The Gravy Post -The Final Frontier - #3
Edition 14 is close and new events are around the corner. Ralph looks into Ted Hughes whilst Jonny and Nick dive into the "why". We also discuss moving to paid content... hint: PAST EVENTS!
A moment of solemnity, if you please.
No jokes. Silence there at the back.
For this is a serious moment. This is the final free edition of “The Gravy Post”.
We know, hold your gasps. Hold your tears. This isn’t a funeral, and this doesn’t have to be the end. Also, if you wish to stay a free subscriber, you will still have access to our submission reminders, event information and latest editions direct to your inbox. That information will always be free.
We sincerely hope that, over the course of these last three emails, you’ve had a good sampling of what “The Gravy Post” has to offer. Insight from the three of us, advice, thoughts, deep-dives and so very much great content. We’re really proud of it, it’s taken a lot of work but we’ve grown this thing to the point where it’s genuinely offering something new, different, and wholly our own to writers and readers everywhere.
From the next edition, things will change. Unless you’re one of our paid subscribers (if that’s you, thank you in advance!) you’ll see previews of all the extra content, but you won’t be able to read it all.
However, for the measly price of a flat white per month (£3.50), you’ll get access to everything. All the articles, recordings of all the events, everything. That’s right, you read correctly: ALL OF OUR PAST EVENTS ALSO. You will soon be able to watch them to your hearts content, and new ones when they’re added too. And boy, have we got some big plans for stuff coming up!
So, we sincerely hope you’ll join us. We said when we started this that we’re big believers in giving people value, and looking at the other offerings available, we think we’re giving our readers something special and worthwhile. Don’t forget, all the money we make from our paid subscribers goes back to paying writers. Yes, ALL OF IT!
Anyway, that’s enough for now. After all, we’ve got a new edition of “The Gravy Post” to get through. Give it a read, let us know what you think, and we hope you decide to keep sailing with us.
Edition 14 is coming soon…
Our final selections will be sent within the next week or so, and as ever, you’ve not made it easy. Thank you to everyone who trusts us with this process.
Shortly after the edition launches later this month SUBMISSIONS WILL OPEN AGAIN! This should be around November. If you’re thinking about submitting to Northern Gravy there is no better time to check out our submissions page than right now: How to Submit to Northern Gravy. - Give yourself the best chance of publication by spending the next month reading what we’ve published.
An Evening with Helen Ivory (online)
In conversation with Ralph Dartford with readings from her new collection, ‘Constructing a Witch’’.
Helen Ivory is a poet and visual artist who makes shadowboxes and collage. She was awarded a Cholmondeley Award by the Society of Authors in 2024. She edits the webzine Ink Sweat and Tears and teaches for the National Centre for Writing Academy. Her surrealist chapbook, Maps of the Abandoned City was published by SurVision in 2019. She has work translated into Polish, Ukrainian, Croatian, Spanish and Greek as part of the Versopolis European poetry platform. Her Wunderkammer: New and Selected Poems appeared from MadHat in the US last year. Constructing a Witch (October 2024) her sixth collection with Bloodaxe Books, is a PBS Winter Recommendation.
Friday, 25th October. 7.30pm - 8.15pm
Ralph Dartford and JP Seabright. Readings and in Conversation (online)
Join Ralph Dartford and JP Seabright as they read for their latest collections, ‘House Anthems’ and ‘White Cloud Over Purple’.
Join Ralph Dartford and JP Seabright as they read for their latest collections, ‘House Anthems’ and ‘White Cloud Over Purple’. Both Ralph and JP will interview with each other about their respective work and will also invite questions from the audience.
Ralph Dartford
Ralph Dartford hails from Basildon in Essex, and now lives in West Yorkshire, having got there via Australia, Barcelona, and Los Angeles. He was a founding member of influential spoken word collective ‘A Firm of Poets’, and his first pamphlet of poetry, 'Cigarettes, Beer and Love', was published by Ossett Observer Presents in 2013. His first collection, 'Recovery Songs', was published by Valley Press in 2019, and 'Hidden Music' followed in 2021.
Ralph is the poetry editor at Northern Gravy and is studying for a Creative Writing PhD at the University of Huddersfield, where his practice and research is concentrated on the working-class poetry of the twenty-first century. For gainful employment, Ralph works as a project manager and educator for the National Literacy Trust within the Criminal Justice team.
House Anthems: https://www.valleypressuk.com/preorder/p/house-anthems
JP Seabright
JP Seabright (she/they) is a queer disabled writer living in London. They have four solo pamphlets published and four collaborations, encompassing poetry, prose and experimental work. Their first collection ‘White Cloud Over Purple’ was published in 2024. They have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, Forward Prize, and shortlisted (twice) for a Saboteur Award for Best Collaborative Work. More info at
https://jpseabright.com
via Twitter/X @errormessage and @jpseabright everywhere else.
White Cloud Over Purple: https://www.atomicbohemian.com/product-page/white-cloud-over-purple-jp-seabright
Thursday, 14th November. 7.30pm - 8.30pm
The following section will soon be for paid subscribers only. As a thank you to all the kind support we’ve received over the last three years we’ve been free since our launch. We will be giving you exclusive behind the scenes access to Northern Gravy including access to ALL our past events.
If you want to support Northern Gravy considering becoming a paid subscriber for £3.50 a month. All money received will go directly towards paying our writers.
The Poem and the Poet by Ralph Dartford
Each month, our poetry editor, Ralph Dartford takes a personal look at a poem he loves and reflects upon its meaning and technique. This month, he reflects on the poem, ‘The Horses’ by Ted Hughes.
The Horses
I climbed through woods in the hour-before-dawn dark.
Evil air, a frost-making stillness,
Not a leaf, not a bird,–
A world cast in frost. I came out above the wood
Where my breath left tortuous statues in the iron light.
But the valleys were draining the darkness
Till the moorline – blackening dregs of the brightening grey –
Halved the sky ahead. And I saw the horses:
Huge in the dense grey – ten together –
Megalith-still. They breathed, making no move,
With draped manes and tilted hind-hooves,
Making no sound.
I passed: not one snorted or jerked its head.
Grey silent fragments
Of a grey silent world.
I listened in emptiness on the moor-ridge.
The curlew's tear turned its edge on the silence.
Slowly detail leafed from the darkness. Then the sun
Orange, red, red erupted
Silently, and splitting to its core tore and flung cloud,
Shook the gulf open, showed blue,
And the big planets hanging –
I turned
Stumbling in the fever of a dream, down towards
The dark woods, from the kindling tops,
And came to the horses.
There, still they stood,
But now steaming and glistening under the flow of light,
Their draped stone manes, their tilted hind-hooves
Stirring under a thaw while all around them
The frost showed its fires. But still they made no sound.
Not one snorted or stamped,
Their hung heads patient as the horizons,
High over valleys, in the red levelling rays –
In din of the crowded streets, going among the years, the faces,
May I still meet my memory in so lonely a place
Between the streams and the red clouds, hearing curlews,
Hearing the horizons endure.
Ted Hughes (1957)
Over 35 years ago, I was awarded a bursary by the Arts Council to go on a residential writing week at the Arvon Foundation. I chose to go to Lumb Bank in Heptonstall, West Yorkshire. I was a naïve lad from Essex and did not know how such things worked and turned up with a green Silver Reed typewriter, a rucksack of badly ironed clothes and 200 cigarettes. Our teachers that week were Kit Wright and Adrian Henri and my fellow students included the great writers, Mandy Sutter, Jean Sprackland and Cherry Smyth. It was an unforgettable experience. I never laughed so much or had so much confidence gifted to me that I could actually write.
One morning before class I decided to go for a walk to get a newspaper. I remember it being overcast and having to cross a field to get to the little village shop. Being an Essex new town boy meant that I did not have much experience of the countryside and I found it both overpowering and beautiful by turns. I was stopped in my tracks when the most astonishing thing happened. I saw a white owl perched on a fence, close, staring at me. I was exhilarated and frightened at the same time. Do owls attack humans? The world appeared to become silent as we engaged, air sucked away. With no drama, the owl flew up and away after what must have been a minute or so, it might have been shorter. Time did not seem to exist in those moments.
On the way back from the shop and crossing the field again, the second amazing thing happened. A horse! Massive, brown and in a bad mood. I saw it at a distance and at first sight was not that concerned. He (was it he?) seemed to be just perusing me as I approached the stile to move out of the field. Then, without warning the thing ran at me, musclebound, seething and snorting. I was terrified and leapt over the style, newspapers flying everywhere. The horse halted, showed its teeth and I’m sure it was laughing at me. Apparently, it was quite a common thing. Poets being chased by horses across that field. This brings us to Ted Hughes’s poem, ‘The Horses’.
Ted Hughes is one of our greatest poets and had a strong relationship with Lumb Bank, he owned it for a while and was born not far away in Mytholmroyd. His wife, Sylvia Plath is buried in the churchyard close by. His poem ‘The Horses’ is a masterclass in stillness, unworldly atmospherics and poetic discipline. It would be easy to isolate individual lines, but the poem, I think, must be read in its entirety, in one go. Read it aloud and look out for the sound echoes in the language, its patience and breathing. There is a view that the final lines weaken the poem because the narrative returns to a normal almost everyday view of the world. I disagree though. The poem dream had to end somewhere.
Further Selected Reading:
Arvon Foundation at Lumb Bank.
https://www.arvon.org/centres/lumb-bank/
Ted Hughes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Hughes
Further Listening:
Frank Skinner’s Poetry Podcast. Ted Hughes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Hughes
Why I Chose - Mollusc, by Dan Draper. A deep dive by Nick Jones
It was Ralph’s idea to get people to tell us, in the submissions guidelines, which piece of work on our site they like from our site. Honestly, the answers are fascinating, as well as the reasons why some pieces are chosen.
If you had to ask me, months ago, which I thought would be the really popular ones, the ones that came up time and again, I mean no offence when I say Mollusc by Dan Draper wouldn’t be one of them. And yet it crops up consistently and often as one of the more popular pieces. So, for the first of these articles, I’ve chosen to answer the question many have asked when they look at the final four for each edition:
Why did he choose that?
Mollusc is a strange story. It’s unlike anything else on the site, really. And that’s one of its key strengths.
As I pointed out in the tweet about it on publication day, the opening is a set up for a joke: A priest, a rabbi and an atheist walk into a bar. The story even acknowledges that. As far as openings go, it’s got legs. As a reader, I’m intrigued. Where exactly is the writer going with this?
Where it ends up is, by any stretch, bizarre. There are shady corporations, impossible artifacts, and what amounts to a miracle occurring on a beach, though a somewhat grizzly one. There are bodies, and a sense of dread about what’s happening. And here’s where the story’s greatest trick comes into play.
Though it gives you the setup, the punchline is entirely open to you, the reader.
It’s extraordinary how quickly things change in Mollusc. No sooner have we witnessed the impossible, it becomes mundane. The incredible becomes trivial. The unfathomable becomes every day. It doesn’t take a genius to connect what we’re reading to modern life and the ceaseless hunger of capitalism for new sensations and sensationalism.
This is all very clever and all that, and if that was where the story left it I’d applaud and say “that’s decent. Not brilliant, but very good.” I’d move on, and I’d probably forget about it.
But Dan Draper isn’t done with us yet.
The titular mollusc arrives, and with it something so strange and horrific that it’s almost impossible to put into words. In short, the story goes from being witty and subversive to suddenly something in the realm of cosmic horror.
For those unfamiliar with the term, I’ll elaborate. If you’ve seen it, do you remember the moment in the film Alien where they board the ship and come face to face with the fossilised and alien corpse? It isn’t human, the architecture is utterly unlike anything we’ve seen before, and the purpose of the room itself is a mystery. The film explains nothing, because realistically how could it? It raises so many questions, like why the ship is there, who the pilot was, and where they came from, that simply cannot be answered but hint at the insignificance and immeasurable gulf of inferiority between human beings and whatever that ship and its crew are.
That feeling, that moment of disorienting static as you realise that some questions we cannot answer, should not ask, and were never meant to encounter. That’s cosmic horror. There’s no jumpscares or grand reveal. It is what it is, and we don’t know what it is, that’s the point.
It’s also, dare I say it, incredibly difficult to do right.
The trouble with horrors beyond comprehension is that the moment you try and explain them, they stop being that. But the reveal here of the titular thing, and what it does to people who climb inside, is treated as a payoff to the original entry point to the story. It makes good on the setup, brings everything full circle, and then gives us one, final, annihilating vision to wrestle with as it draws to a close.
Cosmic horror isn’t for everyone. Heck, horror isn’t for everyone. And that’s okay. But, as a writer, I look at this story, I pick at its seams and examine it on a micro and macro level, and I’m awed. It juggles several ingredients, it has a flavour all its own and is quite unlike anything else I’ve read before or since in my submissions. I think of this story regularly, and if it was me submitting to Northern Gravy, this is possibly what I’d put in my submissions email as one of the pieces I’ve enjoyed, given the kind of short fiction I write.
And that’s why I chose Mollusc. It haunts you. It asks questions that you cannot answer, but that lack of a solution is truly unnerving. It does something extremely difficult with apparent ease. And, at the end of the day, it’s a wonderful piece of writing. I’m not surprised it’s resonated with so many people, despite the niche discipline it represents, as I honestly believe that exquisite work transcends ideas of taste for many. And isn’t that one of the reasons for doing what we as Northern Gravy do?
*****
I’ll be doing more of these articles over the coming months, interspersed with my thoughts on other aspects of writing. If there’s a particular piece you’d like me to delve into and share my thoughts on, let me know. I’m always happy to oblige.
How do I decide between poetry and prose by Jonny Syer
Here at Northern Gravy I make the final choice for our “Young Reader” publications, both poetry and prose. I aim to cover both Middle Grade (readers of 8 to 12) and Teenager/Young Adult (13 to 17). As you can imagine, picking just four submissions from hundreds we receive each edition becomes difficult. Why go for a piece of Middle Grade over a Young Adult? Why Poetry over Prose? Surely, I could just pick one MG prose, one MG poetry, one YA prose and one YA poetry. As it turns out, it's a tad more complicated than that. I strive for balance but after reading this you may see why it's not always possible. And maybe will find a few nuggets of gold to give yourself the best chance.
Let's split it into three sections:
What I look for in prose:
It's worth admitting to anyone who bothers to subscribe and read this article that I do enjoy Middle Grade more than I do Young Adult. The reason for this is pretty simple, I read and write more Middle Grade and so I feel as though I can engage with it at a deeper level - I understand it more on a craft level. The downside of this is that I also understand it more on a craft level... and so the basic mistakes of early writing for this age jump out at me much easier than they would for Young Adults. Does that make Middle Grade submissions the more likely of the two to get published? No, I don't think so, it depends on what we’ve got in our inbox at the time, but I do think it's the age group I'm most comfortable editing and therefore more likely to take on a piece that needs more work. This is the first of many quirks in the publication process, because at the end of the day, publishing is personal.
The second biggest thing, and something that still lacks in my inbox, is a working-class voice/story. Don't get me wrong, we've published plenty of stories that don't fit into this category but, and here is the biggest clue, we can only publish so much of anything. If you've read through our work and see a story similar to one you want to submit, I'd make sure it's really polished, polished enough for me to want to consider a story in that world again. Read our previous work and perhaps try something a little different. It doesn’t have to be the opposite, but it can’t be the same. We have such limited places we want to reach as many people and worlds as possible. Big tip: if you wrote a story with someone waking up in the bed, cut that first bit entirely and just get to the point.
Does that mean you don't publish Young Adult at all? No, of course not. We've published plenty (check out Katy Kent) but I would say that if you are going to submit a story that is on the closer end to Fiction it needs to be in an excellent state when you send it through and ideally different to ones we've already published. And it needs to address subject matters that we can't tackle in Middle Grade. I think Young Adult stories need to be bold. Even if you're writing fantasy, you can get away with less fluff at this reading age. You might want to consider reading for ideas, "All the Bananas I've Never Eaten (Salt Modern Fiction): Tales of Love and Loneliness".
Thirdly, and by no means last but I can't bang on forever here, make sure your work is in a good state before you send it. And not just your text, your whole submission package - I can't tell you how many times I've been put off a story because of the email it came with. Be professional and don't make it seem like you are going to be difficult to work with before I've read your first paragraph. Please.
What I look for in poetry:
Thanks to our poetry editor, I read more poetry than I ever have, and I love receiving it in our inbox when aimed at younger readers. The first thing to say here is... and this may or may not be a spoiler, we do receive more poetry than prose. Does this put the odds of being published in prose higher than poetry? No, I don't think so. What I look for more than anything is quality and variety. VARIETY is the key, really. If you're submitting four very similar poems, that sound and read very much the same, poems that flow and bounce the same, they are unlikely to make the cut. We don't always publish four, of course, but I'd strongly recommend that at least two of them at are different enough in form and subject matter. Unless, like some of the poetry we've published, there is a link between everything. This link usually has to be pretty obvious to engage the reading age.
Do I have a favourite kind of children's poetry? My feelings towards what we receive aren't that particular, although I do enjoy the type of stuff I can read to my 4-year-old daughter. She particularly loves "The Bath Dragon" by Attie Lime and "Medusa goes to the Hairdresser" by Sarah Ziman. I'm an comedian as well as a writer, and humour will always get me thinking. Because this is the point about editors, isn't it, we're people and we all have our own thoughts and feelings and emotions. All of which instruct our choices.
I realise that perhaps this isn't always the most helpful explanation, but it is an honest one. However, if you're like me and love the analytical side of writing the next section may well interest you.
This stuff almost certainly results in a (very lovely and kind) rejection. If you are going to read only one section, READ THIS!
We don't actually want to reject anyone but the limits of our funding agreements and the amount we can afford to pay mean each area of Fiction, Poetry and KidLit (or Young Readers) is allowed to pick 4 pieces each edition. This means we really are on the lookout for any excuse to remove the submission from the pile. Below are some of the reasons that have resulted in a pass. Some of these you can't control but some... well, some you absolutely can.
Submitting when we're closed. This one is obvious, but it does happen.
Unprofessional emails. This one sounds a little snobbish and anyone who knows me knows this isn't the case. The reason I ask for this, and we all do, is to show you'll be good to work with and for us to get all the information we need when shortlisting.
AI submissions. We can spot them a mile away... don't do it.
Not following the submission guidelines: https://northerngravy.com/submissions/
The above of course is not an exhaustive list of dos and don'ts, doing all these things won't result in a guaranteed publication or rejection either way (although on the rejection side of things is highly likely). Timing itself can play a big factor when making a decision. Perhaps even the biggest factor. Sometimes I have 30 great pieces of prose to narrow down to four, others I may only have a few that are truly close to being ready and have to weigh up the options of how long the editing process may take. Our timelines at Northern Gravy are very tight and there aren't many publications that publish 6 times a year (and pay) in this area. I dare say, as with most writing, you'll already be at an advantage if the piece has already been well worked and honed. Sometimes we get more poetry, sometimes we get more prose. I don't want to say it's a lottery, but I think the only true way of upping the odds of publication is to keep submitting. All writing is a marathon.
I will push on with my thoughts in this section, diving deeper in the why as we go.
I hope you'll join me.
Jonny
Recommend reading:
The Haunted Wood: A History of Childhood Reading
All the Bananas I've Never Eaten: Tales of Love and Loneliness by Tony Williams