Essays RSS

September 17th is National Fox Day! To celebrate these beautiful animals and the love they inspire, here is the opening extract from the chapter 'Pumpkin Eyes' from Carly Holmes's exquisite collection of nature essays Love Letters on the River:     Pumpkin Eyes The young vixen appeared late one spring. She unfolded herself from the flower bed and sat slouched on her haunches, yawning and eyeing me as I wandered up the garden path with the birds’ food. I stopped and stared. ‘Hello,’ I said. ‘You’ve flattened my aquilegias. They’re not coming back from that.’ She inserted a paw into...

Sydney Whiteside, for the Wales Arts Review, takes an indepth look at the writings of Christina Thatcher (How to Carry Fire) and Zoë Brigley (Notes from a Swing State), finding cultural depths and resonances as an American living in Wales.

'Both Christina Thatcher’s How to Carry Fire and Zoë Brigley’s Notes from a Swing State are born of trans-Atlantic origins. Writing between Wales and America, though in opposite directions, Thatcher and Brigley speak of both countries with spellbinding precision and depth. As someone inhabiting a similar position, reading these works was both a joy and an inspiration.'

You can read the full article here.

And both books are available to buy on our website - link here.

Happy New Year all!

It is lovely to see this very positive review of Notes from a Swing State by Zoë Brigley on our return to the office! Thanks to Sue Mackrell for writing it!

“She refuses to believe that violence is inevitable and works to challenge violence, hate crimes and discrimination against anyone who does not conform to a supposed ‘norm.’ She believes at the root of it all is a breakdown of communication, ‘an act of violent refusal' to recognise the humanity and to empathise with an individual perceived as ‘different.’”

Writing on Nation.Cymru Jon Gower finds much to admire in Zoë Brigley's new essay collection. 'Throughout this collection Brigley is challengingly open about her own life. Which turns out to have had its challenges especially because, as a young writer she found it hard to write about personal material, which she described as a ‘writerly shyness.’ As a young woman she found herself in an abusive relationship with an older man. So the essays prove she has overcome both and now faces her fears head-on. 'These Notes from a Swing State are written with an openness to ideas redolent of...

Zoë Brigley's essay collection Notes from a Swing State has had two recent, favourable reviews in the latest issues of Planet and the welsh agenda. 'If, as for Raymond Williams, great shifts in time and society are a picking up and setting back down again, then surely we are currently within just such an undefined state, the consequences of which are unknown until the settling and evaluating that comes with the aftermath. The swing state of this new collection of essays by Zoë Brigley is not only Ohio and the Electoral College, but self, home, nationhood and identity. Body, mind and...