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Through our members, the Centre for Place Writing is affiliated to many of the key publishers, journals, magazines and influential blogsites in the field. You can find out more about our connections below.
Caught by The River is a highly influential arts and nature blogsite, posting daily at caughtbytheriver.net, that has played a central role in the growing popularity of place writing. Now in its fourteenth year, Caught by the River was originally conceived as an online meeting place ‘for pursuits of distinctly non-digital variety: walking, fishing, looking, thinking.’ Over this period, Caught by the River has hosted new work in many forms: musical, poetic, creative non-fictional, photographic and illustrative description. The website has also engendered a range of offshoots including gigs, festival stages and the Rivertones record label. Since its launch, many of the Centre for Place Writing’s members have featured in Caught by The River – either as contributors and/or through the reviewing of their work. This list includes core members: Paul Evans, Rachel Lichtenstein, Helen Mort and Jean Sprackland. Caught by the River also has featured the work of students associated with the Centre for Place Writing including Richard Skelton (PhD researcher and recipient of a Vice-Chancellor PhD Studentship) and Hayley Flynn (former MA student).
Comma Press is a Manchester based not-for-profit publisher specialising in the short story and fiction in translation. They publish collections on places across the world by new and established authors, alongside interdisciplinary collaborations between authors and experts, and translation commissions devised to identify cutting-edge (often marginalised) voices. Comma Press also works as a writer development agency and in 2016 founded the Northern Fiction Alliance. Core members of the Centre Helen Mort and Gregory Norminton have both published with Comma Press; and David Cooper collaborated with Comma author, Michelle Green, on the Arts Council England-funded project ‘Hayling Island: Stories at Sea Level’.
Common Ground was founded in 1983 by Sue Clifford, Angela King, and the late Roger Deakin, to seek imaginative ways to engage people with the idea of ‘local distinctiveness’. The charity has since published books, developed films, run events and many other activities. Paul Evans has long been associated with this organisation and is a regular contributor to their events and activities.
Corbel Stone Press is an influential small press, run by Autumn Richardson and PhD researcher Richard Skelton that publishes ‘music, art and writing informed by landscape and nature’. Specialising in beautiful books and hand-made editions, the principal interests of Corbel Stone Press are ‘ecology, anthropology, folklore, animism and other-than-human consciousness’. They also publish Reliquæ: a literary journal of nature, landscape and mythology.
Elsewhere: A Journal of Place is dedicated to ‘writing and visual art that explores the idea of place in all it forms’. Based in Berlin, Elsewhere has published new work by PhD student Hayley Flynn and David Cooper (Co-Director of the Centre) has contributed to its blog. The editor-of-chief of Elsewhere, Paul Scraton, has also appeared alongside David Cooper and Gary Budden (Influx Press) at an event at Blackwell’s Manchester.
GeoHumanities was launched as a journal of the American Association of Geographers in 2015. It published original articles that span conceptual and methodological debates in geography and the humanities; critical reflections on artistic productions; and new scholarly interactions that occur at the intersections of geography and multiple humanities disciplines. The peer-review journal also published original creative work. The inaugural Managing Editor of GeoHumanities was Tim Cresswell: the first Visiting Professor of Place Writing at Manchester Met.
Literary Geographies is an international open-access scholarly journal dedicated to publishing new research at the interface of Geography and Literary Studies. David Cooper (Co-Director of the Centre) was one of the founding co-editors when the journal was launched in 2015 and he remains on the Editorial Board.
Little Toller Books is an independent publisher attuned to writers and artists who seek inventive ways to reconnect with the natural world and to celebrate the places in which we live. Little Toller have published monographs by core member Paul Evans (Herbaceous, 2014) and Beyond the Fell Wall by PhD researcher Richard Skelton. In addition, Paul Evans and Richard Skelton contributed to Arboreal: A Collection of New Woodland Writing (2016) edited by Adrian Cooper; and Paul Evans and Helen Mort feature in the anthology, Cornerstones (2019), edited by Mark Smalley.
Hamish Hamilton is one of Britain’s most distinguished literary lists. Now an integral part of Penguin, they provide a home for an exciting and eclectic group of authors, united by the distinctiveness and excellence of their writing. Many of the UK’s most successful writers in the place writing field have been published by Hamish Hamilton including Robert Macfarlane, Iain Sinclair, Rodger Deakin and co-director of the Centre Rachel Lichtenstein. Hamish Hamilton also run the free online literary magazine Five Dials, with contributions by many key figures in the field. https://fivedials.com/back-issues/
Penned in the Margins has grown over the last 15 years into an award-winning small arts organisation producing new work live, in print and online. The Centre’s Visiting Professor, the geographer-poet Tim Cresswell, has published a trilogy of poetry collections, Soil (2013), Fence (2015) and Plastiglomerate (2020) with Penned in the Margins. The anthology Mount London: Ascents in the Vertical City includes contributions by Centre members: Sarah Butler, David Cooper, Tim Cresswell and Helen Mort. Furthermore Penned in the Margins is working on a four-year multidisciplinary project Edgelandia which explores the ‘remarkable places on the edge of the map’ and includes a new commission Emily Oldfield: a graduate of the Department of English where she took the unit, ‘Writing & Place’, in her final year.
The Clearing is an online journal published by Little Toller Books that offers writers and artists a dedicated space in which to explore the landscapes in which we live and through which we move. There are numerous contributions by and reviews of the work of Centre for Place Writing members to be found on The Clearing including Paul Evans and Helen Mort.