Gage interview

 

The Berg Collection Reading Room at New York Public Library. 

 

June is Pride Month! So happy that radical lesbian playwright, actor and activist Carolyn Gage interviewed me about my debut poetry pamphlet Beerstorming with Charlotte Brontë in New York, and we also talked about Betweenity, my graphic biography of Mary Taylor, and so much more.

Beerstorming

 

 

It's publication day - my debut poetry chapbook is here! 

My grandest thanks go to my brilliant publisher Sara Lefsyk of The Ethel Zine and Micro Press for making this dream of mine come true! Sitting up all night on the settee with a two month old on my breast when I submitted my poems, publication seemed as elusive as sleep. I'm forever grateful to Sara for bringing my chapbook into the world.

Everywhere is now

 

 

In 2018, I was commissioned to write a Comic about war. The editor ended up being replaced and my piece didn't see the light of day, so I'm publishing it here because it seems pertinent to the current period. It was after all written in response to Trump. I had been in America for the first weeks of Trump's inauguration in 2017, researching my Mary Taylor biography, and saw first hand the women's marches protesting against his presidency and the clap-back of MAGA advertisements on TV. 

 

Shop post

I wrote a post about Mary Taylor's shop, for the Red House Yorkshire Facebook group. You can read it here.

Keeper

My thanks to Michael D Grover for including 'Keeper, From Life' in the Museum of Poetry. 

This poem was written as part of my research for the graphic biography of Mary Taylor. I was almost derailed by my distraction with Miss Emily B's work.

Beerstorming

Image Copyright Rachel J Fenton 2020

In late 2016, I was awarded a significant arts grant by Creative New Zealand to research, write and draw a graphic biography of Mary Taylor, Charlotte Brontë's best friend. My research was scheduled to take me to Wellington, where Taylor lived, wrote and ran a successful business for the best part of the fifteen years she was in Aotearoa New Zealand, but an earthquake in the capital meant I had to defer that trip and instead I flew to New York in early 2017. As well as the usual notes and photographs, inspired by the astonishing city New York is, my research also took the form of poetry. 

I am over the moon to share the exciting news that Sara Lefsyk and Joanna Penn Cooper are going to publish the resulting chapbook with Ethel Zine and Micro Press. 
Beerstorming with Charlotte Brontë in New York will be published in April 2021!

 Cheers!

New york

My thanks to Sara Lefsyk for including my poem 'New York' in #EthelZine.

Something rhymed

 

Image copyright: Rae Joyce / Rachel J Fenton 

 

A few months ago, I contacted Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney to ask if I could guest post on their blog SomethingRhymed.com -- reader, they said Yes! Much gratitude to them and to Clêr Lewis editing my post so beautifully and for making the process so enjoyable.

Re petition

I am part of a group trying to save Red House, the home of feminist writer and businesswoman Mary Taylor who, besides being extraordinarily important in her own right, was Charlotte Brontë’s best friend. Caroline Goodwill is leading the charge for the Brontë Red House Group and the following is her call for help:

The Red House Petiton was launched on Change.org at the end of July. By the end of August we had 3,000 signatures but let it run to 3,700 to allow for unacceptable signatures. 3,000 is the number required to go to Full Council meeting at Kirklees local authority. Unfortunately, when we submitted the signatures, we were told that we had only achieved 2,730 acceptable signatures. This was because almost 1,000 signatures were from abroad. We thought signatures from abroad strengthened our case that Red House is of national and international importance but as far as KC are concerned they were not acceptable.

We are now attempting to gain 4,200 signatures as quickly as possible so we can re-submit the petition. The petition is now ring-fenced to disallow non UK signatures. Incidentally, Change.org sometimes ask for a donation - we are not asking - it is not for us - but for Change.org and is entirely optional.  If any of you have links to local Facebook sites that we are not already using, perhaps you could let me know and I will put the petition on that site. This seems the quickest and most efficient way to obtain signatures. 

https://www.change.org/p/the-leader-of-kirklees-council-save-red-house-yorks-inspiration-for-shirley-by-charlotte-bronte

Please do not sign again if you have already signed as both signatures will be disqualified.

Once we have the required number of signatures, we will re-submit to Kirklees Council and hope to gain a date for presenting to the full council.  It should be around mid-October.  We are under time pressure because a number of things happen in November which will make Red House much more vulnerable.  

Once the petition is safely presented and we have a date for the meeting with full council, we must mount a strong national and international campaign to save the site and prevent building on the grounds.  Many emails and letters will need to be produced and if there is anyone in the group who would like to assist with this task, please leave your email in the comments - I won't publish them - and I'll put you in touch with Caroline, the secretary of our group.

Any ideas or names of people who may be able to help with funding, information, publicity etc - please let us have that information. 

Pencil art

Back in April 2017, I was lucky enough to be conducting research for my Mary Taylor graphic biography at the Brontë Parsonage Museum Library while artist Clare Twomey invited visitors to recreate a long lost manuscript of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights. I was thrilled to be able to add a line and was rewarded with this beautiful inscribed pencil. I just got it framed. Many thanks to @studioclaretwomey.

Red house alert

80 signatures needed: please sign and share this petition to save Red House, home of Mary Taylor.

Who is Mary Taylor, you may be wondering? Brontë fans will know her as the best friend of Charlotte, and she should be as well known. For the past three years I have been researching and writing her life story in a quest that has taken me from New Zealand to New York to Yorkshire: it's fascinating and, given the chance to read it, I think you would be as obsessed by Mary as I am. Saving Mary's family home is a crucial step in preserving herstory. Please help.

Wild wood review

“To walk In the Wild Wood is to enter worlds where the mundane is made magical” states the blurb on the back cover of Frances Gapper’s newest short story collection, published by Cultured Llama. I suspect for Gapper, what is meant by as mundane, daily life for most folk in England where many of her stories are set, is anything but. Not all writers have an ability to see magic in the every-day occurrence, however this is Gapper’s stand-out peculiarity; what would be dry description from the fingers of a less skilled writer is, in Gapper’s hands, the equivalent of a Grecian urn with a laugh-out-loud comic strip glazed around its vitreous fired girth. And just as the ancient Greeks understood the winning combination of high art with low art, so too does the author of In the Wild Wood, juxtaposing classical references with contemporary ones such as Come Dine with Me. Old with the new. 

I first encountered the title story in issue seven of Short Fiction. As I read the issue eagerly, excited to see what talent I was on a par with – my story While “Women Rage in Winter” had just won Short Fiction’s competition and was published in the University of Plymouth’s journal alongside stories by Catherine McNamara, Scott Pack, Annemarie Neary, Jenn Ashworth, Jill Widner, and others – I came across Gapper’s. Actually: I opened issue seven, read my story first and “In the Wild Wood” - illustrated by Claire Harper with an intriguing deceptively simple head from inside which grew a tree-brain - followed it, so. The story details the metamorphosis of a mother into a child due to the symptoms of dementia, but really what’s being described is the fear of a child forced to become a parent to their parent, the grief of losing their own life to the shepherding of the person whose care consumes them. Old age, filtered through a child’s lexicon, is made new, a contrast symbolised beautifully by the cover illustration for In the Wild Wood, an original artwork by Jane Eccles that evokes Oscar Wilde's "The Selfish Giant" for me. 

A simple thing representing a complex one, a youthful approach to an adult issue, is what Gapper does best. She has the ability, in the words attributed to Ezra Pound, to “make it new”. This is perhaps best showcased with the stories “In Bed with Miss Lucas” and “Observing Lucy”, lifting off as they do from literary classics of two of England’s most lauded women writers, Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë, with insights that are at times as hilarious as they are diverse.

 

“In bed with Miss Lucas” re-casts Pride and Prejudice from a LGBTQ perspective, in which “The younger girls might now form hopes of coming out a year or two sooner than they might otherwise have done”. Brontë scholars will be familiar with the setting of “Observing Lucy” as Monsieur Heger’s Pensionnat in Brussels, attended by Charlotte Brontë who went there first as a pupil, encouraged by her friend Mary Taylor, and later as a pupil-teacher, until her obsession with her master forced her to return to England and harass him via a one-sided correspondence. Gapper’s re-imagining of Villette is told from the perspective of Madame Beck, whose husband is the love interest of Lucy. In these two short stories, Gapper encompasses greater political and emotional terrain than the two original novels they are derived from.

From these longer historical pieces to the deft brevity of “The Leaf that Wouldn’t Fall” and “MyLion”, In the Wild Wood shows Gapper flexing all her story muscles, and leaves the reader in no doubt there is a lot more to come from one of the most exciting imaginations producing fiction today. I cannot guess where her next work will take me, her previous being The Tiny Key, I can only dream it will open up a world as yet un-imagined from the starry heights of a girl staring at the moon from a cartoon tree-top as In the Wild Wood.