emilycleaver.net

Fiction, reviews & articles

Poems as performance … John Cooper Clarke

Latest blog post for Litro magazine … Last week I squeezed into a packed and sweaty auditorium at the South Bank Centre to watch performance poet and punk legend John Cooper Clarke’s show for the London Literature Festival. The Bard of Salford was on good form, despite the temperature. Now in his 60s, he still [...]

How To Write A Letter

“All flourishes and twirls should be rigidly avoided; they are vulgar and pointless” is the sound advice which kicks off How Shall I Word It?, a letter writer for men and women on domestic and business subjects published in 1943. There’s a letter for every situation that might crop up in modern life, starting with [...]

Dervish Flash Fiction

Dervishes are followers of the mystical Sufi tradition in Islam. Their traditional stories are meant to help Sufi practitioners understand mystical concepts. They’re flash fictions, short and to the point. My favourite is about Jesus, who is a prophet in Islamic tradition. Jesus is hanging around in the desert with some guys, and they ask [...]

Thankful Villages

I came across this rather mysterious and lovely phrase while I was flicking through a copy of Brewer’s Britain and Ireland, and was pleased to find that the explanation was equally as intriguing. Thankful villages are those places in Britain where all the men who left to fight in the First World War came back [...]

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