymore. She cannot walk, doesn’t have the strength to lift her legs. She spends her days in bed now, dying slowly from something they cannot cure.


Sometimes she asks me to put powder across her cheeks, to fetch a mirror so she can see. She tells me how she loves to dance and she asks me for her beads.


When I tell her that the beads are broken, that she cannot dance tonight, she begins to cry.

I wipe her tears with my hand, say I love her, but she looks confused. My grandmother doesn’t know who I am. She doesn’t remember me. But she remembers her beads. How they felt cool on her neck and how they moved against the dark blue of her blouse as she danced.

Hannah Stevens

Review by Annalise Garrett of "The End" ed. Ashley Stokes

It is inevitable that there will be a moment in our lives where we will think the end is near, whether the thought is triggered boarding a plane, watching a loved one die of old age or an accident, or even those close calls that make you question how you survived such an event. Fifteen Endings to Fifteen Paintings is a project by Nicolas Ruston to explore how an art form can operate through different media, as described in the introduction of the book The End, edited by Ashley Stokes. The book consists of fifteen interpretations by writers who have chosen one painting each by Ruston. Each painting is ambiguous with few hints towards the genre of the short story that follows it. 

Every chapter captures the emotional response of its writer, inspired by a black and white etching by Ruston. ‘The End’ is first seen as a large, dominating white text situated in the centre of each painting, and is also the central theme for the fifteen narratives that follow each painting. Fifteen detailed, uncomfortable, thought-provoking narratives present a multitude of emotions. Some paintings are much clearer than others in that they present us with a familiar object, hinting what the story that follows will entail. Each painting is then crafted into words, as it were, to arouse feelings of anxiety, or nostalgia in the reader, or even perhaps to draw the reader into the writer’s paranoia and vision of ‘The End’.

There, of course, are chapters you connect with and are more drawn to than others – paintings and stories that speak to your unconscious mind, your own anxiety and experience with more power than others. There were times where I felt suffocated, uncomfortable when reading certain stories. The stories vary in style and content. The power behind chosen sentence structure and word choice changed my mood and at times I had to put the book down to walk away for a moment before returning to complete the story. Even now I am reminded of the stress I felt on one particular interpretation of a painting. Each story, each memory presented a new thought, a new location, a new passage to the end of something, whether it is life or opinion, whether it is the narrator’s life or someone they are observing. Something ends, even if it is the fictional story itself.

On finishing each story, my attention was drawn back to the beginning of the chapter – the image of ‘The End’. At times the first few lines of a story directly connected image to text, or sometimes it was the final sentence or idea, or even the story as a whole. Back and forth I flicked from painting to word, from chapter to chapter; I sometimes understood the connections, and sometimes I was so caught in the narrative I forgot the painting. There are recurrent themes – such as reference to someone dying, something or someone leaving, or even a habit abandoned. In this way, the reader is teased by the notion of the end throughout. I felt a constant anticipation to find out what will end, who will end and even why.

When each story ended I found myself back to comparing the painting to the words, or the memory, the narrative, the character or setting. Stokes is right in saying the book never ends and you will re-read it: I have read it twice and I want to read it again. When walking in the street or around the house I picture my surroundings like the painting, a black and white etching telling me a story, an end; I text my family and friends more often now than before. The End: Fifteen Endings to Fifteen Paintings made me think about my situation, my thoughts, and I hope others look at these painting by Ruston and their interpreters’ stories. 


About the reviewer



Annalise is a student in her third year at the University of Leicester, studying BA English. She is currently on an Erasmus year abroad at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Outside of her studies Annalise paints and writes as a hobby, hoping to use her degree to work towards a career within the art industry. 

Ekphrasis

The other week, the MA in Creative Writing students went on a visit to New Walk Museum and Gallery Leicester. The students were all asked to write Ekphrastic poems, based on paintings, artefacts or sculptures in the galleries. Rosalind Adam wrote the following poem and accompanying notes about the painting Messiah by Ernst Neuschul:

Messiah?

           After Messiah, Ernst Neuschul, 1919




The symmetry of sunbeams
across angular mountains
that hypnotic manic stare
finger on fourth chakra
body proud
yoga honed
the conceit
of youthful talent
before Juden war Verboten
before the daub of swastikas
before the last train out of Prague




                                                                                                         Rosalind Adam




Research Notes by Rosalind Adam


This painting is part of Leicester New Walk Museum’s German Expressionist Collection. At first glance I mistook it to be representative of Hitler Youth and the Führer’s hoped-for Aryan race. I looked up Ernst Neuschul on the Leicester Museum website and discovered that ‘an exhibition of his paintings was closed down by the Nazis. Because of his Jewish birth and radical political opinions Neuschul also lost his teaching post’ (http://germanexpressionismleicester.org/leicesters-collection/artists-and-artworks/ernst-neuschul/).


I made notes about his movements before the Second World War, his relocation from Poland during the 1st World War and on to Berlin to study at the Berlin Academy of Arts during the volatile period between the wars.


On the web page about the painting itself, it talks of Neuschul taking an interest in ‘Freudian psychoanalysis, sexual liberation, spiritualism and yoga’ (http://germanexpressionismleicester.org/leicesters-collection/artists-and-artworks/ernst-neuschul/messiah/). The reference to yoga reminded me that his finger was on a chakra point. I checked exactly which chakra this was. The 4th chakra is the heart chakra and some believe it to be the most powerful of all the chakras: ‘It’s at this chakra that we start to see the possibilities of the internal and external world…the world of spirit and form.’ (http://www.2012-spiritual-growth-prophecies.com/chakra-symbols.html). The finger on the heart chakra gave me a lead into the kind of poem that I wanted to write. That and the title that he had chosen for his self-portrait suggested that he was confident in his own talent and had plans and dreams for greater things. He did not know when he completed this painting in 1919 how disastrous things would become for anyone of Jewish birth or political views that would oppose the Naze regime.


Once I had written a rough draft I decided that, as this was about a piece of Pre-WW2 Expressionist Art and as I had begun the poem talking about symmetry, I would attempt to create a symmetrical layout of the stanzas. I removed all the punctuation from the first two stanzas but played around with putting full stops at the end of each line in the final stanza to represent full stops in his, and so many other people’s, lives. This did not work for the poem and so I finally removed all the punctuation.


The website talks about Neuschul getting the last train out of Czechoslovakia. I have always heard of this train being called the ‘last train out of Prague’ and so this is how I referred to it, especially as it has a more satisfying scan.