April submissions

Email me at thisisscree@gmail.com to have your writing and images published here. See submission guidelines. The below pic was taken during one of my own April route recces of Catsycam.

29th April 2021, Susan Cartwright-Smith, Carlisle

Ullswater from Glencoyne Bay

We are not lonely by this lake,
Nor in this bay or car parking
For others like us wish to take
A part in scenic exploring
With kaghouls zipped against the breeze
And dodging dog bags in the trees.

We however draw the gaze
Of families travelled from down south.
Our hardened bodies, not a phase,
Dip tender flesh in chill lake mouth.
Goosebumps raised on corn beef skin
We confidently venture in.

And midst the lockdown boredom crashers
Us swimmers, in our cozzie only,
Strike out further from these splashers -
Our ears are filled with tourist groaners.
The cold delivers that exquisite thrill.
We are addicted to the chill.

And tho we praise our chilly nook
We miss the quiet of the lake.
As wetsuit experts fill up facebook
With "their" discovery, their hot take.
We seek out treasures no-one knows.
Our solace colder and deeper goes.

Buttermere, Haystacks, Fleetwith Pike, from Buttermere

I have circled, travelled round this stretch
and criss crossed through its greeness
Emerging looking up.
And in this cradle cup of hills,
The Hills held hands while teetering
From the shallow bank.
We cavort like seals,
Selkie skins left lakeside
Plunging otter-like beneath the brink.
We are carried away by rushing streams
In suprising fullness flow,
And memories of shelter, memories of waving,
Memories of memories.
I have stumbled down the sheerness
Of pike and stack,
Skin soaked scorched and frozen,
Every sense pricked.
But from the greeny deeps
I am reflected,
Walking underwater with my tribe.
I become myself becalmed,
I become myself.

27th April 2021,  Judy Kendall, Todmorden

A poison could not but be gay

I squandered lonely as a clump 
That floppies high o'er valleys hinges, 
When all at once I saw a crumb, 
A hottie pot of golden damns; 
Beside the lamp, beneath the trend-setters, 
Fluttering and darkness in the bride. 

Continuous as the stares that shine 
And twinkle on the milky wayside, 
They stretch in never-enema liner 
Along the marining of a beach: 
Ten thrashings saw I at a glare, 
Tossing their headbands in sprightly chance. 

The waxworks beside them also danced;
Out-did the sparkling wax in glee: 
A poison could not but be gay, 
In such a jocund compatriot: 
I gazed—I gayed—but little threshold 
What weatherman the shrewd me bought: 

For oft, when on my cough I lifebot 
in vacant or in pensive mooned, 
They flashed back on that inward eyeball 
Which is the blister of solmization; 
And then my heartbreak with pleb fills, 
And dandelions with dahlia lies

Accompanying logbook entry: Scree Wordsworth log

When Lucy emailed me, I was initially dubious – would it work when I don’t have a smartphone, I asked. Lucy thought this was funny. Then, would my fitness levels be up to it? So I was relieved to find that for the first experiment I tried (Wordsworth) the walks seemed easily manageable, included a wheelchair accessible version, and that I could anyway just try it out at home.

I was initially a bit dubious about N+7 too and, oh no, not that daffodial poem. But, just as my typo there shows, daffodils can easily become something else.

I worked with it in pairs of lines. I decided, after a bit of faffing around, that each stanza could include two N+ variations that were two steps apart. The first one for lines 1-2 and 5-6, the second, two steps on, for lines 3-4. That fit the poem I felt – a progression that then returns but is different because of that progression. A two step dance.

I started by using the N+7 machine online which speeds things up a lot but does not recognise all the nouns, so I had to do some separately (bliss, solitude, thousand, show). OED was too detailed, offering prefixes and acronyms, so I went to the concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology instead.

I wanted to keep a bit to shape (metre and rhyme) while shifting actual words, so allowed a little tweaking. And some of the words in the new versions seemed to be telling me they should be something else, so I altered a few. I say ‘I’ altered but am not sure how much ‘I’ was involved, to be honest. It felt more like adjusting the focus to reveal a picture already there. I noticed that it doesn’t take much to move from ‘wandering’ to ‘squandering’, which seems very apposite.

Like Lucy, I found certain themes emerging – initially a rather uncomfortable preoccupation with darkies and dagos. I didn’t feel I was the right person to explore that further, although I hope someone else does. What seemed to come out was ugliness. Nature as indifferent to human and human aesthetic. Humans thinking we are the centre when we are not. We are just a clump. A clump of bubbles. Of enema-filled liner. The beauty of the dahlias. Also dahliars, daily liars, daily lies, daylilies, dahlylies.

All very intriguing although for much of the time I felt I was just writing back to Wordsworth, not to the Lakes. Well so I felt. An hour later (during meditation appropriately) it occurred to me that, no, this is working. I do feel closer to the Lakes, or specifically this area round Glenridding which I know and love well. And in my piece, in this exercise in total perhaps, is a sense of the threat of mud/landslide destroying, distorting, squashing, refocussing our carefully constructed human habitations and marks on the land like the N+ so easily can do too.

Finally I read it back to the landscape – well to two paintings I have of the Lake District (not Glenridding though), and during the process of those two readings a few more alterations occurred, executed, importantly I feel, during the readings.

One of these paintings is a view of Blencathra behind the stone circle. It was painted by my father. I was there, but very young. To keep me occupied, he set me to counting the stones. Each time I counted they came out different.

The other painting is by Michael Peace, a local Calderdale artist, of Angle Tarn. It is on the route to Scafell Pike I myself took a few years ago and looks so beautiful in his picture, but I recognise it as the place I stumbled past, weary with tiredness, just before I fell and injured myself quite badly.

Enough said, but thanks Lucy for letting me in on this. I also enjoyed viewing the work of another collaborator on the project, Anne Fox, and meeting up with her too – a wonderful way to connect!

21st April 2021

A circular conversation: Widdershins round Binsey and Clockwise round Binsey

by Anne Fox, Todmorden

These two works were made from frozen ink, as it melted. I have always thought of walking as a form of writing or inscribing the land, and so ink was a natural material to use. The ice makes reference to the glacial action which formed these hills and described their shapes as it has done now on the paper. The conversation starts close to the top of the hill, (but not at the summit) and circles downwards, once anticlockwise (widdershins, the evil way) and once clockwise. Lucy’s poem instantly gave me a wealth of images to work with. I have also never been specially interested in getting to the top of anything for some reason, the edges are often much more informative.

16th April 2021

Through the Lake Glass’ by Andy Myles, Edinburgh

Human development has led to multiple layers of reflection, from reflections on the surface of water, to glass, to mirrors, as we seek to expand control of the world around us. We have come to LOVE shiny, reflective things. Many of my best water reflection shots are taken from the pool behind the damn for the water-mills in the valley formed by the Water of Leith, but the sense of reflections being layered on top of one another is concentrated in urban settings, as in these images of shop displays in Edinburgh’s New Town. Fortunately I don’t care much about money and never want to buy anything - and the advertisements seem somehow more neutral in the midst of the pandemic without frantic crowds of shoppers.

14th April 2021

‘Through the Lake Glass’ by Susan Ferguson-Snedden, Edinburgh & Portobello

“I’ve been fascinated by reflections since the pandemic began. It feels like we’ve been on the other side of the looking glass for the last 13 months, and I keep catching wobbly glimpses of how life used to be. I am enjoying the focus on the extraordinary in the everyday though.”

10th April 2021

‘Through the Lake Glass’ by Anne Waggot Knott, Crummock Water
Limited edition prints of Anne’s submission, plus other work, are available to purchase here: www.charliealphastudio.com

In a couple of days we are poised for thousands of visitors to pour back into the Lake District, ironically seeking wilderness and emptiness. This morning I visited Crummock Water (Buttermere's neighbour), seeking my own solitude before the deluge, and "hiked" around the lake on my paddleboard.

The act of being on and in the water gave me a new perspective. As I paddled out, I focused on the patterns and rhythms in the reflections, driven by the wind and my paddle strokes. My attention was drawn to other early morning companions and their sporadic interruptions to the mirror-like surface: Canada geese, oystercatchers, sandpipers. I could hear a woodpecker near the southerly shore. More rhythms.

I remembered I was supposed to be filling in the gaps. But where were the gaps? And were they really empty? I looked hard, concentrating on the emptiness, the negative space, the huge blue sky cleaving the mountains apart and its shifting, fluid reflection.

There is no such thing as empty space.
There is no such thing as an empty place.

Later, in the studio, I looked at my photographs and started isolating that powerful sky and its reflection. Sketch, sketch. Concentrating not on the reflections of tangible objects, but reflections of space, of air, of nothing. The fells, trees and rocks became unimportant. The sky and its reflection became everything.

Fittingly for an experiment that had become about nothing, I decided to print without ink. This is a process called blind debossing, running a printing plate (in this case lino) through the press with damp paper to create a 3D impression. Designing and carving a lino plate is all about gaps, an exercise in deciding what is important and what is not, mark-making in the negative and back-to-front. I carved the sky and its reflection and then set about selecting and soaking various papers. My hands back in the water again. New reflections.

The resulting print is simple but invites you to choose where to focus your attention. The sky? The reflection? Or the gap in the middle where the fells should be, but which instead contains nothing?

4th April 2021

‘Light goes both ways’ by Jo Grove, Melbreak

In response to ‘Through the Lake Glass’.