Micah is an artist, designer, and teacher who’s an expert in punch needle rug hooking - a type of textile craft that can be used not only to create rugs and cushions, but also fashion and art.
Micah’s unfinished projects include a stalled attempt to create a piece of punch needle art every day for a hundred days, and several ideas for punch needle fashion that she’s never quite got round to starting.
We talk about the struggles that have stopped her progressing that work, as well as the complexities of trying to navigate the worlds of art, fashion, craft, and business all at the same time.
If that weren’t enough, Micah has also just released her first book, Punch Needle Fashion, which explains how to make different pieces of wearable art.
About Micah
Micah Clasper-Torch is a Los Angeles-based artist, designer, and educator helping to lead the modern revival of punch needle rug hooking.
With a background in fashion design from The Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City and the Politecnico di Milano in Italy, Micah blends fine art, heritage craft, and wearable design to create one-of-a-kind textile pieces that range from coats and accessories to wall hangings and soft sculpture.
In 2019 Micah launched Punch Needle World, an online community, shop and educational platform dedicated to uplifting the craft and its history, and making high quality supplies and training accessible around the world.
Her debut book, Punch Needle Fashion, came out in June 2025 from Quadrille –– it brings punch needle into the world of contemporary fashion through 15 original projects and a beautifully photographed exploration of the medium.
Links of interest
Punch Needle Fashion - https://www.amazon.com/Punch-Needle-Fashion-Accessories-Wearables/dp/1837832218
Micah’s website - www.micahclasper-torch.com
Micah’s blog, including information on how to get started in punch needle art - Blog – Punch Needle World
Micah’s Instagram - @claspertorch & @punchneedle.world
unfinishing is the podcast about projects that are incomplete, abandoned, works-in-progress or not public. It’s presented by Emily Anderson and the artwork is by Graham Oakes. If you have an incomplete or private project you’d like to talk about, please contact us via our website: https://unfinishing.co.uk/.
My guest in this episode is Tommy Mackay. Tommy is a musician, a comedian, a punk, a satirist, a mature student, a reader of James Joyce, and a writer.
He’s the creator of The Daily Reckless, a long-running website known as ‘the paper that’s sick of the news’ – which is jam packed with comic songs.
Tommy’s unfinished project is a book called 'The Reckless History Of The 21st Century.' It’s part a history, part memoir, part experimental account of the Daily Reckless.... and of the 21st century. He describes it as ‘an encyclopaedic mish mash reflecting the absurdity of modern times’.
Tommy used to play in punk bands in the 70s and 80s, but then resurrected his career to become a popular entertainer on the Scottish comedy circuit.
As The Sensational Alex Salmond Gastric Band he has played in comedy clubs across the UK. He was once a regular on SW1 radio in London, as well as appearing in several Edinburgh Fringe shows, including Tartan Special, Best of Scottish Comedian Of The Year and Mark Watson’s ‘The Hotel’.
He has also contributed regularly to the Caledonian Mercury and the BBC Comedy Unit’s Rough Cuts. Collaborations include his work with Armando Iannucci, Adam & Joe and journalist Robert McNeil, whose reviews of Scottish MSPs Tommy shaped into a collection of songs about our political leaders (mishaps.htm). He was also half of the short-lived phenomenon that was Whyte & Mackay and the public art agitpoppers The Tam Tam Club.
Links of interest
Rabelais: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Francois-Rabelais
Armando Iannucci: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0406334/
Stuart Lee: STEWART LEE vs THE MAN-WULF : Stewart Lee - 41st Best Standup Ever!
Hugh MacDiarmid: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/hugh-macdiarmid
P.L. Travers: https://www.britannica.com/biography/P-L-Travers
Wake podcast: WAKE: Cold Reading Finnegans Wake | Podcast on Spotify
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unfinishing is the podcast about projects that are incomplete,abandoned, works-in-progress or not public. It’s presented by Emily Anderson. You can find more episodes and get in touch with us here: https://unfinishing.co.uk/.
My guest in this episode is Teresa Stenson, a writer and zine-maker based in York. She’s the creator of My 90s Teenage Diaries, an online project in which she revisits her old diaries and shares extracts alongside present-day thoughts and reflections.
She’s also a published short story writer, with work placed in several literary prizes and anthologies, including the Guardian’s Summer Reads contest.
My 90s Teenage diaries is a work-in-progress, and in this interview with Teresa we talk about the emotional and practical challenges of keeping it going.
Teresa also shares two diary extracts during our interview. One is a letter that her teenage-self wrote to her future husband, and the second is a list of flirting tips.
Towards the end of this episode, Teresa tells me about her day job as a freelance ghost writer and editor, helping her clients all over the world to tell their own stories.
We also talk about the comedy persona Teresa created sometime in the mid noughties – an alter ego called Bella De La Rocher – who by coincidence has published an unfinished novel. Teresa continues, sporadically, to share Bella’s creative works and her inner world online, though sometimes that's just photos of potatoes.
Links of interest
More unfinishing episodes: https://unfinishing.co.uk/.
My 90s Teenage Diaries: https://teenagediaries.substack.com/
Teresa’s zines are here: https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/TeresaWrites?ref=profile_header
Teresa’s Insta: @Teresa.Stenson
Most of a Novel by Bella De La Rocher: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Most-Novel-Bella-Rocher-ebook/dp/B07XLP7RB6?ref_=ast_author_dp
Bella’s insta: @BellaDeLaRocher
If you liked this episode you can:
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unfinishing is the podcast about projects that are incomplete, abandoned, works-in-progress or not public. It’s presented by Emily Anderson and the artwork is by Graham Oakes.
If you have an incomplete or private project you’d like to talk about, please contact us via our website: https://unfinishing.co.uk/.
My guest in this episode is Dr Michael Shallcross, who is a writer based in York, UK. Michael's unfinished project is called Inscribing Pandemonium.
Inscribing Pandemonium is about why authors introduce devils or devil-like characters into their writing, and what happens when they do.
Michael focusses on writers who try to use the devil to help convey a particular angle on social and political change - only to find that the devil isn’t always that easy to control.
Originally, Inscribing Pandemonium was going to be a traditional academic book, but it became clear that a book just wasn’t going to contain the subject.
Instead, Michael left the book unfinished, and he’s now exploring a far more expansive, accessible, and entertaining online format for his work.
Michael has a PhD in English Studies from Durham University, and his first book, Rethinking G.K. Chesterton and Literary Modernism: Parody, Performance, and Popular Culture, was published by Routledge in 2017. Michael can be contacted via Bluesky.
If you liked this episode you can:
1. Give it a rating or a review:
On Apple: tap on the podcast thumbnail (the logo), and scroll down to below the episodes until you find the ratings and reviews section.
On Spotify: click on the three dots below the podcast art and title (next to settings), and select ‘Rate show’.
2. Check out the website and sign up to the unfinishing newsletter: https://unfinishing.co.uk/contact
3. Text it to a friend with this link: https://unfinishing.co.uk/episodes
4. Tag us in your social media posts!
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Links of interest
About Inscribing Pandemonium: https://inscribingpandemonium.wordpress.com/the-point/
G.K. Chesterton: https://www.chesterton.org/who-is-this-guy/
Kingsley Amis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingsley_Amis
Lucky Jim: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucky_Jim
Evelyn Waugh: https://evelynwaughsociety.org/about-evelyn-waugh/
J.G. Ballard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._G._Ballard
unfinishing is the podcast about projects that are incomplete, abandoned, or not public. It’s presented by Emily Anderson and the artwork is by Graham Oakes.
If you have an incomplete or private project you’d like to talk about, please contact us via our website: https://unfinishing.co.uk/.
This episode features Kenton Rogers, the director and co founder of Treeconomics. Treeconomics is an organisation that uses the best available scientific techniques to understand and improve how trees enrich our urban and rural spaces.
Kenton talks about some of the projects that the team at Treeconomics has completed, and explains why working with trees is always an ongoing, unfinishing endeavour.
Kenton is a Chartered Urban Forester and Environmentalist. He’s worked on a range of commercial, urban and community forestry projects in the UK, Europe and North Africa. Kenton was a Trustee of the International Tree Foundation and is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. He has written for the UK National Ecosystem Assessment and the Springer Handbook of Urban Forests, and co-authored the Haynes Workshop Manual for Trees.
‘Thank the Lord (for Sidmouth Arboretum)’ was recorded by Kelvin Dent and Tess Bisson, musical director of Sid Vale Folk Choir.
Links of interest
Treeconomics website and resources: https://treeconomics.co.uk/resources/other-resources/
Birmingham Tree People: https://birminghamtreepeople.org.uk/
Sidmouth Arboretum: https://sidmoutharboretum.org.uk/
Sophia Siddique is a film scholar whose area of focus is contemporary Southeast Asian cinemas, film phenomenology, and genre (horror and science-fiction). She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Film at Vassar College. Siddique lives with a lovable feline rascal, Magnus, who is her creative muse!
Sophia’s unfinished project is a film called Shirkers, which she created in the early 1990s alongside Sandi Tan and Jasmine Ng. She met Sandi and Jasmine while studying film at Substation, Singapore’s first independent contemporary arts centre.
Shirkers is an incomplete film because after shooting was finished the director, Georges Cardona, took the recordings and refused anyone else access to them. The theft meant that Shirkers could never be fully produced and released as a complete feature film. Georges was involved in Shirkers because he taught the film course on which Sophia, Sandi, and Jasmine were enrolled.
The footage of Shirkers – but crucially not the sound recordings – was eventually recovered decades later. The recovery took place when, after Georges’ death, his ex-wife found and entrusted the film reels back to Sandi, Jasmine, and Sophia.
Sandi Tan tells that story in her excellent 2018 documentary, which is also called Shirkers and is available on Netflix. It contains lots of footage from the original film (which Sophia calls Shirkers 1.0), and features Sophia talking about her experiences of creating it.
As Sophia explains in our interview, taking part in the Shirkers documentary (which she refers to as Shirkers 2.0) has allowed her to access whole new ways of thinking about incomplete things, to use exciting experimental forms in her academic work, and to enjoy different, delightful approaches to living creatively.
Sophia tells me about the variety of emotions and youthful confidence involved in making Shirkers 1.0; about the vulnerability she experienced when watching Shirkers 2.0; about how her experiences with Georges prepared her for working with difficult people later in her career; about the impact of the Shirkers film on how scholars can think about films that are incomplete or no longer exist; and about the importance of staying for the credits when you go to the cinema.
Links of interest:
Sophia: https://www.vassar.edu/faculty/soharvey
Shirkers: https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/80241061
Incomplete: The Feminist Possibilities of the Unfinished BBC Film, edited by Alix Beeston and Stefan Solomon: https://www.ucpress.edu/books/incomplete/paper
Giselle Buchanan: http://www.gisellebuchanan.com/about-1
Allyson Nadia Field, Uplift Cinema: The Emergence of African American Film and the Possibility of Black Modernity: https://www.dukeupress.edu/uplift-cinema
unfinishing is the podcast about projects that are incomplete, abandoned, works in progress, or not public. It’s presented by Emily Anderson and the artwork is by Graham Oakes. If you have an incomplete or private project you’d like to talk about, please email unfinishing.pod@gmail.com, contact Em on Instagram @unfinishingpod, or on Twitter @TrueBagglerag.
unfinishing is the podcast about projects that are incomplete, abandoned, or not public. It’s presented by Emily Anderson and the artwork is by Graham Oakes. If you have an incomplete or private project you’d like to talk about, please email unfinishing.pod@gmail.com, contact Em on Instagram @unfinishingpod, or on Twitter @TrueBagglerag.
My guest in this episode is Robert Hampson, Professor Emeritus in English Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London, where he began teaching in 1973. Robert has dedicated a very large chunk of his career to studying Joseph Conrad, the author who’s probably best known for his novel Heart of Darkness (1899).
Robert tells me about two of his unfinished work on Conrad. One is a possible further critical monograph on Conrad, and the other is a recent Ukrainian edition of Conrad’s works for which Robert wrote the introduction. Two volumes of this edition were published before the Russian invasion, with the war then interrupting the project.
We then go on to talk about Robert’s poetry. Robert began writing a volume in the 1970s called seaport, which was published in unfinished form in 1995. Robert returned to seaport during lockdown and has now written a (very long) version of the section that was originally missing. We talk about – among other things – the challenges of picking up an unfinished work decades after it was begun.
Finally, we discuss another lockdown poetry project of Robert’s that is unfinished, called covodes. This series was – again – interrupted by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Robert is also kind enough to give a reading of one of the works in this series.
About Robert
Robert has been engaged in research on Joseph Conrad since 1971. He has published four critical monographs on Conrad – Joseph Conrad: Betrayal and Identity (1992), Cross-Cultural Encounters in Conrad’s Malay Fiction (2000), Conrad’s Secrets (2012) and Joseph Conrad Cosmopolitanism and Transnationalism (2023) – as well as a critical biography, Joseph Conrad (2020). He has co-edited a number of volumes of essays on Conrad: Conrad and Theory (1998), Conrad and Language (2016), The European Reception of Joseph Conrad (2022) and Conrad’s Cultural Legacy (2024). He is also the current editor of The Conradian.
Robert has edited three Conrad texts for Penguin – Lord Jim (1986), Victory (1989) and Heart of Darkness (1995), and two Conrad texts for Wordsworth – Nostromo (2000) and the Lingard Trilogy (2016). He has been on the Editorial Board of the Cambridge Edition of Conrad’s Works since the 1980s. In addition, he has published numerous essays, articles and chapters in books on Conrad.
Robert has published some 15 pamphlets of poetry since 1975 as well as five books of poetry: Assembled Fugitives: Selected Poems, 1973-1998 (2001); seaport (1995, 2008); an explanation of colours (2010); reworked disasters (2012); and covodes 1-19 (2021). The volume reworked disasters was long-listed for the Forward Prize, and selections form the covodes have been translated into Italian and published in Italy.
Links of interest
Robert Hampson: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Gavin_Hampson
William Roscoe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Roscoe
William Rothenstein: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Rothenstein
Charles Olsen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Olson
unfinishing is the podcastabout projects that are incomplete, abandoned, or not public. It’s presented by Emily Anderson and the artwork is by Graham Oakes. If you have an incomplete or private project you’d like to talk about, please email unfinishing.pod@gmail.com, contact Em on Instagram @unfinishingpod, or on Twitter @TrueBagglerag.
My guest in this episode is Lorraine Topper, who is a writer and a fashion history researcher. She has, for the last decade, focused on clothing stories from the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Her research has been featured as part of public programmes at the M&S Archive, the V&A, The Courtauld, and the Museum of London.
After completing a Master’s in History and Culture of Fashion where she wrote tens of thousands of words about underwear, she really wanted to turn her bra history research into book. However, after years of trying and failing, once she finally had a book contract and tried to get stuck into the writing she realised it wasn't the right path for her...
Links of interest: https://linktr.ee/masterofbras
unfinishing is the podcast about projects that are incomplete, abandoned, or not public. It’s presented by Emily Anderson and the artwork is by Graham Oakes. If you have an incomplete or private project you’d like to talk about, please email unfinishing.pod@gmail.com, contact Em on Instagram @unfinishingpod, or on Twitter @TrueBagglerag.
In this epsiode Guy Waites talks about his experience sailing solo round the world, spending months alone at sea as part of the Golden Globe Race.
Over the course of the race, Guy and the other entrants faced huge storms, enormous waves, and of course the immense psychological challenge of being alone for months and months.
But, incredibly, it wasn’t any of those challenges that prevented Guy from finishing his circumnavigation in one go. It was: barnacles. So many barnacles attached themselves to Guy’s boat that he was forced to stop to remove them.
Somewhat brilliantly, though, and despite having been excluded from the race, Guy decided to continue with his journey. He completed his circumnavigation after 287 days at sea – and also having run out of food for the last few of those days.
Find out more about Guy here: https://guywaitessailing.com/
Read about the Golden Globe Race here: https://goldengloberace.com/skippers/guy-waites/
Read about the Jester Challenge here: https://jesterchallenge.wordpress.com/what-is-the-jester-challenge/
unfinishing is the podcast about projects that are incomplete, abandoned, or not public. It’s presented by Emily Anderson and the artwork is by Graham Oakes. If you have an incomplete or private project you’d like to talk about, please email unfinishing.pod@gmail.com, contact Em on Instagram @unfinishingpod, or on Twitter @TrueBagglerag.
In this episode Andy Jaggard tells the story of an unfinished memoir that was written by his father Gerald.
Andy discovered the memoir after his father died, and reading it opened up a maze of mysteries and unanswered questions.
The memoir includes a lot of reflection about Andy’s grandfather – who was called Captain William Jaggard and who established a well-known bookshop in Stratford-upon-Avon. Captain Jaggard firmly believed that he was descended from the printers (whose family name is also Jaggard) who published the First Folio of Shakespeare’s work in 1623. In the end Andy hired a professional genealogist to find out whether his grandfather was right...
But what’s really central to the memoir is the personal story it tells. When Andy found it, it ended abruptly at a crucial moment in the story.
A mysterious call from an American researcher eventually prompted Andy to research his father’s life, and to finish the memoir. In the process, he discovered some truly extraordinary events in the history of his family.
The completed memoir was published in April 2023. It’s called "Shakespeare Press" - the memoir of Gerald Jaggard completed by Andy Jaggard.
Links of interest
The Shakespeare Press: https://www.waterstones.com/book/shakespeare-press/andy-jaggard/9781739307707
Find out more about Gerald’s memoir on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/shakespeare_press_book/
Find out more online: https://shakespeare-press.com/
unfinishing is the podcast about projects that are incomplete, abandoned, or not public. It’s presented by Emily Anderson and the artwork is by Graham Oakes. If you have an incomplete or private project you’d like to talk about, please email unfinishing.pod@gmail.com, contact Em on Instagram @unfinishingpod, or on Twitter @TrueBagglerag.
My guest in this episode is Alix Beeston, who is a writer and a Senior Lecturer in English at Cardiff University, where she researches and teaches twentieth and twenty-first century film, photography, and literature.
Alix is the perfect guest – in the last few years she’s been studying unfinished creative work. She approaches unfinished films and literary texts as windows onto the realities of artistic production for women, including the systemic barriers that affect that labour, and also as constituting significant artistic work in its own right, even if it doesn't achieve the completion of a distributed film or a published book.
In summer 2023 she published Incomplete: The Feminist Possibilities of the Unfinished Film, a collection of essays that she co-edited with Stefan Solomon.
Links of interest
Incomplete: The Feminist Possibilities of the Unfinished Film: https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520381476/incomplete
Out of Sight: Modernist Writing and the Photographic Unseen: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/in-and-out-of-sight-9780197673010?lang=en&cc=gb
unfinishing is the podcast about projects that are incomplete, abandoned, or not public. It’s presented by Emily Anderson and the artwork is by Graham Oakes. If you have an incomplete or private project you’d like to talk about, please email unfinishing.pod@gmail.com, contact Em on Instagram @unfinishingpod, or on Twitter @TrueBagglerag.
My guests in this episode to open Series 3 are Jen Simonic and Masey Kaplan. Together, Jen and Masey founded the Loose Ends project.
The Loose Ends project has created an enormous community of knitters, embroiderers, and crafters of all varieties around the world, who finish textile works that have been left incomplete when the original crafters have passed away or become ill.
Masey and Jen have some incredibly inspiring and moving stories about the unfinished projects that have been submitted to Loose Ends – as well as some very funny ones.
To submit an unfinished project to Loose Ends, to volunteer as a finisher or translator, and to donate, visit www.looseendsproject.org.
unfinishing is the podcast about projects that are incomplete, abandoned, or not public. It’s presented by Emily Anderson and the artwork is by Graham Oakes. If you have an incomplete or private project you’d like to talk about, please email unfinishing.pod@gmail.com, contact Em on Instagram @unfinishingpod, or on Twitter @TrueBagglerag. This is a special episode of unfinishing, all about the Northern Writers' Awards (NWAs), which are perfect for this podcast because they support works in progress. With huge thanks to the staff at New Writing North who run the awards, I went along to talk to some of this year’s winners, alongside judges and authors who have won in the past: Will Mackie, Senior Programme Manager (Talent Development) and Programme Leader (MA in Publishing) Dr Louise Powell, writer and winner of the Sid Chaplin Award (2023) Farzana A. Ghani, writer and winner of the Northern Promise TLC Award (2023) Lucy Irvine, agent – Peters Fraser + Dunlop (NWA Judge) Sairish Hussain, author and Lecturer in Creative Writing (NWA Judge) James Harris, author and 2019 winner of the Hachette Children’s Novel Award Naomi Kelsey, author and winner of the Arvon Award (2020) and Northern Writers’ Fiction Award (2014) You can find out more about the Northern Writers Awards here: https://newwritingnorth.com/northern-writers-awards/
unfinishing is the podcast about things that are incomplete, abandoned, or not public. It’s presented by Emily Anderson and the artwork is by Graham Oakes. If you have an incomplete or private project you’d like to talk about, please email unfinishing.pod@gmail.com, contact Em on Instagram @unfinishingpod, or on Twitter @TrueBagglerag.
My guest in this episode is Victoria Bennett, who is a writer and creative producer. Her work includes poetry, non-fiction, video-game narrative, creative writing facilitation, and publishing.
I speak to Victoria about the experience of grief is unfinished, with a focus on her memoir All My Wild Mothers (Hachette, 2023). In the memoir Victoria describes the loss of several members of her family, her experiences of motherhood, and the process of creating a garden full of wonder with her young son.
Links of interest
All My Wild Mothers: https://www.hachette.co.uk/titles/victoria-bennett/all-my-wild-mothers/9781529398618/
Wild Women Press: http://www.wildwomenpress.com/
Women Who Run with the Wolves: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_Who_Run_with_the_Wolves
unfinishing is the podcast about projects that are unfinished, abandoned, or not public. It’s presented by Emily Anderson and the artwork is by Graham Oakes. If you have an incomplete or private project you’d like to talk about, please email unfinishing.pod@gmail.com, contact Em on Instagram @unfinishingpod, or on Twitter @TrueBagglerag.
In this episode, Dr Steve Kershaw talks about Plato’s Critias dialogue, a text that’s not only unfinished but actually ends mid-sentence – and no-one knows why. It also happens to be the source of the legend of Atlantis. We talk about why Plato may have abandoned it, and how its incompleteness has fed into its (mis)interpretation.
Steve wrote his Ph.D. under the supervision of Prof. Richard Buxton, arguably the leading scholar on Greek myth in the world. He’s spent the last 40 years travelling in the world of the ancient Greeks and Romans, both physically and in his head, and he's been a Classics tutor for some 30 years. He currently works out of the Oxford University Department for Continuing Education.
Useful links
Steve’s Brief History of Atlantis: Plato’s Ideal State (including Steve’s translation of Critias): A Brief History of Atlantis by Stephen P. Kershaw | Hachette UK (littlebrown.co.uk)
Mythologica, Steve’s children’s book on Greek mythology Mythologica by Stephen P. Kershaw | Quarto At A Glance | The Quarto Group (quartoknows.com)
You’re Dead to Me episode on Atlantis: You're Dead To Me - Atlantis - BBC Sounds
Steve’s website: http://www.stevekershaw.com/index.html
unfinishing is the podcast about projects that are unfinished, abandoned, or not public. It’s presented by Emily Anderson and the artwork is by Graham Oakes. If you have an unfinished or private project you’d like to talk about, please email unfinishing.pod@gmail.com, contact Em on Instagram @unfinishingpod or on Twitter @TrueBagglerag.
My guest this week is Jo Moseley, who is a beach cleaner, joy encourager & midlife adventurer. Alongside her lovely day job, she is also a speaker, writer and podcast host. She’s a single mum of two sons, aged 26 and 22, and she lives on the edge of the Yorkshire Dales. In August 2019, Jo became the first woman to SUP (stand up paddleboard) coast-to-coast 162 miles along the Leeds Liverpool Canal, picking up litter, fundraising for the Wave Project and the 2 Minute Beach Clean Foundation, and raising awareness of the problems of single use plastic. Jo worked with filmmaker Frit Tam to make a film about her journey called Brave Enough - A Journey Home to Joy.
We speak about Jo’s second book on Paddleboarding, which she took the very brave and unusual decision not to publish (despite having spent months working on it!) Jo tells me why she made that decision, and the process she went through to (very kindly) explain it to all the people who had helped in its creation.
Jo also explains to me the experiences she’s had with miscarriage, and why the grief of that feels to her like it will always be unfinished, as well as telling me how she’s still in an ongoing process of exploring her own dreams and ambitions – which she wasn’t able to realise in her 30s and 40s.
In June 2022, Jo’s first book Stand Up Paddleboarding in Great Britain - Beautiful Places to Paddleboard in England, Scotland and Wales was published by award winning Vertebrate Publishing.
Two of Jo’s films Finding Joy and Found at Sea have both won awards.
You can find out more at: www.jomoseley.com and Jo's column in Stand-Up Paddleboarding Magazine is here: https://standuppaddlemag.co.uk/paddleboarding-for-good/
Follow Jo on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/jomoseley/) and Twitter (https://twitter.com/Healthyhappy50).
unfinishing is the podcast about projects that are unfinished, abandoned, or not public. It’s presented by Emily Anderson and the artwork is by Graham Oakes. If you have an unfinished or private project you’d like to talk about, please email unfinishing.pod@gmail.com, contact Em on Instagram @unfinishingpod or on Twitter @TrueBagglerag.
My guest this week is Faye Latham, who is a writer, visual poet and rock climber based in the Lake District. In January 2020 she was awarded the Literature Wales Bursary for Writers Under 25 to support the development of her poetry, which resulted in her work being published in journals and magazines including UKClimbing.com, Lumin Journal, The CTC Rewilding Anthology, and the Cambridge Literary Review. In 2021 she was awarded a grant with the Society of Authors and her pamphlet Ruin/Nation was highly commended in the Poetry Wales Pamphlet Competition. Faye is also one of the organisers of Kendal Mountain Festival.
Her first poetry collection is called British Mountaineers and in it she uses a style called erasure poetry. This involves taking writing composed by someone else and erasing large parts of it so that what remains creates a poem. British Mountaineers was originally a text by the mountaineer Frank Smythe, who was a well-known climber active in the 1920s and 1930s. Faye and I talk about how creating something new from Smythe’s text felt to her like a process of ‘unfinishing’ it – of showing that the tale he told was not the end of the story.
We also talk about how Faye turned to poetry partly because she found it hard to finish novels, and about a possible erasure project for the future that has an environmental focus. At the end of the episode we get on to chatting about different forms of erasure/ unfinishing, such as the toppled statue of Edward Colston, and the Banksy artwork (now called Love is in the bin) that involved one of his paintings being shredded just after being sold.
Links of interest:
British Mountaineers: https://www.littlepeak.co.uk/catalogue/british-mountaineers-international-orders_73/
Frank Smythe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Smythe
Sarah J Sloat's book Hotel Almighty: https://www.sarahjsloat.com/publications/
unfinishing is the podcast about projects that are unfinished, abandoned, or not public. It’s presented by Emily Anderson and the artwork is by Graham Oakes. If you have an unfinished or private project you’d like to talk about, please email unfinishing.pod@gmail.com, contact Em on Instagram @unfinishingpod or on Twitter @TrueBagglerag.
Rebecca Coles is a mountaineer. Her unfinished project is to climb all 82 of the 4000m alpine peaks with an all-female team.
Becky specialises in remote expeditions and has made first ascents in Nepal and South Georgia, Antarctica. She’s led expeditions on all seven continents, and she’s a Winter Mountaineering and Climbing Instructor and an International Mountain Leader. She has a PhD in Glacial Geomorphology.
We talked about the great number of different things that have to come together to achieve all 82 peaks, about trying to get to sleep the night before you attempt to summit, and about why Becky enjoys training military personnel.
Becky also tells me about how she motivated a judge with no walking experience to complete an ascent of Kilimanjaro, about what it feels like on a first ascent expedition when you don’t quite make it to the top, and why looking negatively at unfinished things is a dinner-party problem, rather than a personal one.
At the end of the episode, we spend a bit of time talking about Becky’s next expedition: she’s leading a 280km, camel-supported desert trek in Sudan.
Find out more about Rebecca Coles here: https://www.instagram.com/roam.mtns/
Rebecca’s piece in Sidetracked about her first ascent of Lasarmula: https://www.sidetracked.com/a-mountain-affair/
The UIAA:
Rob Johnson, filmmaker:
Franco Cookson is climber and the star of Fall Theory, a film by Alistair Lee that premiered in 2021, and which follows Franco completing the first ascent of an incredibly dangerous route called the Immortal in North Yorkshire.
We talk about my guesses of things Franco may not have finished (two climbing routes and an article it turns out he doesn’t remember writing). We then cover how having unfinished climbing projects is inevitable (since at some point failure is guaranteed), how climbing routes take on personalities as more people complete them, and about the importance of thinking through what could go wrong in preparation for doing a climb.
I happened to speak to Franco on his very first day as a fully professional climber, so we also speak about the socio-economic barriers to going professional, the possible effects of social media on the process, and why you’re probably doing it wrong if you enjoy doing promotion too much.
There are also bits about castles in Northumberland, about how the pupils Franco used to teach didn’t know he was also a climber, about Franco’s enthusiasm for climbers who aren’t from the normal climbing areas, and – right at the end – a bit about a play Franco started to write while at university in Manchester.
unfinishing is the podcast about projects that are unfinished, abandoned, or not public. It’s presented by Emily Anderson and the artwork is by Graham Oakes. If you have an unfinished or private project you’d like to talk about, please email unfinishing.pod@gmail.com, contact Em on Instagram @unfinishingpod or on Twitter @TrueBagglerag.