Five Questions for... JLM Morton

We continue our series of occasional short interviews with contributors and friends of Elsewhere with five questions for JLM Morton, who we featured in our Trespass issue. 

What does home mean to you?

Home, in it’s very truest sense, is the place where I grew up – Cirencester, a market town in Gloucestershire where I wore a groove into the street I lived on, going back and forth to the parks at either end of the street: the now paywalled Bathurst Estate park and the municipal Abbey Grounds with its sweeping cedar tree, elderly mulberry, a lake full of pike that my brother used to catch and the old cold store that looks like an egg cupped by a mound of grass. I couldn’t live there now – there are aspects of the place that I can only stomach in small doses (like a toxic family member) – the showy Cotswold privilege and snobbery, the loafers and chinos, small town social dynamics, the town/gown antagonism with the Royal Agricultural University that led to many a fight in the marketplace on a Saturday night when I was younger. I suppose I found home in the out-of-the-way quiet places, in the ‘maze’ we built as kids in the thicket at the back of the school field, in the den we claimed on the dirt hill at the edge of the car park, in the copse where I snuck out at dawn with a friend to set a fire and fry an egg in the skillet I’d smuggled from our kitchen in a rucksack. Home was also the rivers and brooks that run through the town and in and out of both parks, where I paddled, as well as the open-air pool where I seemed to spend entire summers diving off the board and burning my tongue on too-hot chocolate in plastic cups from the tuck shop. Now, wherever I go in the world, water feels like home to me – I can sit and be with water for hours and never get restless.

Which place do you have a special connection to?

I feel a very special connection to West Africa, a region I spent a lot of time living and working in during the early 2000s and 2010s. I have a background in education, particularly supporting girls and children with disabilities to access school which took me to various places including Nigeria, Benin Republic, Ghana, Togo, Cameroon. I feel a very particular affinity with Sierra Leone – there is something about the people, the colleagues I’ve worked with over the years, that I love and admire. It’s something like resilience but not – everyone I’ve ever met there has always welcomed me with open arms, with a kind of high-spirited joy, a no-f*cks-left-to-give attitude that carries them along and which I find inspiring. I first went there in 2003 just after the civil war ended to work with the Forum of African Women Educationalists. Though excluded from public decision making, what women have done to create nonpartisan community dialogue to advance peace has been extraordinary. The majestic cotton tree that stands in the oldest part of Freetown is the most on-point manifestation of this attitude – associated with the founding of the capital by a group of formerly enslaved African Americans, known as the Black Nova Scotians, who gathered under its shade to pray and celebrate their freedom, the tree is a landmark, revered by the local community for its spirit and historical importance. Sierra Leone is an extraordinarily beautiful country – I especially love the area around Kenema, where the trees look like gods and the forest is all you can see for miles.

What is beyond your front door?

Immediately beyond my front door is a street full of families and elderly folk, rows of houses built on an orchard in the mid-1950s where the springs along the hill still seep up through the kerbsides. Some of the residents have lived here since these houses were built. Beyond our gardens is the A46 road down to Bath. To the back is a steep climb up to Rodborough Common. To the front, over the rooves, Selsley common and a view towards the Severn Vale where the land flattens and on a good day you can see the Forest of Dean beyond the river.

What place would you most like to visit?

I have always wanted to go to Rajasthan, lured in part by the textiles, beadwork and jewellery as well as the desert. I’m really fascinated by the ways women all over the world have used weaving and making as a kind of language that speaks beyond the confines of the written word. It’s a way of transcending boundaries and telling stories that express culture and history which I feel deeply connected to. I come from a long line of textile workers – something I only discovered recently and which explains why I have boxes full of textiles that I’ve collected from around the world that I really have no space for at all but can’t let go.  

What are you reading / watching / listening to / looking at right now?

I’ve been collaborating with the brilliant comic Emma Kernahan and composer Mara Simspon on Lost Mythos, a show that blends the unruly folklore of old, weird Albion and stories from modern rural life, simultaneously embodying and exploring ancient archetypes and questioning our yearning for them. Mara has written a beautiful album, Living Matter, in response to my poems and I’ve got that on repeat. She also did a brilliant playlist ‘Humans in the Room’ for 6Music’s Freakzone which I highly recommend banging on.

I always have multiple reads on the go and my tbr pile is ridiculous. I’ve just finished Isabelle Baafi’s collection Chaotic Good which was thrilling to read – innovations in form and one of those books that make you feel like you’re being let in on a secret that only you will know. I’m now reading Michael Symmonds Roberts’ brilliant and moving memoir Quartet for the End of Time which is about grief and the premiere of Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du temps to a crowd of Jewish prisoners of war in a deathcamp and its legacy – it feels remarkably prescient. I have also got Jen Calleja’s demented and revelatory Goblinhood on the go, a series of encyclopaedic essays and poems on her theory of goblins in pop culture. I can’t describe it, you have to read it. I’m writing about pilgrimage at the moment, so I’m reading Esther de Waal’s The Celtic Way of Prayer too which is about inner and outer journeying, poetry and prayer / poetry as prayer.

I’ve just binged Narrow Road to the Deep North on BBC iPlayer. Lured in by the love story, I got sideswiped by the turn into the horrors of the Death Railway built by Asian labourers and Allied POWs to connect Thailand with Myanmar, but I thought this was an utterly brilliant drama, one of those ones I can't stop thinking about. I realise I’m being drawn to war stories right now, no doubt looking for answers to our current predicaments. Original novel by Richard Flanagan, the only writer to have won both the Booker and the Baillie Gifford. The way he / the director handle the subtleties of emotion really blew me away. Incredible storytelling.

I keep meaning to get up to that London to see the Ithell Colquhoun show at Tate Britain. Painter, occultist and poet, Colquhoun is getting a long-overdue reassessment. She reminds me a lot of Monica Sjöö, a radical anarcho ecofeminist who played a pivotal role in the peace and women’s movements of the 1970s and beyond. She got her own retrospective in 2023 at Modern Art Oxford and at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. Both of these artist remind us that we are not simply one and the other, goddess and god, male and female. Our boundaries are permeable, all matter is vibrant and that nothing comes from nothing, our differences are joyously multiple at many levels and scales. Such is the fecundity and variousness of our planet – that recognising our relationality and radical inter-connectedness, not focusing on our oppositions, is a form of resistance. A callback from the past, a reminder we need now more than ever.

JLM Morton is a writer, celebrant and community arts producer from Gloucestershire in the west of England. Her poetry has featured on BBC6 Music and appeared in Poetry Review, Poetry London, Rialto, Magma, Mslexia, The London Magazine, Anthropocene, The Sunday Telegraph and elsewhere. Her prose writing has won the Laurie Lee Prize, been longlisted for the Nan Shepherd prize and extracts from Tenderfoot have been published in Caught by the River, Oxford Review of Books and Elsewhere: A Journal of Place. Juliette is the winner of the Geoffrey Dearmer and Poetry Archive Worldview Prizes and she is a Pushcart Prize nominee. Her debut poetry collection Red Handed, was highly commended by the Forward Prizes and a Poetry Society Book of the Year (Broken Sleep Books, 2024). www.jlmmorton.com

You can read ‘Over, Across’ by JLM Morton here.

PEN & Paper Aeroplanes: Ellen Wiles for Dina Meza

PEN & Paper Aeroplanes: Over the next two weeks we are handing over the Elsewhere blog to a series of literary tributes from UK-based writers in solidarity with writers at risk around the World who are supported by English PEN. As they are added, all the tributes will be collected together here. Today is the turn of Ellen Wiles for Dina Meza:

I was first invited to pay tribute to Meza as part of the English PEN Modern Literature Festival in January 2019. I took inspiration from a speech she gave on International Women's Day, in which she tells the story of a colleague of hers, Dunia Montoya: another Honduran woman journalist who was brutally beaten by police when she covered a protest against state corruption. Meza quotes Montoya as describing justice in the country as being as distant as ‘the stars in the sky’. Before performing my poem, I began by sounding three notes from a pair of treasured, hand-made bronze chimes were given to me by an experimental visual and performance artist in Myanmar, Aung Myint, who also bravely protested against a repressive military regime for many years, in different ways, and was also both censored and threatened. You can watch my performance of the poem here.

Starlight on Honduras

When justice is as distant as the stars in the sky
when fake-fake news fawns over military men
spinning truths as tasteless as cardboard tamales
when free speech and other rights are rendered illusory
when national security means violence with impunity 
and power is swiftly won with the help of a gun

people who speak up are warned to know their place.
and if a woman won’t listen, a rape threat might make her
or targeting another useful weak spot: her children
miming slitting their tarnished little throats should suffice.
the few who still won’t stop must expect to be surveilled 
and learn to see fear as an indulgence to be quelled.

When the body feels as fragile as a porcelain figurine
when the spirit is a petal floating slowly to the earth
when it’s hard to keep a grasp on hope’s fraying rope
when, all around, hard nationalism gains global ground
when oppression starts to threaten even those lucky citizens
who’re used to living cosily in liberal democracies

voice is still the best and only weapon to resist
formations of words can still move minds and heal rifts
so courageous women journalists defiantly persist
believing in the need to keep believing in each other
speaking out against abuse despite existential risks
deserving tributes far more starry than a small poem like this
packed with bleeding liberal metaphors, liberally mixed.

...

I spent the next few months reflecting on Meza’s life, often imagining what she was doing while I was ambling on through my own juxtaposed writer-mother’s life with my two children. I dwelt increasingly on what it would feel like to be forced to put your children’s physical safety at risk every single day through your writing, and particularly to receive sexual threats directed at your daughter – but I found this almost too excruciating to contemplate. When I was invited to perform a second time in tribute to Meza, at the Greenwich Book Festival, 2019, I decided to write a new piece – a piece of prose, this time – born out of those reflections. You can watch my performance of it here.

Wolf Mother 

My daughter surprised all of us by growing a loose, golden Afro as soft as a cloud.
What with her blue eyes, it causes a lot of people to assume that she and her dad aren’t related, 
and it’s a paradise for headlice, but it’s worth all the hours of painstaking combing.
She says t instead of ch
and f instead of th.
She pecks at dry cereal flakes like a little sparrow
eats only the white of egg
licks the honey off her toast
and makes every pancake into a letescope.
She’s exceptionally tall for her age – only just three but the height of a five-year-old –
and is implausibly Bambi-legged.
She could be a supermodel, I’m often told in knowing tones
but I’ll do all I can to keep her future adolescent body safe from judging gazes.
When she doesn’t get her way she throws back her peachy cheeks
and lets her epiglottis vibrate like a fire bell, at a pitch no
human can endure for very long. 
And she knows it.
When she’s sleepy and calm she strokes my face and hair
like I’m a new kitten.
And when I lean down to kiss her goodnight she’ll 
get me in a headlock under her arm, clinging to my skull
like a rugby ball she never wants to touch down.
When she sings, her timbre is as exquisite as
a blackbird’s and she’s bang in tune. 
Her favourite toy is a scruffy and malevolent chicken, whose
gimlet eye she mimics when she wants
to bend my will.

Her older brother is the world’s most beautiful boy.
He doesn’t know it yet, but his coppery skin, sleek black curls
and rainbow smile radiate energy and light 
and promise to open doors to life’s best kept secrets.
He knows all the dwarf planets and names of distant stars, 
can list the rarest dinosaurs like they’re old friends, 
and is intimate with the inhabitants of the Mariana trench. 
Last time we played twenty questions on the way to school, 
I gave up. 
‘Shall I tell you?’, he asked. 
‘Tell me’, I conceded.
‘A benthocodon’, he said, triumphant but mildly disdainful of my ignorance. 
(That’s a deep water jellyfish shaped like a bell, in case you, too, didn’t know).
He can leap like a gazelle, swing easily from monkey bars
and devour stories like Augustus Gloop did chocolate cake – 
he can listen enraptured for hours, snuggling up against me, until 
my voice is hoarse, and he believes that he, like Matilda, 
will one day learn to move objects with his eyes. 
When he doesn’t meet his own expectations of himself, 
he can descend into a furious grump, 
but within five minutes he’ll be sparkling as if nothing had happened.
He’s translated the bleep language spoken by his toy robot,
his alter ego is a peregrine falcon that can dive at 60 miles per hour,
and at five years old he’s so worried about climate change and its effects on animal life
he’s decided to become a vegetarian, which both pleases me and breaks my heart.
He’s engaged to a girl in his class, and saves her grapes at lunchtime,
he can scrape out Rigadoon on his cello, and dances the coconut calypso 
like his limbs are made of slinkies instead of bones. I can 
just about still pick him up and throw him onto our bed to tickle him, 
but it takes all my strength.

I lost him once. 
He was two, and his sister was a baby. 
We were out in the park, on a balmy summer day, and I was changing her nappy – 
and when I looked up he’d gone. 
I scooped up the baby and circled the fenced-off toddler area, 
once, then twice, keeping studiously calm. 
But he was nowhere. 
The panic churned; my feet picked up speed.
I told every adult I passed, speaking too fast, but they understood 
from my face alone, and we all fanned out 
like a newly-oiled machine
searching, calling. 
I headed half-blind towards the road – 
he’d always been good about roads before, but what if… 
The baby, who was being jiggled and grasped too tight, 
started to cry, as time slowed and fractured around me. 
How could I continue living if…?

And then he emerged, from a bush that he’d been imagining as his 
den in the Jungle Book, where he lived with Mother Wolf. 
And right at that moment, 
I was Mother Wolf, 
from heckled neck to claw. 
I was pure animal.

When I became pregnant for the second time
I was happy – but all the same I couldn’t imagine having 
an inch more space in my heart to love a second small person 
with the newfound fierceness I felt for my son. 
But then, when she arrived, new caverns opened up within me, 
at least as big again, yet without diminishing the size of the caverns 
that had opened up for him. 
It’s like one of those impossible pictures of houses 
with infinitely intertwining stairs. 
It makes no rational sense.
It’s just one of the illogical miracles of motherhood.

The writer Dina Meza has three children, 
and I’m sure she loves the third one 
as voraciously as the first two. Since learning about her work, 
while I do the school and nursery drop-offs, 
reliant on the knowledge that my children will be safe and nurtured, 
and that, if they need me for anything, I can drop the writing I’m doing freely
and come running – I often think of her
waving her three children off to school, 
while being watched over by bodyguards, 
heading off to report unofficially on a disappearance
that echoes her own brother’s tragedy,
being followed by a car crawling along with no 
number plate, that she pretends not to notice,
wondering whether to answer a call on her tapped phone, 
hoping that, if the voice on the other end issues a threat
the threat will be to her, and not to her children.

As I collapse onto the sofa with a cup of tea 
after putting my children to bed, I think of her doing the same
after returning home – to a new home where armed men have not 
yet broken in – before summoning the energy to return to her
desk and write the words that will rile still further with their truth, 
that will ratchet up the risk to her children once again
for the longer-term benefit of all our children. 
As I open up a school newsletter asking parents to 
support a project to plant a set of trees in the playground 
she, I think, might, this moment, be opening a letter saying: 
Don’t think you can carry on treacherously 
undermining our national unity and security.
We know where your children go to school now
all three of them, and their routes back
to your new home that you told them were the safest ones. 

I put the newsletter aside and creep back into my children’s bedroom. ‘
My daughter has shifted herself around on the lower bunk 
so that she is lying horizontally, with one arm dangling 
off the edge, overseen by the malevolent chicken
whose eyes gleam at me as if in a proprietorial challenge.
I bare my fangs at it and growl.
As I turn her around gently, she sighs and resettles, and I 
stroke the soft billow of her hair and 
pull the duvet over her skinny arms. 
Up on the top bunk, my son has one arm flung around 
his furry wombat, a present when he was born from a 
friend down under, and his head is tilted towards the creature’s 
whiskers, his lips slightly parted as if he’d 
fallen asleep while telling it an anecdote. 
The smooth line of his forehead 
glows in the marmalade light of the city 
and the moon that seeps through the blinds. 

***

About Dina Meza: Dina Meza is an astoundingly courageous Honduran journalist and human rights defender. Her work was initially motivated by her brother’s disappearance and torture by the state nearly thirty years ago. She is the founder and President of PEN Honduras, and founding editor of the online newspaper ‘Pasos de Animal Grande’ where she publishes information on human rights violations and corruption in Honduras – despite receiving constant death threats to herself and her three children, including sexual threats to her daughter. She needs protection around the clock. Nevertheless, she persists. She is the recipient of both the special Amnesty International UK prize for journalists at risk and the Oxfam Novib/PEN International Freedom of Expression prize. You can read a piece she wrote about freedom of expression in her country here. 

About Ellen Wiles: Ellen is a writer, ethnographer and curator. She is the author of The Invisible Crowd (Harper Collins, 2017), a novel, and Saffron Shadows and Salvaged Scripts: Literary Life in Myanmar Under Censorship and in Transition (Columbia University Press, 2015). She is the founder of Ark, an experimental live literature project, and has recently completed an ethnographic PhD on live literature and cultural value. She was formerly a human rights barrister and a musician.

Elsewhere No.05: Some thoughts from the editors

IMAGE: Paul & Julia in discussion, Tim hiding behind the camera

For the first time in the short history of the journal, for Elsewhere No.05 we did the submissions process a little differently. Unlike with the previous four editions of the journal, we had a call for submissions  and a specific window of time in which people had to get us their work. On top of that, Elsewhere No.05 is also the first time we had a theme. So we were certainly interested, as the 31 March deadline approached, as to what writing and visual art on the theme of place and transition we would receive.

This week, after weeks of reading, I sat down with our editor Tim Woods and our creative director Julia Stone, at Elsewhere HQ Berlin-Neukölln to discuss the submissions and, slowly but surely, build a contents list for the fifth edition of the journal. With the number of submissions, we were unable to give personal feedback to every person who sent us their work, but we thought it might be a nice idea to share some general thoughts from our perspective, which might be food-for-thought for anyone submitting to us or another magazine/journal in the future:

Theme

Elsewhere is a “journal of place” and we decided, for issue No.05 to add the theme of “transition” into the mix. Now, within both of these there is an awful lot of room for manoeuvre. We had said from the beginning that genre or style of writing is not a deciding factor. Fiction or non-fiction. Poetry or prose. We will consider writing that could be labelled memoir or travel-writing, psychogeography or local history, reportage or experimental fiction … we really don’t care. What we are interested in is that it is good, and that it somehow conveys some sense of place within the topic of transition. Unfortunately, some submissions either did not relate to the issue theme of transition and/or were not related to the topic of place, and so however well-written they might have been, they were just not right for us.

That said, we did receive an incredible mix of writing and other submissions that DID fit the theme of the issue; from prose essays to poetry; illustration to photography; interview suggestions and book reviews. What was most gratifying was not only the quality of the work shared with us, but the diversity of approaches and styles that made it so much fun to read and also so difficult to come to a final decision. It meant that the decision-making process took a bit longer than we would have hoped, but it was certainly never boring!

Transition

Talking of the theme, and this is not a criticism but more an observation; we were interested in how many of the writers sending us the work interpreted the theme of transition on a very personal level, relating to movement, home and emotion, rather than on a political or societal level. As you will hopefully see when Elsewhere No.05 is published, we have tried to put together a journal that offers a mix of different perspectives on that theme.

Paris and Berlin

Perhaps because of where we are based, we often get a lot of submissions on the topic of Berlin. And for this issue, the German capital was joined by its French counterpart as the most popular place to write about in our submissions pile. But especially when it comes to Berlin and other places we know well and – more crucially – have been written about a lot, we are extremely picky. It is a reminder that writing about places that have been covered a lot, or with which your audience are familiar, it can sometimes be more difficult to make your writing stand out.

Format

At Elsewhere we consider every submission that arrives, however it is formatted and even if it is clear at first glance that someone hasn’t read our submissions guidelines. Sometimes, in very rare cases, we also receive submissions from people who appear to think we are someone else, or haven’t actually looked at what we DO publish. It would not take long on our blog, for example, to know that we are unlikely to publish a listicle piece about 30 Ways To Get Cheap Spring Break Tickets To Europe. It is also better not to send submissions addressed to our friends at The Berlin Quarterly or Gorse.

In general though, what was really nice about this submissions window was how many people did appear to be following what we do, both in print and online, and had sent us pieces that they thought would interest us. In the vast, vast majority of cases this was true, and the reading process was all the more pleasurable for it. We also wanted to use the blog to say thank you to everyone who took the time to send us their work. We really appreciate it. And we can’t wait to share the details of Elsewhere No.05 in the coming weeks.

Paul