Kym Deyn

Bogs are one of my favourite things!! If it wasn't such a trip for me, I'd absolutely be there! Looks fantastic 💚

Trickster figure behaviour.

I wrote “Because you can’t go through it” & won the free trip.

They spent years telling me about this fantastical, non-euclidean, impossible vertical garden, and all the impossible things that could be found there, and when we finally went to Knaresborough together I was able to confirm that literally everything they had said was 100% true

wild how the left gets framed as miserable and joyless when its just endlessly trying to stop the right trashing everything that fosters life and happiness on earth

Always very weird to be marketing books when everything is like this, but—well, You Know.

Limestone Quarry, Knaresborough It’s not my fault the rocks are insane, I’m just announcing stone-intent. If you were two-hundred-million years old and each century was worth less than a grain of sand if you had been mud and coral in Pangea and saw extinctions and then in the great yawn of tectonic plates became a little spit of something that one day would be England, if humans were the latest news, a misplaced handaxe your first trinket, if you watched Romans introduce gods and rabbits, if you saw Christ carried in a book, if you were a sprawl of caves, a castle, a cliff, a series of shrines, generations of homes, if you wore a vast forest as a cloak, if you buried a prophet, dug up a saint, if you kissed the last boar goodbye, if you became black with soot, if the forest was shorn to a sliver, if the river washed you to sand, if the day and night were a spinning top and your voice was the great echo of grit, if there was no moving through your history but the history was you over and over and over again, wouldn’t you be a mudslide, a haunt, a great unspoken secret?

Blog post: Inspiration behind the poem If you sit me down and ask me to guess the length of a minute, I’ll wander off midway through, come back a half-hour later and ask you what time it is. For someone this thoroughly timeblind, I have a peculiar obsession with it. Deep time, in particular, the way that it passes for a stone or fossil not measured in days, but in the long yawn of epochs. It’s a scale utterly unimaginable for any of us. In Knaresborough (a Yorkshire market town) when I was a teenager, I met a man who kept a vertical garden. A normal garden would stop where it reached the edge of a cliff-face, but his simply went on up, dug into it, occasionally supported on wooden two-by-fours. It was a fantastic endeavour in non-euclidian landscaping complete with fishpond, at least ten feet up. In front of the garden was his bookshop, poky and ancient like himself. One year during a summer squall, he told me ghost stories, how he invoked the Lord against bits of haunted furniture and how his own dead son had walked through the door one day. Another year, he claimed his garden, his cliffs and the caves under them as the birthplace of a prophetess. He said to me that he’d had an archaeology student spend a summer with him. When this had happened, I couldn’t guess. This archaeology student spent a summer digging in those caves, looking for the tunnels that supposedly ran from there up to Knaresborough Castle. Instead, he found

stone tools and Roman coins. Proof that there’s been people continuously living in and around these cliffs for almost as long as there’s been people on this island. Time flattens. I see myself returning here at fifteen, at twenty-five and all the years between, slipping between Royalists with their muskets, medieval hermits, Georgians on their way to take the waters at Harrogate, Roman legionaries, and my strange, nimble bookseller. But even that is a short gasp compared to the stones themselves. Knaresborough is surrounded by limestone cliffs, which given that limestone is formed from calcite and that calcite was once ancient sealife, I figure those cliffs to be about 99% ghosts—scientifically speaking. And look at everything those ghosts have seen! The last time I visited my bookseller, the shop was shuttered. He had been elderly the whole time I had known him, and I suppose time must have caught up to him at last. Though, I almost don’t believe it. How can I? When I see him vanishing into those ancient caves, his ghost stories, that green cliff of his own making.

A sample poem from my forthcoming @ninearchespress.bsky.social collection and a blog post. Something about time, booksellers and folklore 💚

to be perfectly clear my rats would make much better paperweights, they're baby. they've never done any human rights abuses.

tbf in addition to my rats thats also how i feel abt keir starmer

not 2 be a rat gender essentialist but the way people talk about having girl rats vs boy rats is so funny. It's like "oh my sweet girls are always so curious and aventurous!" and for my lads its "this enormous ballsack missed his calling as a paperweight"

A post in the UK Comedy gig list forum Anonymous participant: Hi all, I’m looking for comedians for Wednesday 1st April for a comedy night at a pub in Milton Keynes. If interested please comment and we will contact you Anonymous participant 578 (me): Yeah sure, DM me Anonymous participant: I’m unable to message as your anonymous Anonymous participant 578 (me): I'll DM you then Anonymous participant 578 (me): I’m unable to message as your anonymous

I anonymously applied to an anonymous gig and we have found ourselves at an impasse.

Mahmood did say she refuses to learn anything from Gorton and Denton because she, like most of Labour, truly believes in implementing the same polices Reform would, regardless of whether it makes electoral sense to do so.

The Norton annotated one does some lovely dives into different versions of the text & their reception. Also, Seale is a native Arabic speaker and her translation cuts out a lot of the orientalism added by early translators.

Have you read any of the new Yasmine Seale translation? It's absolutely gorgeous.

Thank you so much, Gita! 💚

A little piece of @hookland.bsky.social by way of Yorkshire. And I swear that garden really *did* exist. To this day I'm not entirely sure how, but it really did.

"One year during a summer squall, he told me ghost stories, how he invoked the Lord against bits of haunted furniture and how his own dead son had walked through the door one day."

A blog with a new poem from the collection & the story of what inspired it: a little bit of first-hand folklore.

“Pioneer” is the word: lesbian heroine Sylvia Townsend Warner wrote 7 utterly distinct novels which you probably don’t know since they are all so different to each other, 150 short stories, a history of Tudor church music and much else. Her (umpteen) letters are fascinating.
Please repost to help.

My small linocut print “Da shu: The Rat: The Big Mouse” shows a side view of a rat with some chatter (uncarved bits) and the Chinese character for rat, in black on white.

A throwback for World Rat Day from my collection of Chinese Zodiac prints.

minouette.etsy.com/listing/1260...

#Rat #WorldRatDay #ChineseZodiac #linocut #printmaking

may i offer you some shrews in these trying times

requiem for vanished birdsong

if you think the greatest threat to effeminate gay boys is the trans movement and not the cis straight men who overwhelmingly exclude and brutalize them then you should walk into the ocean immediately

Illustration of a blue and black hare with large ears. The inside of it’s ears have hypnotizing concentric shapes pulsating in pink, blue, green, and yellow.

Do you hear what I hear?

Although the wind blows terribly here...

Whenever I'm having a bad day, I'll just pretend it's because my own personal archangel has been opening his seals and vials again.