WORD FROM THE WORMHOLE - JUNE 2023
COMPOST NEWS
Session three was an absolute blast of love to the heart, beginning with special readings from the morning pages of those that have been visiting us for the last few sessions 💙
Thank you to everyone that joined to consider the love and communion of creative writing together, it’s such a dream to share thoughts about our dedication to this practice of excavating the self with tenderness, attention, and care 💌
This was our third event, and if you didn’t make it last week, please join us for the fourth on the 28th of June (where we can walk those new-composters through the first few weeks) 🥹
If you can’t make it to the in person sessions, the course material is also available for at-home study too, purchasable online ✨
For those that did join, please keep doin’ your gorgeous morning pages, take yourself out on an artist date, and consider finding someone in your life that can hold you accountable for doing your writing tasks; with the reminder that creative practice happens with community (the lonely not so alone)🚶♀️
Please also tag us in your composting posts and we will re-share all your wonderful writings. We’re also encouraging everyone who has been before to please send a little snippet of text, either from your morning pages or something you’ve been working on, to: compost@worm-s.com 📝
WORMS 7
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CATGUT - THE OPERA BY RHEA DILLON
WORMS 7 AVAILABLE FOR PRE-ORDER
Our MEGA WORM (the biggest issue yet at 176 pages) is now available for pre-order via the Worms website. Details of the official launch to follow.
The ‘Artists who Write and Writers who Art’ Issue.
For Worms 7 we’ve looked to our visual counterparts for some soil nutrients. We’ve wormed our way into the psyche of the artist.
Clem interviews Helen Marten, Martine Syms and Diamond Stingily, Caitlin interviews actual art-writing icon Olivia Laing, Pierce talks to the profound Dr. Joy James, Philippa Snow gives us her thoughts on the act of writing art criticism (spoiler: it’s out her ass), and we have enough Derek Jarman content to keep you going for the rest of the year. We have some hilarious/insightful/weird/wonderful contributions from some of your favourite regulars too; including Jess Cole, Isabelle Bucklow, Sam Moore, Haydée Touitou, Estelle Hoy and many others.
We are very pleased to announce our latest Worms Publishing publication with the artist and writer (and Worms contributor, ofc) Rhea Dillon.
‘Catgut - The Opera’ features Rhea’s libretto that ruminates on the conditions and capaciousness of Black performance as experienced through the Black operatic. Throughout the opera’s three acts — the essay, the poem, and the poethic — Rhea denounces the idea that the Black performing artist should or could ever exist in the mundane.
In addition to the libretto, in this edition Jessica Lynne has written an emotional response in essay form, while Simone White has offered a poem to accompany the libretto. The book includes photographic documentation of the opera’s performance in Hyde Park in 2021, and concludes with an extensive conversation between Rhea and Elaine Mitchener discussing the trials of performance as an artistic practice.
Available via our Worms website and from select stockists.
Next Monday the 26th of June Reference Point is hosting our Monthly Book Club.
For June we’re reading two chapters from Black Women Writers at Work, a compilation of interviews with 14 black women writers. The chapters we’ve picked are the ones with the brilliant Gayl Jones and Toni Morrison.
Meet us there, 2 Arundel St Temple, London, WC2R 3DA at 7pm BST or head over to https://www.wormsmagazine.com/bookclub to sign up and receive the zoom link.
WHAT’S NEW ON THE WORMHOLE
June in the Wormhole has been very digestive.
Our first Worms Digest of the month featured Caroline Calloway, Gabrielle Zevin and J. G Ballard and our second included the likes of Gayl Jones, Miranda July, Gaspar Noé, and many, many more.
Delia Rainey gave us a new set of reviews
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the Worms team shared their top May reads.
WORMS DIGEST
“Listen, if you’ve never had any scandals, my advice would be to continue to have none. But if you’ve had one, have as many more as you can. It’s the Kardashian, Trumpian information overload fatigue. There’s a point where people can’t retain enough information to remember every little scandal. Whereas if you have one scandal, people remember, and it defines you.”
Personally, I’m a big, big fan.
Currently obsessed with GASH: A Feminist Horror Zine by Gwynnie Naylor that I got (first edition, first out there, woah) at Compost last week. With bucket(load)s full of blood, this new-beauty zine lands in horror as ‘a ripe place for feminist discourse, given feminism's complex relationship with genre.’ Focusing on a particular film in each edition, the first episode critiques Ginger Snaps, an early 2000s classic which, in Naylor’s words, ‘takes the female puberty as body horror trope and gives it a lupine yellow wallpaper feel.’
I’ve been listening to No Bounds Radio since Enya, who runs it, came to one of our Compost workshops. It’s a literary radio show and the ‘Pests in Poems’ episodes are especially great. Listen to Episode 2 - the worms episode. It’s spectacular.
~*~*~*~*~*what delia read recently~*~*~*~*~
I left this book under a blanket in a hotel in Ohio on my way to my best friend's house in Philly. On the way home, we had to go back to the hotel to retrieve it. I couldn't not finish the book, I was only halfway through, and it's not a book I could easily re-buy or check out from the library -- it is unavailable, not around in homogeneous book-places. So we went back there as a pit-stop on the drive home. My sister and I walked into the hotel and used the bathroom and filled our water bottles, but the receptionist was nowhere to be found. People started lining up behind us with their suitcases. They were waiting for rooms to sleep, and I was waiting for a book that is only 130 pages long.
BEST READS OF MAY
McBride handles Kathy like a younger sibling, equal parts love, protectiveness and a melodramatic eye roll, constructing an incomplete picture of an insanely creative, troubled, kind, bratty, anxious, tenacious, vulnerable, neurotic, selfish, prolific, wild and gentle person.
WORMS SHOP
Hats, socks, citation Ts.
Grab yours before they sell out!
Is your relationship with writing melting down? Are you reading a book your best friend recommended that you're hating? Is your ex taking credit for all of your intellectual pursuits?
ASK AGONY AUNT
and share your readerly and writerly woes with Aunty Worm.
Recently I've been going to more workshops/discussion groups about writing, which I love, but I find myself to be the only person in the room without a degree. I believe I've developed a bit of a complex at this stage of my life as I'm friends with loads of people that are incredibly educated (master degrees a plenty!) but I find it hard to feel good enough to be a part of the conversation. Despite, by some miracle, being invited to contribute to it. I read all the time and do my best to learn as much as I can but I still can't shake this feeling of being a little bit dumb. Any suggestions?
Oh dear worm, imposter syndrome will forever get the better of you. This question has brightened my day as I too do not have a degree, and often find myself in a similar position. There is a pool out there filled with degrees and education and despite a plethora of fish to swim with, your peers have chosen you to contribute. Congratulations! I’m sure that all that academia in the room can become a sort of echo chamber of sameness, and that not having a degree is your biggest, most refreshing asset. Might you consider yourself to be a threat to others?
My suggestion is to keep doing what you’re doing - it clearly seems to be working! If the feeling of dumbness persists, then you should try meeting with a counselor, or go out and get that degree you so truly want and deserve!
In my line of work, I’ve recently been faced with the grotesque question of “did chat GPT write it?” I’m afraid some of my best work is assumed to be by an AI and maybe one day AI will take my job all together. Any advice?
Firstly, let me thank you by clarifying that it is in fact GPT, not GPD, which I have been embarrassingly saying in public since its launch. Secondly, what is so grotesque about it? I suppose it depends on whether the question is loaded with negativity or if it’s complimentative. Personally, I would be thrilled at this question, as your writing has been likened to a flawlessness only artificial intelligence can bring. Or, are you worried that the assumption of GPT means your writing lacks personality? Unfortunately no one, not even me, can predict if AI will take all our jobs. While it’s very likely, try not to get yourself down about it. Just keep doing what you do best, producing unblemished writing!
Happy Fertilising!
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