The Colour of Chalk - Writing Journeys

Nature writing, but not as you know it...

Welcome to The Colour of Chalk, a home for my writing on place, change and journeys real and imagined, from deep time to the present moment, into the speculative future. This is nature and climate-based writing, but not as you know it. Since we are all part of nature, I write myself into the landscape too. I witness and write 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, and along the borders of my British-Iranian identity come into play.

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 my existing and new writing in its many forms - poems, stories, memoir, walking essay, image.

The title of this Substack is named after my 2021-22 podcast The Colour of Chalk, a walk and talk podcast made as inaugural Writer-in-Residence across the Seven Sisters and Sussex Heritage Coast, UK for South Downs National Park. I spent three incredible years wandering the shifting chalk landscapes, researching, writing, running writing programmes and then curating and amplifying new story and poetry by fellow women writers of global majority 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 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). Following a fiction masterclass with Leone, I am now writing my first novella, alongside my artist memoir and an growing collection of my nature writings. On this Substack, I will unravel how all that is interlinked, shaping up, finding a home.

I will publish here every 7-10 days – on a Thursday or Saturday – and the posts are free, but if you join my paid subscriber community (£6 month or £50 annually) you will receive regular voice-notes and/or a mini podcast, in which I invite you to take up your own pen and write, via 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. Inclusion is important to me, so if you really can’t afford to pay to subscribe but want to join the paid subscriber community, do contact me.

When I offer occasional live writing workshops or retreats, I will let my subscribers know about them first.

So let us begin, my first journey in the next post will be a walk close to my home, and end far, so far away...

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