Embrace the spirit of daring to be different this Women’s History Month in a panel exploring the evolving portrayal of women in pop culture. You’ll hear from a lineup of creatives hosted by Sex Talk’s Emma-Louise Boynton, and get a chance to reflect on your journey with life coach Dina Grishin. Fashion Designer Tolu Coker, the founder of 'Cheer Up Luv' Eliza Hatch, and live poetry from Salena Godden. FREE event!
Women's voices are still underrepresented in publishing, there's still a lot of work to be done to publish the plethora of amazing stories out there. We're very proud of the women we represent, who bring some of the most eclectic, compelling, vibrant writing to our list. We asked Canongaters to pick out a selection of books by women they've been enjoying recently, and tell us the sentence that got them hooked. Here's what they chose:
ALL FOURS - Miranda July
Sorry to trouble you was how the note began, which is such a great opener. Please, trouble me! Trouble me! I’ve been waiting my whole life to be troubled by a note like this
WITH LOVE GRIEF AND FURY - Salena Godden
Maybe one day, I will stop writing so much protest poetry, stories soaked in trauma and rooted in grief, our anarchy, our hopes for humanity, but then I remember I live and write in the 2020’s and the world is frightening and I am me and here we are
A HISTORY OF WOMEN IN 101 OBJECTS - Annabelle Hirsch
Objects extends through the past like a long hallway, along which, here and there, I open a door or pull something down off a shelf, to shed light on certain aspects of history or tell a particular story
SMALL BODIES OF WATER - Nina Mingya Powles
Which body of water is yours? Is it that I’ve anchored myself in too many places at once, or nowhere at all? The answer lies somewhere between
WHY WOMEN GROW - Alice Vincent
Women have always gardened, but our stories have been buried…We have silently made the world more beautiful, too often without acknowledgement. I wanted to try and change that
BUDDHA DA - Anne Donovan
Ma Da’s a nutter. Radio rental. He’d dae anything for a laugh so he wid . . . but that wis daft stuff compared tae whit he’s went and done noo. He’s turnt intae a Buddhist
A SPELL OF GOOD THINGS - Ayobami Adebayo
When he was a child, Eniolá would shut his eyes whenever he got into trouble, certain that he was not visible to anyone he could not see
RECKLESS DOLLY MAUNDERA - Kate Grenville
Soon as she could walk, she knew she wanted to be outside…The sky above you and the dirt under your feet, and always the shape of the land against the sky like a familiar face
POYUMS - Len Pennie
Come one, come all, to the scene of the crime, Where the victim made every last police report rhyme,She’s bottled her tears for the masses to swallow,She carves out their serving from flesh rendered hollow
THE OUTRUN - Amy Liptrot
I find my favourite place: a slab of rock balanced at a precarious angle at the top of a cliff. I’d come here as a teenager, headphones on, dressed up and frustrated, looking out to the horizon, wanting to escape
Here’s the face of a very young poet. Found this in the archives yesterday digging around for an old Dazed article for a project. Funny how I used to keep all my newspaper pages and magazine cuttings in files. I kept press clippings in folders with the article or review cut out and the date and name of the publication all glued and set there. Even the mean ones. Even the derogatory ones or silly things: I once did a feature testing toothbrushes.I used to keep every scrap of press, every flyer and ticket, memories from all my gigs. That’s thousands of shows since 1994. I kept a paper trail of good times and big nights. No photos, no phones back then. Just the paper trail. The electronic world has erased a lot of this behaviour. We take photos on phones and upload to sites that are electronic scrapbooks and social media. I think I am going to get back on it again. Be a better archivist, keep my paper trail alive, scrapbook my things, because all of sudden it will be 25 years in the future and that means it will be 2050? All of these existential notes and blogs won’t even exist and none of this will be here and nobody will see this page, and all of this work and writing and thought will be erased and gone, like the way we left MySpace and Tumblr, Twitter and Facebook, all gone now, our poems and posts, our notes and stories, songs and art, like rusting abandoned shopping trolleys in the lake of the lost forest of time covered in moss and frogs spawn. We won’t be here and nobody will be here to see or feel or remember what we were thinking and how we got here or what we did with our spirit and our minds and our bodies and our words and our short time on earth. I guess that’s why I love books, I love making books, writing longhand, I love writing diaries, I love reading books, books stay put, you can rely on a book, a book on your bedside table, a book in your hand, your notebook in your bag, your novel in your suitcase, it’s all coming with you, it’s real, its yours, it cannot be deleted, it’s all yours, it is your own paper trail.
Here we are on the rooftops of London, overlooking our Soho, our playground. I remember this laughter, this excitement, the unknown, the freedom of the before times. Photo taken by my friend, photographer, film-maker Olivia Rutherford - sharing with much nostalgia and BIGLOVE Xx
Celebrating 10 years of RTB this powerful exhibition features poetry of revolution, resistance and activism, showcasing the power of poetry to question authority, speak up for the oppressed, and call for radical change.
Featuring poetry from Travis Alabanza, Anthony Anaxagorou James Baldwin, Mahmoud Darwish, Lowkey, Nikita Gill, Salena Godden and Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan.
Welcome to WAITING FOR GODDEN. For those of you that are old school, thank you so much for sharing and following and reading these blog posts and poems over the last 15 or so years. I feel like I am on here less and less lately...
You will be able to find me writing on Substack
Maybe the Waiting for the Godden is over. Maybe I am here or there now wherever that may be. Maybe it is time to just let go of this blog as I have some of my other social media pages that I don't use so much anymore - I am no longer using Facebook and I have left Twitter. I notice I haven't been blogging and posting on this page as often as I used to since I switched and started using Substack to share poems and write things.
Maybe these pages and websites aren't meant to be forever, we forget passwords, we move on to another page or platform where our friends and favourite poets and artists are sharing work.
We all leave trails of art, poems and songs and stories and pictures, and this becomes forgotten, like that old tumblr or myspace just left abandoned like a burnt-out car in the woods with beautiful ivy growing all over it.
I'll leave you with this new poetry-film I made this week, something January flavour, something loving and gentle and snowy, it has been such a disaster, such a tough month and rough start to the year, sharing this poem with love and solidarity.
Thank you to everyone that has read and connected and shared my work on here over the years. Thank you for Waiting for Godden, maybe the wait is finally over... Most especially thanks for sharing my debut novel Mrs Death Misses Death.
This last week in January is Mrs Death's Birthday, my MDMD book birthday week. The hardback and audiobook were published in lockdown in January 2021 and the beautiful blue paperback arrived the following year on this day in January 2022.
This week I received my PLR statement and it informs me that thousands of strangers have taken time to borrow my books from their local libraries. I am immensely moved by this and grateful. I had no idea. Thank you.
Here’s a picture of a happy day, this day in January in 2022, when the paperback was in the big window of the flagship store of Foyles on Charing Cross Road. This was a huge moment for me, I recall, I was very excited about it. I have never been in a big shop window before, and this is a particular favourite bookshop I love to visit all the time, especially as a baby poet when I worked and partied in Soho every night.
I always said ‘one day I will be in that window’ and back then this seemed like a big dream of a thing to say out loud. It was something I really fought for and believed though. I look back and love the punky baby poet who starved and fought for me.
I have to salute her. She, who is not me now. I think about that, how we have to thank our past self. The person who writes the first draft of the book may grow to feel differently about things than the person who signs the published article. The poet that started this WAITING FOR GODDEN blog all those years ago isn't me now. We are all complex, multi-layered and messy human beings, and all of the eras of you being a human being get you to this place, which is always in the here and now.
I am inside these thoughts and memories and also in the here and now, January 2025, I’m in hibernation and buried in the darkness of January tasks, it is a sad mixture of death and taxes, virus and sickness, bereavement and deadlines, sorrow and bewilderment.
This winter I'm quietly working in the worlds of Life and Death and Time, my new MDMD universe novel The Life Of Life will be published next year in 2026. I am excited to share this new story in the future times, written by me in the past which is now. Art is time travel. Hope is energy. Passing some of this good vibe to you who read this post, please feel it, keep going, keep going, keep going, we need you, you need you, future you will look back and thank you for your courage and perseverance.
Keep going, keep going, keep going, keep reading and writing, keep making and doing, keep stirring the pot, keep speaking your truth, young you, old you, the in-between you, the here and now you, they all say it with me, keep going, keep going, keep going, we need you.
With many thanks to all book lovers, book bloggers, book sellers, fellow poets and writers, thanks to my publishers and my agent and family and friends.
