My guest today is J.L.M. Morton, writer, poet, editor, celebrant and teacher based near Stroud in Gloucestershire, England. Her work explores contemporary rural experience and belonging, ancestry, place and practices of care, repair and solidarity across human and more-than-human worlds. Her first full poetry collection, Red Handed, explores England’s rural textile heritage with a decolonising lens, picking apart the global threads and entanglements that were created and enforced by British colonial rule. In the second half of the collection she explores ways of coming to terms with this legacy and how belonging might be found in the ruins through an attachment to place. These poems reach back to the deep time of an ancient Celtic past and forgotten indigenous women’s rites and rituals. 

We discussed poets and poetry, language, being a thinker and feeler, writing, practicality and pragmatism, social identities, landscape and history, getting out of the academy, Red Nose Day, T.S. Elliot, having a compulsion to creativity, being obsessive, her debut book of poetry Red Handed, creativity as a healing process, writing as thinking or working out thoughts, Celtic Mother Goddesses, questioning the value of art, divesting from art, becoming a celebrant, ritual, ceremony, literalization, rationality, psychedelics, indigenous cultures, arts funding, having a creative process, passion, deep interest, dialect, healthy egos, and grief. 

Episode Details:

Guest Name: J.L.M. Morton

Website: https://www.jlmmorton.com/

Substack: https://jlmmorton.substack.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jlmmorton/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/JLMMorton/

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