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Creative Match 2025 — Collaborative Letters Across Time

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This work is part of the Creative Match 2025, an initiative by Manic World Magazine pairing writers in collaborative exchange.

 

What follows is part of an ongoing epistolary project between myself and Canadian writer, Jess Logan — letters written across time, distance, and shared ground.

Chapter I 

July 19th 1970. The sign says “The Future is Here’ and is already peeling off the hoarding. A strange sign to have by a roadside with nothing but a wooden bench and a wire bin. Not even a bus stop, or a lay-by to take a car from the tarmac and park in any safety. This future will have to be walked. The surroundings offer no brighter clue, a sullen clump of trees huddle in a field of sad grass and the blue sky and warm sun seem wasted on this empty scene. Except for a figure, walking across the grass and off the footpath, coming from what appears to be the coarse grasslands that lie behind the bench. They are heading toward the bench. They stop by the sign, the huge hoarding with the weathered paper of the crazy promise and just as we might think they’ll read the sign, come round the front, take a seat on the bench, ponder the future and what it might mean, the figure stops. It disappears for a few seconds, then it seems to be digging in amongst the weeds around the wooden frame that holds up the hoarding. It has something, a box, small, shining a metallic glint, it might be metal.

READ THE WHOLE STORY HERE

The Hacienda Must be Grown

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Dragging the canvas to the flyover when it was just plain and grey and flimsy was not the kind of drag that meant channels of mud. It never once touched the ground, it was always at least waist height and it blew around a bit and acted as a sail. The sense of being dragged was inside the body, of the walk harder usual because of this giant, empty thing. People in cars looked, stared like people in cars do when they see things they did not anticipate. Each second or two of starey eyeballs made the belly churn a little and cling to the promise of the corner that took me off the road and into the mudpath between the houses. Then, at least, while no less awkward, the baggage of intent was unseen by anyone else. I could struggle alone as it snagged in brambles and the soft hooks of high ferns. Once free of unintended audience the possibilities of what this thing might become in the next hours started to emerge. Kind of.

Read rest of the story here

Peter beneath the flyover

Fragments – Three Stories at Haworth Art Gallery, Accrington

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Fragments was a series of three short stories performed at Haworth Art Gallery in October 2024. Each story uses a short form, 200 words, to develop punchy images of life. This is the video taken during the event, live and direct! The stories as a book can be found on the website under ‘fragments’.

Fragments 

The Fragment by Seamus Heaney (in Electric Light, 2001, London: Faber & Faber – p.57). 

 

‘Light came from the East,’ he sang.  

‘Bright guarantee of God, and the waves went quiet.  

I could see the headlands and buffeted cliffs. 

Often, for marked courage, fate spares the man 

It has not marked already.’ 

 

And when their objection was reported to him –  

That he had gone to bits and was leaving them 

Nothing to hold on to, his first and last lines 

Neither here nor there – 

‘Since when,’ he asked, 

‘Are the first and last line of any poem  

Where the poem begins and ends?’. 

 

Exactly, I thought.  And did not know the interplay between Beowulf and Heaney and swimming and moving country. I know risk. Of losing a job at an age of danger, of working classness as an everyday risk. Not so much the courage to face that which we take but the shame we face down.   

And I know fragments and that life is not pinned to these single stanzas and pages of life that flick one after the other to create order where there was none. Make it to death, the end, the end that makes it all seem that was fine all along even if it never felt fine at all.  And now it is, they are not even here to see that it was.  Probably that means it was not at all fine. 

 

And so Fragments takes from Heaney the semblance of a poetry that is not all about poetry at all. More like Zephania who talks about Bought and Sold poets in fact, in being a poet who desires no prizes but does require a publication.   

No matter what is rhymed or reasoned, the world unfolds in uneven lines and crevices and different paper thickness makes for smooth and ruffled edge. The page before does not relate to the one after, not always.  What sticks in us is the electric burn of accident. We would love the golden glow of love or achievement to be what lingers.  we do not get to choose and so we can be burned by acidic memory or tainted by dull aches of not very much.  These are the fragments that tell the tale of a life.    

Since when?  Since forever.  And here the attempt has been to string something together like pearls without string, falling over the edge of unclothed tables in backrooms onto hard floors.  Bouncing into memory banks, not placed there with white gloved archivists.   

 

The idea of Fragments is wild in the challenge to brings to how we see our past, our experience, our memory.  Not wild as ragged or without form.  Wild as in open to change and the space for transformation.  We are not bound by our pats and they are not fixed entities.  they provide the material for our fabulations, or imaginations, our paces of being and of our becoming.  Neither is ever completed. 

 

The stories here indicate a series of events with the pattern of activities rendered vital through how they shape the nowness of the author.  If you think of your own, the ways your own fragments are created is a meeting point, of then and now, not as causation but as exchange, of engagement and encounter. We shape and our shaped, continually.  

Slag Heap Critique

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Slag Heap Critique 

 

I am walking on the slag heap nature reserve  

What was the Wigan Alps 

Now the Three Sisters named after the bottomless shafts they could not fill 

And the birds have it as their own  

Watery idyll 

And on a hillside of driven-in trees and new sown grasses  

to mask million years old debris 

I meet Owd Frank and he sez 

Naw then Pey, where’s tha bin 

I told him I had just completed my PhD 

He is rolling tiny thin paper between golden nibbed fingers 

What’s that all about, he asks of me 

 

I tell him of Deleuze and Guattari and of rhizomatic knowing we cannot fix 

Of Freire the Brazilian and his fights and the millions  

Of Educators and knowers scattered across the earth 

Of making learning matter and letting us all see our own worth 

Of poetry and art brut 

Of living life as nomads and finding a route 

To not knowing that is more than all the knowledge entombed in the schools 

 

I dance foot to foot and windmill arms waft the words higher 

I tell him of this hillside as our university 

These new trees the only dreaming spires 

We need to dwell amongst  

and we can learn from what we hear and things we see 

Of assemblages and lines of flight,  

of Rimbaud and Molliere, Bourdieu, and Poetry 

as dynamite 

 

My voice electric in speed and Frank nods and I wax on 

About imaginaria and dialogic space 

Of outsider artists and the ways we might look 

At each other anew without the threat of the school  

or campus 

And knowing that  is only always what we have brought with us 

And learned from the planet and our wanderings on it 

That and and and is  a philosophy,  

French 

Of more than human networks and literature and art and philosophy 

And how we can start  

to build somewhere better together 

How we are creators of a new land of the free 

A liberation ontology that includes both thee and me 

 

His own work is now completed and he brings flame to papery tip 

The blue grey vapour wafts up and creates a veil from his chin to cap 

He blows a smoke shaft into the ether 

And he says, 

‘Sounds belting that’. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Image of Peter Shukie under the flyover gallery

Improperly Vaccinated

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Improperly Vaccinated

 

When finding that you are

unfairly hated

The solution I found

is to get yourself

Improperly vaccinated

History reeks

Curated and discovered and sometimes

From under rubble

Emerges hidden knowledge

Not the utilitarian and sanitised types

found at, say

a teacher training college

Horseback history is all you’ll find there

History sat high

and making clean histories into courses

Saddle back enforcing

Equine strength and baton wielding

To ensure you know this history

Is endorsed in

All your schooling

You will struggle to find you in there

And that is the point

Your Silence today

Comes from throat throttled yesterdays

It’s hard to make a stand

When your feet are dangled in shifting sand

When your dreams

Are left searching for places to wake

Even imagination is kettled

And all you have at night

Is mares

And stallions

Their cross breed loveless union

At the head of battalions

Do you remember horse,

the thoroughbred part of yer

that your lineage is Arab, Asia and North Africa?

Now you stand as part of a line in the solidifying sand

A cavalry building sand pits from dunes

When you find yourself at the foot of the hoof

Beneath the bridle

Sore but not from saddle

Remember this

When finding that you are

unfairly hated

The solution I found

is to get yourself

Improperly vaccinated

It exists

The vaccination to a group that hates yer

Not quite immunity

Certainly no impunity

But through music, movement, voice and being together

We can realise ourselves as people soon to be

A not-yet

But always there

The virus in the ecology of an eternal now

The billion year old fight for survival that resists

Petrification

Stone forged from sand

Where love is boiled alive until it becomes a nation

With a flag and crown

and a remit to put down

All

that stand in the way of

this historical reinvention

of better yesterdays

A Casino, club med solution

Charged through with equine retribution

From baton, to musket, to lance

Carpet bombing and a uranium tipped dance

It will be this way

and your only option

Is to create

It is never ever too late

To take over what is abandoned

To know that your response to a horse back kettle

Is drum

And bass

And song

Or walk, just move

Out the range of a history that is meant to eradicate

You

To sanitise and cleanse and inject you with bleach

A whitewashed utopian ‘before’

That is always out of reach

Because it never existed.

We have a history

It is in the blood

and the body and the connection

between us

It comes from the acts you take through love

Without any official validation

Where horses roam free

And so do we

Once we inject an

Improper vaccination

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