The Wardrobe

Over the last six months I’ve been setting up an online project called The Wardrobe. It’s a pop-up magazine consisting of six online issues and, eventually, a printed anthology.
I’m really happy to announce that at the beginning of the month we published the first online issue of The Wardrobe. The first issue features poetry from Sarah James, Sara Nesbitt Gibbons and Anna Cathenka and a creative essay by Milla Prince.

Here's my editorial for the first issue:

Our first steps into The Wardrobe, the furs fondling our shoulders, and then the open plains. Here we must build our own fortresses. We hide and then find ourselves in clothes, using them to cover our nakedness. Gradually, over millennia we have emerged from the shadow of the forest, a wooden casket and we cover our nakedness, and that of the land, with clothes. Fallen leaves, remnants of the past flooding our identity.
In this first issue of The Wardrobe, insecurities jostle with mythical musings. Only in sickness, melancholy and the closeness of companionship do we allow our vulnerability to be expressed in flesh rather than the carefully constructed seams and panels of clothes. Whether it’s the jumble of the youth hostel washroom, the undressing of a lover, the nurture of a parent or grandparent or the protective seal of a red riding hood, clothes tell stories.

If you’re interested in contributing then have a look at the first issue and the submission/about pages to get an idea of what we like. We're also on twitter @wardrobelit.

Inside the Cacophany

In an academic environment increasingly dependent on the goodwill of a reluctant government I couldn't help feeling it was apt to share this extract from Charles Bernstein's The Consequence of Innovation. The chapter is on the nature of poetics and is an interesting read. Even if it's not something you want to do a degree in,  liberal arts and humanities are likely to be something that you have at some point in your life actively engaged in. They allow us to explore beyond our material self, think critically and engage with the world and become part of a universal discourse. Successive governments haven't wanted the majority to be a part of that discourse so they have done their best to cripple arts funding and teaching. 

 “The greatest benefit of the university is not that it trains students for anything in particular, nor that it imbues in them a particular set of ideas, but that it is a place for open-ended research that can just as well lead nowhere as somewhere, that is wasteful and inefficient by short­ term socioeconomic standards but is practically a steal as a long-term research and development investment in democracy, freedom, and creativity – without which we won't have much of an economic future or the one we have won't be worth the flesh it's imprinted on... We cannot make education more efficient without making it more deficient.” ~ Charles Bernstein, The Consequence of Innovation p. 53

Graffiti on the wall of a bus stop in Penryn, Cornwall.