This week we present a short film exploring the watery landscape of Dartmoor, scripted and narrated by Clearing editor Ben Smith, filmed by his brother Max Smith and produced by FatSand films.

Here, Max and Ben explain a little about the inspiration and thinking behind the project: 

“In the U.K. we often regard moorland landscapes, such as the Highlands of Scotland, The Lake District and Dartmoor, as symbols of wilderness. However, these places have been farmed, mined and inhabited by people for millennia, and have felt the presence of humans longer than many of our urban centres.

The ecologist Frank Fraser Darling coined the phrase “wet desert” to describe the landscape of Dartmoor, such was the lack of biodiversity that he found there. But in hidden corners of the moor, relics of its past cling on – stands of trees coated in moss and fern, supporting a range of plant and animal life – relics that point to the bizarre fact that when humans first arrived here, these open landscapes were temperate rainforests.”

Max Smith is a freelance filmmaker and motion graphic designer based in Brighton. Since Graduating in Graphic Design & Visual Communication from the University of Brighton in 2012, he has worked as a Motion Designer, Camera Operator, Camera Assistant and Editor on a range of projects for clients including the BBC, Discovery Channel, Canal+ & London Fashion Week. He was shortlisted for a British Wildlife Photography Award in the Wildlife in HD Video Category in 2014 for his film A Sense of Place.

Ben Smith is on the editorial team of The Clearing and is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Plymouth University. His first chapbook of poems, Sky Burials, is published by Worple Press. He lives in North Cornwall.

Melissa Harrison’s new novel At Hawthorn Time is out now, published by Bloomsbury. Her first novel, Clay (Bloomsbury, 2013), won the Portsmouth First Fiction award, was selected for Amazon’s ‘Rising Stars’ programme and chosen by Ali Smith as a Book of the Year. Ben Smith speaks to her about her recent shift in focus from the city to the country, as well as the role of walking, photography and politics in her work.

Your first novel, Clay, has been described as an ‘urban pastoral’, and your new novel, At Hawthorn Time, has been called a ‘modern pastoral’. What does the term ‘pastoral’ mean to you?

It’s interesting that the term has been used about both my books; it seems to indicate a need to fix them in a tradition; to say, here is a new practitioner of a certain form. Clay was also called a ‘nature novel’ (in The Guardian, I think). The qualifier seems to suggest that there is some difficulty about how to define them.

Since writing both books I’ve come to see that perhaps they’re unconventional because they don’t focus on exclusively human concerns. When you make the world of a novel larger, by including non-human lives and concerns, it risks making the people in it seem slightly smaller. I don’t mind that; I think that given all our depredations we’re long overdue a bit of a demotion – and moreover, I find the world beyond humans almost unimaginably rich and interesting. A big factor in my enjoyment of nature is the refreshing feeling that I am part of a large cast of creatures, rather than always in the lead role.

Fiction can certainly be a powerful tool for changing perspectives, and I think it’s healthy to question the anthropocentrism that has led us where we are. But I didn’t write either book with any conscious intention to add to a tradition, either of pastoral, or the broad genre – if it is one – called ‘nature writing’. In fact, I’ve learned that for me it’s important not to try to force a work into any particular form or genre, despite how much I want to. The more I try to control what I write, the less successful it is – which is deeply chastening, and at times painful for someone like me: a planner and list-maker by nature. Writing is, I have found, a process of learning to sit with the discomfort of not knowing what I am producing, or whether it will be any good, and keep going anyway.

Is your writing process affected by the particular landscape that you are writing about? What were the differences between writing about the urban landscapes of Clay and the farms, fields and villages of At Hawthorn Time?

There was no difference in process for me. Both books are about landscapes I know well, though when I was writing Clay I was living in the place I was inspired by and seeing it daily, whereas writing At Hawthorn Time meant drawing more on memory – although I did visit the village on which I based Lodeshill several times during those two years.

As well as place, at the start of a project one of the most important decisions I have to make is what time of year it is set; I’m not sure I could write anything, no matter how short, without knowing the season as it affects so fundamentally the landscape, the botany, the birdsong ­– the entire world in which the piece will take place. It can be harder to write about a season I’m not in than about a place I’m not in, so sometimes that affects my decision; with Clay, which takes place over the course of a year, I drew on detailed daily notes I had made about what the natural world around me was doing through the seasons. At Hawthorn Time takes place in one spring month, which meant making notes during that time of year, and taking photographs, so I could draw on them even in midwinter. I went on a four-day walk up the A5 as research for Jack’s pilgrimage and waited until April to do it; afterwards, I revisited the sections about his walk to bring in everything I had learned.

So, is it important for you to spend time in the landscapes you are writing about?

I’d find it challenging to write about a landscape I didn’t know intimately, I think. It’s not just the worry that I’d get something wrong; far more importantly, I wouldn’t feel the pull of it, the thisness of it. I need to care about a place, I need to be able to draw on my feeling for it for all those long hours at my desk. Facts aren’t enough.

The one location in At Hawthorn Time I didn’t know well was the places just north of London that Jack passes through on his trek north – which is why I did the solo walk I’ve just mentioned. I’ve already written about this walk here and here so I’m loath to repeat myself and bore your readers, but suffice to say that while it didn’t turn out as I expected, it was really valuable to get out and engage with that part of the country, despite (or perhaps because of) how hard it was to walk in, and how psychologically challenging the trip was.

Both your novels deal with the ways in which different places affect people’s psychologies. Is this something that you’ve experienced yourself?

Human psychology is such a huge subject that I’m not sure I know how to answer! Our state of mind is informed by so many things, from the kinds of attachments we were able to form as children, to our education, our health, our beliefs, our life circumstances, our stress levels… because of that, I think it would be facile to suggest that particular landscapes affect our psychological make-up in any kind of general way; there are just too many variables. Some people get a great deal of joy out of living somewhere rural; others, like Howard, will barely notice it, or may even find the countryside oppressive and instead flourish in towns. And of course the effects of place on each of us may change with time, too.

It’s my belief that having a regular, positive experience of the natural world can benefit most of us, both physically and mentally, but that can be achieved in all sorts of landscapes – including cities.

In the character of Jack, you present us with someone who has chosen a life on foot. How important is walking for you (as an individual and as a writer)? Does it influence your writing process? Do you carry a notebook when you go out walking?

Walking is enormously important to me, whether it’s taking my dog out before bed each night, climbing Helvellyn or hiking on Dartmoor with my husband, or going out alone to hear nightingales or watch the dawn rise. You can’t connect with the countryside from a car or through books; you have to get out there and put your body, your physical self, into it. Walking is a kind of thinking; it’s also a way of connecting with the past, of establishing a sense of continuity with the generations of people who have left their mark on places using their feet, their hands and their imaginations.

This year I was invited to speak at the Hay Festival, and straight after my event my husband, my dog Scout and I headed into the Black Mountains, parked at the first interesting-looking footpath sign we saw, and set out. As well as the lovely little whitewashed chapel at Capel-y-ffin – which reminded Frances Kilvert of an owl – we discovered a ruined, roofless farmstead inhabited only by sheep and entirely inaccessible by road, only a mud-thick holloway, long lost and overarched by trees, leading down from it to a ford. Places like that, redolent with history, are the reward of the walker – not to mention the birdsong, the smell of cow parsley, and the warmth of the sun on your face.

I don’t carry a notebook when I’m walking, no; I give myself up to the walk and to the moment, and try to drink in everything I can with all my senses. Some of it will be lost, but I don’t think that matters: it all counts in the end, consciously or unconsciously. I do take photos, sometimes with my DSLR but often just with my iPhone, although I use these more as prompts than accurate records. The discipline of photography teaches you how to look, and was a big part of learning how to be a writer for me.

That’s an interesting connection. Could you say a little more about how photography ties in with your writing process? Why do you find photographs more useful prompts than written notes? Are there particular photographers who have influenced the way you see (and write)?

I do make written notes about the natural world, and I note down ideas and scraps of dialogue all the time – but I don’t take a notebook with me on walks. I find it interrupts the process of the walk and the natural development of my thoughts too much, whereas snapping a photo makes barely a ripple in the flow of the journey.

It’s worth distinguishing here between iPhone snaps, which I use as prompts for memory, and the ‘proper’ photography I do with my DSLR which is something separate and an end in itself. I’m self-taught and under no illusions about how basic my skills are compared to professional photographers, but even so the process of learning to use a camera fed into my writing in two ways. The first was that, while I really wanted to do it, it didn’t matter to me half as much as writing did – which meant that there was much more ‘play’ to it. It wasn’t achingly serious, it was fun – albeit challenging fun – and I felt OK about making mistakes because it wasn’t as though my whole identity hinged on it. Having a second stream of creativity that had a totally different feel to it freed up my writing to be more playful and take more risks, I think.

The second way it contributed was the process of learning to see. Photography forces you to slow down and frame and think in a different way; and while having a compact or an iPhone to snap with is fantastic, it was the big camera with its difficult settings that really made me engage with light and shade and form and composition. I look back at my early photographs now and it’s not just as though I couldn’t use the camera properly, it’s as though I couldn’t see. That’s been really valuable.

Having said all that, there’s a lot of technically accomplished landscape and nature photography out there that leaves me utterly cold. A rocky stream on a long exposure, or a shoreline sunset with a violet filter, a moody, black and white shot of some pylons… that kind of stuff may be popular on photography websites but it usually has no feeling to it, no guiding aesthetic other than competent use of the camera’s settings. I have no time for that. Give me Tacita Dean’s dreamlike landscapes or Jane Bown’s affecting rural reportage any day.

One of the major debates running through At Hawthorn Time is the issue of what constitutes ‘real’ nature. One of the main characters, Kitty, stops painting bluebells and starts painting plastic bottles and electricity pylons. Do you agree with Kitty that this subject matter is more ‘real’? Or could her new paintings, perhaps, also be accused of a kind of romanticism?

Is romanticism necessarily a bad thing? I’m not sure. There are many different ways of thinking about the countryside, and I’m more interested in exploring them all, and looking at how they interact, than saying that one is more valid, or ‘real’, than another. To the wealthy city-dweller the countryside may be an idyll, all Agas and bunting and heritage chickens; to the farmer, a workplace in which productivity trumps aesthetics. To the psychogeographer it might be an unpeopled, liminal palimpsest ripe for decoding; to the ecologist a patchwork of biodiversity habitats. What’s interesting to me is that all of these things are true at the same time; it’s why I tend to write books with multiple viewpoints, including the non-human. I’m guessing that’s what Ali Smith meant when she said I had a “communal style”.

Kitty’s halting progress in the book is to do with letting go of the broad-brush, picture-postcard dream of the countryside she had when she lived in a city, and starting to notice what is actually around her – which isn’t always bucolic or pretty, but has its own value, and is worth bearing witness to. In doing so, she finds a way to come into her own, authentic relationship with place.

There is a moment in the novel where we suddenly get a glimpse of the effects of ash die-back. How important is it, for you, that contemporary fiction addresses these kinds of large-scale environmental and political issues?

I can only speak from my own experience; I don’t believe it’s anyone’s place to set out an agenda for other writers. Choosing to make art of any kind is tough, and requires real commitment: the results are a gift to the world, freely given. I don’t think any writer has a duty to write in a particular way.

When it comes to fiction, all writers have different concerns. Some want to change the world; some want to be successful; some want to tell a good story. I’m glad of every new voice, whether it addresses environmental concerns or not, because I believe that storytelling itself is so important in developing empathy and imagination: vital tools in living well and responsibly. Stories, I believe, are central to our ability to be good humans.

For me, it’s hard to keep my fears and hopes about the natural world out of my novels because they permeate my life; my books represent what the world looks and feels like to me. Admittedly, there is an evangelism about what I write – although I hope I don’t proselytise. It’s my experience that while some people are ready to engage with the big issues around the environment, many are turned off by issue-based narratives and campaigning literature, and it’s those people who I hope I may reach: with emotional engagement, rather than paralysing guilt. That doesn’t mean I think this approach is better than anyone else’s; the fact is, we need all sorts of voices doing all sorts of work if we are to reconnect people with the natural world. There is no single, right way of going about it.

It seems to me that hope – both for us and for our fellow species – lies in our ability to rediscover a pleasurable, deeply felt connection to nature and place, and I believe that storytelling (and, of course, getting out and walking) is a powerful tool for doing just that.

You can find out more about Melissa Harrison at www.melissaharrison.co.uk A 10” record featuring two tracks inspired by At Hawthorn Time, with an individually silk-screened and hand-stitched sleeve by artist Lucie Murtagh, is available now from www.caughtbytheriver.net.

Both of your books are very place specific. What was it that attracted you to writing about these particular landscapes?

My collection of short stories is set in Cornwall, which is where I grew up. I think I had probably always taken the landscape around me for granted, but when I came to write my MA dissertation (which became three of the stories in Diving Belles) I realized that all my ideas for stories were linked to the landscape that I knew best. I seemed to have a store of images and ideas that I hadn’t really known about before. I’d been reading a lot of poetry about landscape and place, poets such as Alice Oswald and Jen Hadfield, and they inspired me to think about bringing in more magical, uncanny elements into my fiction – which quickly led me to the idea of basing the collection on Cornish folklore. The folklore is intricately connected to the landscape – stories about giants come directly from shapes in the granite, and mermaids from treacherous stretches of the coastline where people drowned – so I became interested in exploring how the stories emerged from the place.

For my novel, it was almost chance that I ended up in the landscape that inspired it. I was moving around quite a lot, renting in different places and generally being unsettled, and I ended up in a wooded river valley near Dartmoor. I found the landscape interesting because it was so different to the coastlines I had written about before – the woods changed so much with each season, and the river changed all the time depending on the weather, the light, or whatever suddenly washed down it. I thought the river valley would be an interesting place to set a novel, and I also wanted to challenge myself to write about a place that I didn’t know quite so well.

We tend to think about place as something stable and grounded and yet water seems to be fundamental to your writing. Could you say a little about the relationship between water and place in your work?

I tend to feel landlocked if I am not living near a wide stretch of water, so I guess that I find water an essential part of feeling inspired and at home in a place. I think the tension you’ve asked about, between what is stable and what is constantly in flux, is the very reason why water features so much in my fiction – it’s that conflict between stability and change that drives narratives and creates characters. I’m interested in the ways that people often resist change but how we slowly, incrementally change anyway, without really noticing it. Water is a good symbol for these kinds of ideas – and both the river and the sea offer up really interesting contrasts. The river is a constant feature of the landscape but it is also changing moment by moment: small changes such as flipping over small stones and flashing in the light, and big changes, like biting away at the bank and changing its own shape. I am also fascinated by the way the sea can wash things up out of nowhere and then cover them over again.

When you started writing Weathering, did you have the idea for the story first, and then fit that into the setting, or did the landscape influence the story?

I think I have a set of overall ideas that I will probably always come back to in my writing – ideas about home and belonging and family – but the actual story itself pretty much came out of the landscape. The river valley offered a lot in the way of dramatic tension; it is a beautiful place, with fascinating birds and plants, but it’s also isolated, very cold and damp in winter, and it’s difficult to get around. The contrast between the different aspects of the place and the landscape gave me the idea of writing from three different perspectives – playing around with the conflicting versions and experiences there are of a place. It was easy to imagine someone who loved living there, someone else who was forced to live there and desperate to get out, and someone else who had become stuck there and let the years pass by before they really knew it. These became the outlines for the three interconnected narratives that made up the novel.

Can you say a bit more about how you used these three different narratives to explore the landscape?

Each chapter in the novel follows the story from one of the three main characters’ point of view. All of their concerns and perspectives collide and contrast, but also sometimes overlap and mirror each other. They all have very different perspectives on the place they have found themselves in, based on their past and present experiences of it. But equally, their perspectives tend to colour or distort how they view the place too – so because Ada, one of the main characters, doesn’t want to be there, she notices grey skies and gloomy weather and the constant thump of the river, whereas Pepper, her young daughter, who is fascinated by the place, notices the colour of mushrooms and the flash of a kingfisher. Each of the characters can’t help but bring their own baggage along, which influences how they view the landscape.

Both your books draw on particular places, but there aren’t any specific place names or locations mentioned. Why did you make this decision?

I decided when I first started to write Diving Belles, that although I was writing about a specific place, ie. Cornwall, I didn’t want to use specific place names, or real towns or anything like that. Partly it is to do with the fact that, as soon as you say, ‘this story is set here’ then there is a chance you will have got it wrong in some way, some minor detail will inevitably not be quite plausible in your story (at least, I imagine that would be what would happen in my stories!). Also, everyone’s perceptions of place are different, and I wanted to draw on this and try to create a sort of patchwork effect, an overall impression of a place, which people can then situate as they want. I hope it allows the reader to draw more on their own imaginations and perceptions. Places are a combination of detail, imagination, and personal experience, and I draw more on that idea in my writing I think.

How different was it trying to evoke a sense of place in a novel compared to short stories?

It was quite a different experience. In the short stories I think I used broader bush strokes in lots of ways, because the place had to be captured quickly to get each story going. I probably conjured up a more general and less specific landscape than the one I created in my novel. Partly this is to do with the sheer amount of time and space spent in the one small setting of the novel, and maybe partly to do with having more experience this time around.

However, writing about a place in the novel presented difficulties, because there are certain things you categorically have to talk about, and you can’t gloss over and use sleight of hand in the same way as you can in short stories. For example, in the novel, I suddenly had to think about things like, ‘where is the nearest petrol pump?’ ‘Does it actually make sense that this particular bird would be around at this exact time of year?’ ‘I need there to be bright colour in the landscape for the main character to notice and wonder at, but apart from maroon bracken what else is there in early winter?’ (Lots of things, including spindle fruits and gorse!) In lots of ways the narrative forced me to create a more detailed picture.

You have described your writing as magical realist; is this style/technique particularly useful for evoking landscape and place?

Magical realism can offer a different perspective on a place and a landscape. By slightly skewing our perceptions of the everyday, it can more strongly evoke the beauty, the wonder and the strangeness that is already inherently there. In Cornish folklore for example, the buccas, or wind-spirits, draw our attention to the ferocity and temperament of the Cornish weather. Mermaids evoke the beauty and danger of the sea. In stories of mermaids luring men out to sea, there is the whole history of drownings in a community lurking under the surface.

I find ghosts a particularly interesting way of exploring landscape and place. In my novel, one of the three main characters is a ghost who is stuck in the river because her ashes have been scattered there. I hoped that the ghost would add another layer to the evocation of the place. She is suddenly a part of the river, and a part of the landscape; she experiences the tiny details of the landscape, but also gains a sense of its vast scale. Magical realism highlights the richness of the places we find ourselves in, and encourages us to wonder at things – the magic is already there.

You mentioned before about being inspired by poetry, how exactly does this kind of writing feed into your fiction?

I definitely read more poetry than fiction while I am in the depths of a project. I find it useful to read from different genres to the ones that I’m working in. I enjoy poetry that is very rich in images and description and which uses unexpected, startling language. As I mentioned earlier, I found that magical elements in poetry such as Alice Oswald’s Dart and the strange, uncanny glimpses in John Burnside’s poetry, helped inspire me to bring these elements into my fiction. I think reading poetry also encourages me to make sure I’m always searching for the best word to use when describing something, and not to just go for the easy option.

Do you see yourself continuing to write about the South West in the future?

I hope so! Partly it depends on practicalities, such as where I will find myself living. But I am keen to go back to writing about the sea and the coastline next. I think that a river worked well in the novel because it twined right through its length, whereas the sea has made me think again about a short story collection – the small things that are washed up and taken away, the ebb and flow of the tides suggest small surges of stories. I would like to be more specific place-wise with these short stories, and set them in North Cornwall perhaps, which is near where I grew up. And I would like to carry on exploring the idea of ghosts – I am really interested in the idea of haunted landscapes.

These collections explore many of the themes at the heart of The Clearing: ecology and folklore, the complex relationships between people, plants and animals, and the links between language and landscape, the domestic and the wild.

THE CRAB

by Isabel Galleymore

Sunbathing on basalt,

the crab is a miniature

cedarwood stage

moving upon pincers

and ginger-haired legs –

empty of actors,

this stage casually

bears a backdrop;

a skywash of sea,

a suggestion of birds,

how its scale frames

an old local story

with these barnacles

empty, ashen

as blown volcanoes.

ST. PETER AND THE STORM PETRELS

by  Ben Smith

Footsteps on water.

Dawn clear as prayer.

Bodies hanging over water

like small, dark beads.

How long have they been out there

treading slowly across the bay,

staring down into the salt-clear distances,

scrying for storms?

There was a time when a saint walked on water.

We saw him – a bright light crossing the bay

leaving a trail of taut, still water

marked with footprints.

He left long ago, turning west

on his weightless march,

leaning into the heft of the waves

like a restless ship.

We still wait for him to return,

but perhaps, lost or driven mad

by such winds, such distances,

this is what he has become –

a petrel hanging over water,

staring down as if in wonder

and pattering its ragged dance

to the distant, scudding footfall of storms.

HOLY WELL

by Isabel Galleymore

Legend tells that the well contained 3 fish,
and as long as St Neot ate no more than one
fish a day their number would never decrease.

Those seeking health, those whose
cells do not divide quickly enough,
visit this small installation of blessed
multiplications an angel once promised
– two fish will be three fish by the next
day, and always, as long as you only eat
one. There are no fish now – but where
there’s water there’s a whether of matter
– see how the coins someone’s placed in
the ripple are becoming uncertain of their
solid circles, copying their colour onto
the granite floor until this well fills with
thoughts of halos.

DERANGEMENTS OF SCALE

by Ben Smith

‘Environmental slogans follow horrifying predictions of climate chaos with injunctions, no less solemn, not to leave electrical appliances on standby or overfill the kettle. Such language enacts a bizarre derangement of scales, collapsing the trivial and the catastrophic into each other’

                                                                –   Timothy Clark

I boil the kettle and the crow is back at the window.

This has happened before. Maybe it has always happened.

I used to know a thing about birds – something

about feeding habits, something about patterns of flight –

but from here this crow looks the size of a tower block.

He walks the length of the horizon, staring at himself in the glass.

I boil the kettle and a tower block falls. It’s okay,

I knew that this would happen. There were signs

in the newspapers and pasted to lamp-posts.

But I didn’t know that the sky would fill with dust;

that the roof-tops, the window, the crow,

would all turn white with dust. I do not know

why the crow is collecting coat hangers, tangles of wire.

I boil the kettle and the TV loses itself in a storm. There is no news,

but if I listen at the wall I can hear talk of the weather –

that it will get much hotter, that it will get much colder.

I still have power, but across the street, lights disappear,

as if the crow is stretching his wings.

At night, the kettle switches on. I wake

to the sound of flood waters, of foundations murmuring.

I turn over. At least I don’t need to worry about the kettle any more.

Through the wall, in the kitchen and in kitchens across the city,

water pools in rows of untouched cups

and crows rise like heavy clouds of steam

lugging themselves towards open windows.

BERRIES

by Jos Smith

We were looking for your best side,

a single photograph that captured HAWTHORN

an image that said CLIFFTOP ENDURANCE

or showed on a calm blue day

the loose direction of a decade’s wind.

What we found were these berries

the colour of dried blood

– here take them, have them, they are yours, anyone’s –

while the spirit of the tree passed out below,

sifting back down through the earth.

Whose black skeleton is this left here then?

Whose troubled silhouette,

home from home for Sweeney working his claws?

Who will remember these blackening berries

as the blind Atlantic wind swallows them whole?

ASH

by Jeremy Over

It seems to hang lifelessly now in midsummer leaf

but here comes the wind moving through the fields of barley

like a pack of hounds on the trail of a day

when the same tree was loud

with an anxiety of winter thrushes

which, as I approached, made it breathe in

and then just let go, giving everything up:

the full deck of cards spread out, hand over hand.

THE GREEN MAN

by Ben Smith

Now I appear in beams,

now in door-frames, the edges

of bookcases and chairs.

I don’t know why I am inside,

in drawers, in wardrobes,

in floorboards’ warped whorls.

Nothing but flat surfaces,

no boles or branches.

And varnish, Christ! My face

compressed, contorted,

eyes sealed open and nothing to do

but stare at ceilings,

willing the wood to grow.

Nothing to look forward to but the sun

drying my mouth into a crooked grin.

Time is sanded down, one day

into another. I split

through paint on window sills;

splinters bloom, while outside

the first leaves unfurl.

Somewhere, the first leaves unfurl.

Jeremy Over lives and works in Cockermouth, Cumbria. He has had poems published in various magazines and anthologies and in 2002 won the BBC wildlife poetry competition. His two collections are ‘A Little Bit of Bread and No Cheese’ (Carcanet 2001) and ‘Deceiving Wild Creatures’ (Carcanet 2009).

Jos Smith is a freelance researcher, writer and poet currently working on a history of the arts and environmental charity Common Ground (funded by the British Academy). He lives in north Dorset.

Ben Smith has recently completed a PhD in Environmental Poetics at Exeter University. He now works as a freelance editor and occasional lecturer. His poetry, criticism and short fiction have appeared in various journals, magazines and anthologies. His first pamphlet of poetry will be published by Worple Press in 2014. He is currently working on a poetry collection about wolves. He blogs at wolves-etc.blogspot.co.uk.