Susie Wild

BETTER HOUSES

• £8.99
 

Pre-order a signed copy for £8.99 and free P&P [The Parthian summer sales is on at the moment so you can get an extra £3 off at the checkout for either Better Houses or my story collection The Art of Contraception]

This book officially launches 1 October 2017

This lively first collection from Susie Wild introduces a poet with a nomadic spirit. She tramps with humour, love, and loss across the UK, even the globe, seeking a place to call home.

'The voice is concentrated, urgent; the material is often tender, even domestic. There is no contradiction in this. The poems come from raw edges of the spaces between people, and a sense of how provisional the tender things can be.' – Philip Gross

Better Houses charts the move from childhood to adult life with wit and wonder. In a state of constant displacement, the poems flit from tents and gypsy caravans to boarding school, to lodgings and house sitting. The collection offers a half-remembered, half-invented life of pub crawl dates and doors slamming, as the narrators fall in and out of love and a life packing and unpacking boxes. 

These poems hunt fossils and comets, escape fires and great white sharks, consider life on other planets, and prophesize white witches. In Wild’s playful, offbeat take on the mundane world, beds and language barriers are tested, areas are gentrified, lawns are mown, and heart rates checked.

Susie Wild is author of the short story collection The Art of Contraception (Parthian 2010) listed for the Edge Hill Prize, and the novella Arrivals (Parthian 2011). Her writing appears in publications like Poetry Digest, The Lonely Crowd, Wales Arts Review, Ink Sweat & Tears, The Lampeter Review, and Rising. She has an MA in Creative Writing from Swansea University and an MA in Journalism from Goldsmiths. Awarded a place on Ty Newydd’s poetry masterclass, she has studied creative writing with Gillian Clarke and Imtiaz Dharker. She was writer in residence at the Mothership, Dorset, and her poems have been an Ink Sweat & Tears Pick of the Month, and a First Thursday performance winner.  She has performed her poems at events like the Glastonbury Festival, Hay Festival, the Green Man Festival, and the Dylan Weekend. Her recent multimedia commission, ‘Sex Change Disco,’ in collaboration with artist Beth Greenhalgh, was performed at Made in Roath and Cardiff Contemporary 2016. Born in London, she lives in a house with a garden and a shed in Cardiff, sharing it with a German prop maker and their Welsh cat. 

Twitter: @Soozerama

Blog: Wildlife

2017 Gig Dates

SEPTEMBER

8 — Mileu, Flute and Tankard, Cardiff, free entry 

20 – Penned on the Bont, Carnegie House, Bridgend, 7pm, £4 on the door

21 – HOWL, Mozarts, Swansea, 8pm, free entry

22 – Poetry Showcase, Cardiff Book Festival, Prince of Wales Suite, The Angel Hotel, 7pm, Tickets £5 / £3 in advance from www.cardiffbookfestival.co.uk

OCTOBER

5 – First Thursday, Chapter, Cardiff, 7.30pm, £2.50 on the door

15-22 – Made in Roath Festival, Cardiff

NOVEMBER

4 – Do Not Go Gentle Festival, Swansea 

30 – The Full Moon, Cardiff 

DECEMBER

1 – Can Openers, The Station, Silver St, Bristol, 12.30pm

Arrivals in Kobo ebook sale

Happy International Women's Day! 

My ebook novella 'Arrivals' (and three other great Parthian titles) can be picked up in Kobo’s US and Canadian stores 'Celebrating Women Around The World' ebook sale, which is running from March 7th-12th.

Enjoy!

Susie x

Announcing Collective

Hi Lovelies,

I hope you are being kind to yourselves and each other in these testing times and have managed to jump about in some autumn leaves like I have.

I wanted to tell you about a free event I'm taking part in on the 1st of December at Little Man in Cardiff. I'm looking forward to reading new poems at Collective – an evening celebrating poets who have recently published (or are due to publish) a new collection. 

Entertaining, amusing, thought-provoking, and surreal, this event will feature eight fantastic poets, representing six presses, including: 

MAB JONES (Indigo Dreams Publishing)

MARK BLAYNEY (Parthian)
TRACEY RHYS (Green Bottle Press)
RHYS MILSOM (Accent Press) 

SUSIE WILD (Parthian)
REBECCA PARFITT (Listen Softly London)
NATALIE ANN HOLBOROW (Parthian)
EMILY BLEWITT (Seren)

I hope to see some many of you there. 

In other poetry news I had an excellent week at Ty Newydd on the Autumn Poetry Masterclass with Gillian Clarke and Imtiaz Dharker last month where I wrote and edited a lot of poems, took poet walks along the beach, won a copy of Gillian's collection Ice for good poetry guess skills and edited the anthology of 18 poets Cynefin.

I returned and moved straight from the train into performance mode, for the second instalment of our mixed media, performance art and spoken word piece Sex Change Disco (writing a brand new scene on the long train home). Beth and I performed to a packed room as part of the beautiful creative madness that was TactileBOSCH's Garden of Earthly Delights at Cardiff Contemporary. It was a joy to be a part of, and amazing to see so many people through the door.

Since then I've met and workshopped new poems with both of my poetry groups and then went on to win the First Thursday Open Mic earlier this month with one of those. I was very pleased as I won another poetry book, this time from Seren, thanks Amy Wack.

I've also been pleased to see elysiumgallery, who I work for from time to time, getting some excellent press and about time too. They work so hard to keep creativity happening in Swansea and beyond and deserve huge support.

I think that's all my news for now, I best write / edit some more poems now as it is two poetry workshops in a week time again!

Love and sparkle,

Susie x

Cynefin at Tŷ Newydd

Sex Change Disco: Act Two

Thanks to John Abell for the poster and Torben Schacht for the photos.

More thanks to all who came along to see us at The Garden of Earthly Delights as part of Cardiff Contemporary and those who lent us props.

Susie & Beth x

Poetry and Disco Dancing

Hi Lovelies,

It is Sunday. I have had a wonderful morning of not having to get up and do anything or be anywhere except in bed with Handsome Man and Softie Kitten. After a lot of running around... from Waterstones London Piccadilly to a rugby club in the valleys... this past couple of weeks it has been pure bliss. There's been all sorts of exciting things happening for a plethora of Parthian launches and S4C filming and other events.

On top of the publishing silly season, I also thought it would be a great idea to collaborate with Beth Greenhalgh on a new piece – Sex Change Disco – commissioned for Made in Roath festival. It turned out it was and we had a blast dancing with you all on Friday night. Although my immune system may disagree...

After taking the show down yesterday and painting my hair ready for next week's performance, I have been lazily catching up on my writer admin and social media. But now to get busy and gather ALL of my poems and poems in progress together to print and pack for a mini creative adventure.


I'm SUPER excited to be off on the Poetry Autumn Masterclass at Ty Newydd THIS week and grateful for the bursary helping me to go. It'll be my first visit to the house and everyone tells me I will love it. I am hoping the muse is kind to me and I can knock my first poetry collection into better shape while I am there.

I get back on Sat 22 October and then I will be zooming home, changing and then rushing down to the Bay to help finish setting up and running through the new bits of Sex Change Disco at Garden of Earthly Delights... come along!

Love and glitter,

Susie x

Sex Change Disco at Made in Roath and Garden of Earthly Delights

I have been collaborating with my dear friend and artist Beth Greenhalgh and we have two performances coming up in Cardiff this autumn.

First up our show Sex Change Disco will be at Made in Roath...

Sex Change Disco: Beth Greenhalgh and Susie Wild

Visual Art / Performance / Spoken Word / Disco

pin	Pet Shop, 2 Diana St Roath Cardiff CF24 4TS

Friday 14th October, 6.30 - 8.30pm

Free entry, all welcome 

An image is burnt to the retina. A flash of something that lingers in my memory. It is playful, holds beauty, holds power. I will not forget it.

Chocolate guns melt into fondue and singing, speaking mouths burst with colour. Things are revealed upon our bodies, words spoken to stillness and, in the end, everyone will dance.


At the Sex Change Disco, the menagerie are mothing about the kaleidoscope lights, dazzled – flitting here a whirligig bearded lady, flitting there a boy with a girl’s arse – and, Fanny, sitting at the bar blasting shot after shot after shot...

There are words coming out of your mouth – dropping like pins and feathers – but I’ve stopped listening. LA – LA – LA. I lick my lips and continue to stare at yours. The thick bow of them, a wrapped gift in the glitterball light. You do not notice. I take my own invitation, tune in to your Channel Tunnel of consonants and vowels. I lean forward and eat your words and phrases, all twenty-six letters. Some I swallow. Some I spit out.

Sex Change Disco is a new performance piece and collaboration between Beth Greenhalgh and Susie Wild. 

A strange experience is a wonderful thing. Come along.

UPDATE TO SAY: This went well! You can see photos here: https://www.facebook.com/events/1225842437480892/

NEXT UP....

Next up, we'll be taking a smaller piece from this collaboration to the wonder that will be tactileBOSCH's Garden of Earthly Delights...

Garden Of Earthly Delights is a love letter to Hieronymus Bosch, on the 500th anniversary of this most enigmatic and influential artist. Inhabiting the dark, atmospheric spaces of a vast, disused historic building in Cardiff Bay, tactileBOSCH present Garden Of Earthly Delights, a multi-media gesamtkunstwerk (exhibition) incorporating installation, video, sonic art, interdisciplinary collaborations and spontaneous interventions, kicked off with a wild night of live music and visceral performance art!

The itinerant collective will then reconfigure the exhibition in the sparse light-flooded spaces of Stadium Plaza.

Garden Of Earthly Delights runs from 22nd October to 19th November, and is part of Cardiff Contemporary, a city-wide festival of contemporary art.

Grand Opening Night – 7pm – 11pm Saturday 22nd October. Everyone Welcome!

For more infomation about the event head to our website: http://tactilebosch.co.uk/projects/#/garden-of-earthly-delights/

Do come along!

The Mothership Happened...

Hello Lovelies!

So, I'm back from my time on the Mothership artist residency in Dorset and I thought I'd tell you all about my wonderful writing week. I'm grateful to have been given the space, views and time to reflect on current / new work and future longer projects.

I arrived at Bridport Station on the Saturday afternoon and artist and residency organiser Anna Best kindly collected my mobile library and I and showed us to the studio space that would be our home for the week.

After tucking my books, notebooks and laptop in, I tagged along with Anna for the Force 8 evening film screening that she runs (with Hester Schofield) in a chapel in charming West Bay, Bridport. Afterwards we walked the dog around the harbourside and then went on to another little art disco event afterwards, before returning to Copse Barn so that I could turn in early to get up and on with things the next day.

Returning to the workspace in the darkness I was struck by the silence of the roads, the expanse of fields spreading out all around, and the ever-present trees outside my wall of glass, somehow strongly reassuring but also, of course spooky. I sat looking out into nothing but country, the night, the forest, uninhabited space, and my own lone reflection in the glass.

Sunday began with Blue Tac. I used it to stick all of my poems auditioning for the collection to the walls to start to make a sense of ordering them, finding the threads and the gaps and choosing which to omit. It was strange to see 10 years of creative work, of homes and makeshift homes, relationships and shifts in this way, my words wallpapered from the floorboards to the cobwebbed corners.

Recently I have been writing more and more about my childhood, the good and the bad, the remembered and the misremembered. Something about being on the outskirts of a very small village in the woods and hills of Dorset with this huge view out into the green and quiet, really took me back to growing up (the first part of it, there's been a whole other part of it in both my twenties and my thirties).

I have been drafting and redrafting new and newer poems about being lost as a small child and enjoying it, about mothing – catching moths – which I used to do with my grandfather on summer holiday visits in Cornwall, and more on moths and bugs, actually... Something about writing into the night in this big glass-fronted lightbox, that sent me off into thinking of the moth experience, of exposure too, and the dark. Of loneliness and vulnerability, of tricks of the light. A couple of nights I woke to torrential rain, and then to mist in the morning, but no gorillas.

On the one day that the sun came out in force, I also had the opportunity, away from the city living of my adult life, to muck in with nature. I put the geese and chickens to bed, petted the ponies and, as my accounts are in a very poetic sorry state, I paid my way for my stay with an afternoon of gardening on the veg and herb patches, weeding out nettles and dandelions and fading chamomile and more... allowing the rainbow chard and the last of the beans to breathe, and eating veg and salad pick-fresh from the garden for my dinner. I also enjoyed my short skill sharing session on storytelling and phobias and scary clowns with the family.

Eeek!

With the dark nights, alone and illuminated with the bugs and the bats and the deer and the owls in the forest, the scary clown stories, my own spooky night walks and the fate of the stuffed toys, I can see a thriller or horror story coming your way soon too, which is very unlike me! Moving back to the dark side ;)

Clowncrow

A lot of weeding!

Nom

But we don't want to go to bed, though...

As well as moving closer to putting this collection to bed, and ensuring both a range of subjects and a flow between the sections, I was able to think about and work on other projects, finally finishing a story touching on weather and climate change which I have been carrying about for two or three years now, and moving forward with a couple more longer ones and lightly thinking ahead to some non fiction and longer work I'd like to get on with next, once the stories and the poems are finished.

For me, it was the perfect mix of reading, research, writing and reflection. Taking walks in the lush surrounds of the Mothership, observing the weather and the outdoors from my desk and visiting Dorchester and Bridport for art and short wandering / supply shopping trips with Anna.

I am pleased to say that I have been invited back, it feels like a place I could happily build a relationship with. Many thanks to Anna, her daughters and the animals for making me so welcome and giving me some independent creative alone time to crack on with new work with no added pressures or distractions.

If you would like to find out more about more about the Mothership which has the studio, and also a caravan available for artist residencies and collaborations for part of the year – look out for call outs for submissions – and can also be hired short or longer term, please visit: http://annabest.info/the-mothership/

Bye for now!

Susie Q x