Exploring literary visions of greener, fairer ways of being
Following the The Word for World is Forest symposium, I was invited to turn my presentation into a full length article for The Acorn journal. I’m pleased to say this is now available online.
Continue reading “My new publication on The Word for World is Forest by Ursula Le Guin”Waking up to the US election result was depressing for many reasons, but the one I’ll talk about here is the stark contrast between the progressiveness I see in contemporary American utopias and the fact that in reality, more than 75 million Americans voted for Trump.
Continue reading “Is utopia more or less relevant since Trump’s re-election?”
St David’s in Wales, the smallest city in Britain, has a population of less than 2,000 but a massive cathedral. This disparity is due to it having been an important site of pilgrimage for over 1,000 years. In 1123, the Pope even declared that two trips to St David’s were as good as one to Rome. This October, I was one of a number who descended on St David’s, not for a religious pilgrimage but for a gathering of poets.
Continue reading “Pilgrims: A gathering of poets in West Wales”
I will be giving a paper as part of this year’s conference of the Science Fiction Foundation. The topic for the conference, which will be held online on 7-8 December 2024, is Women in the Black Fantastic. Full details of the programme and a link to buy tickets can be found here.
Continue reading “Women in the Black Fantastic: Upcoming Online Conference”
For the past year or so I have been collaborating in a group poetry project organised by Bean Sawyer. Each month, a poem is started by Bean or another guest poet, then posted on to the next person to write the next verse, then the next person to write the next verse, and so on. When the poem is complete, it is sent home to Bean.
Bean has aptly named this project ‘The Murmuration of Words’. As a writer, Bean is very good at naming things. In this post I’ll explore more about murmurations as a model for working collectively, and about the experience of writing as a group.
Continue reading “The Murmuration of Words Project: Writing Poetry Collectively”For the past year, the Utopian Book Collective have got together for film nights in between our book group meetings.
Here, list fans, are the utopian films we’ve watched in the order we saw them.
Continue reading “A Year of Utopian Films”
The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin is book of the month. We will be discussing this book at our next Utopian Book Collective meeting on Monday 6th May.
I re-read The Dispossessed this month in anticipation of our upcoming book group meeting. I can’t wait to discuss it. In this post I simply want to highlight a few quotations that stood out for me on re-reading. I’m sure other people will have their own moments in the novel that carry meaning for them. It’s such a rich text. Please let me know in the comments or at book group if you happen to be able to make it.
Continue reading “The Dispossessed: what resonates on re-reading”
I originally wrote this piece with Stone Club in mind. But, as it hasn’t appeared over there, I thought I would post it here.
Now, on the face of it, my visit to a stone circle doesn’t have anything to do with utopia. But actually, it did give me a new perspective on ways of being and engaging with the environment. And the possibility of a different relationship to the environment, whether that’s real or imagined, in the past, present or future, is a utopian possibility.
At Gors Fawr I caught a glimpse of a more embodied, spatially aware and landscape-savvy way of being a human in this world, as you will discover in my field notes.
Continue reading “Finding other ways of being at Gors Fawr stone circle”As we start 2024 I have Just Utopias New Year news for you. News of a new publication, a new start behind the scenes for this website, and a new book of the month.
Continue reading “Just Utopias New Year news!”Part III of this three part series, in which Nathan Taylor-Gray explores fictional utopian languages and the utopian ideals of their speakers. If you missed them, here are Part I – Utopian, Houyhnhnm and Part II – Speedtalk, Pravic.
Continue reading “Fictional utopian languages: Part III – Asa’Pili, Láadan”