Welcome to …The Farthest Edge
(Photo by Paul Musso, taken on Cuckmere Beach, Sussex for this article in Voices magasine)
Welcome to The Farthest Edge, the newly renamed home for my writing and my journeys real and imagined, from deep time to the present moment, into the speculative future.
I witness and write in places that are disappearing, as well as those that are part of my emotional imaginary; landscapes from the farther reaches of my writer’s imagination, all the way to the borders of my British-Iranian identity.
As of December 2024, I will be making a very powerful journey to the farthest edge of an experience and place that has shaped me and my art over the last twenty years. Please read my posts through November for more.
As a visual artist and performer who has moved more deeply into writing over the last seven of my thirty year career and been publishing across print and audio, I will gather here existing and new writing in its many forms - poems, stories, memoir, walking essay, image.
(photo by Adiam Yemane, courtesy of WritersMosaic/The Royal Literary Fund)
During my time as inaugural Writer-in-Residence across the Seven Sisters and Sussex Heritage Coast, UK for South Downs National Park, I spent time wandering the shifting chalk landscapes of that coast, researching, writing, running writing programmes and then curating and amplifying new story and poetry by fellow women writers of global heritage, ending with our audiowalk series We Hear You Now, which still echoes on Listening Posts from Seaford to Eastbourne and around Cuckmere Valley until 2029.
So now I am continuing my walking journeys, taking my pen for a walk with you, sometimes to places I know well along these ancestral bone paths of Sussex, or down along the lip of its shoreline and in dialogue with water – river, sea, far ocean.
I will take you to places I am discovering or researching afresh for current commissions, pure pleasure or personal refuge and restoration. I will write about the process of developing my new work, including how I manage to make my life work as a writer and artist with its struggles, insights, breakdowns and breakthroughs.
Occasionally, as I write in bed at 5am in company with the birds, I will offer up thoughts that have taken flight from my dreams and let the poetics take over! I am a lover of speculative fiction, using writing to imagine new worlds, and I see this as a political tool for hope in these extremely precarious times. I have learnt from one of the best in the novelist Leone Ross, who was editor on my first published fiction story – The Beard, a feminist tale of hair, power and revolution – for the speculative fiction anthology Glimpse (Peepal Tree Press, 2022), recently republished in Salt’s Best British Short Stories last year (ed. Nicholas Royle).
I am now writing my first novella, alongside my artist memoir and a growing collection of my nature writings. On this Substack, I will unravel how all that is interlinked, shaping up, finding a home.
Stay up-to-date, join the journey…
I will publish here every 10-14 days and the posts are free, but if you opt to join my paid subscriber community (£6 month or £50 annually) and support me in that way, you will receive regular voice-notes and/or a mini podcast/ video, extra creative writing prompts and tips from me at the end.
You can also access my archive, comment/dialogue/share work, and become part of this community in a deeper way.
Founding members (anything upward of £240/year) will receive advance publication invites, as well as live zoom events with me three times a year, and other additional content I will offer as I get comfortable on this new platform. There are group and gift subscription options so you can easily help spread the love!
Thankyou in advance, as with many writers, this will make a huge difference to how much time and focus I can bring to my writing projects in uncertain times at a time when my usual core funding has disappeared.
Inclusion is important to me, so if you really can’t afford to pay to subscribe for the extra content but want to join the paid subscriber community, do contact me.
When I do offer occasional live writing workshops or retreats, I will let my subscribers know about them first. This year is a slow one, next year will probably be different.
Thankyou for joining me on this journey, do feel free to share!
To learn more about the tech platform that powers this publication, visit Substack.com.
