Category / Essay / The Clearing
Under African Skies by Jini Reddy
England was the country of my birth, but my parents, who were of Indian descent, were born in South Africa.
October 9, 2018The Blasted Heath: loss and lawlessness in Middlesex by Jon Woolcott
Amongst a tangle of roads, a little blue sign declares a bike path: “Heathrow Airport: ½ mile.” Who on earth rides to Heathrow? Today, I do.
October 5, 2018Anthropocene TV by Adam Scovell
A sense of collapse more than change is at the heart of many of these dramas, perhaps suggesting that the melodramatic turn of such environmental catastrophe has made it seem too big, incomprehensible or unsolvable to avert.
October 1, 2018A Peck of Dirt by Tim Dee
Paul saw his moment. He pressed the launch button and the net cannoned over the gulls. They lifted as one as soon as it rose above them.
September 1, 2018Coal Measures by Paul Evans
What dies in the coal forest falls into the water: horsetails, tree ferns, dragonflies and crocodiles rot under the surface of the swamp.
August 28, 2018Footprints by Tim Hannigan
This was absolutely the countryside. The spinneys and fields had names, even if no mapmaker had ever thought to seek them out.
August 20, 2018Heart of Oak by Dexter Petley
1 Family Trees One September morning, I woke to find that most of the trees in the forest around me had been spray-painted with those dreaded red rings of the oak hunter,…
August 7, 2018Quartz by Linda Cracknell
In the summer of 2016 I part-rode, part-pushed my bicycle, loaded with a tent and some art materials, across the narrow waist of the Udal peninsula on the Hebridean island of North…
July 3, 2018My Rock by Tim Dee
In hospital, I was often asked to rank my pain on a scale of one – not so bad – to ten – deadly. I answered, thinking of the Avon Gorge near my home, its savage gash of limestone perpetually wounded by a muddy river.
June 27, 2018Entanglement by Christopher Nicholson
There came the point when the secateur blades were within an inch of the antlers, which in the poor light seemed as grey as the honeysuckle. Then the roebuck had had enough. In one convulsive movement it flung itself into the air and broke free. It hurtled away, crashing downhill, disappearing into the darkness of the trees.
April 30, 2018In Praise of Dandelions by Gerard Fosse
I remove an individual dandelion seed and let it drop onto my notebook. I keep plucking, and ten minutes later I have a pile of 82 seeds (or 83, but I’m not counting again) wavering across the pad in a soft froth.
April 23, 2018Made in England by Fran Edgerley
She loves the stories hidden in the landscape – particular hedges, the small paths that signify cross-breeding links, farming styles, a new kerbside or a route home. To me Dorothy Hartley is a fellow student following the complex web of how the physical, natural world translates to our daily and cultural material experience.
April 4, 2018
About
THE CLEARING is an online journal published by Little Toller Books that offers writers and artists a dedicated space in which to explore and celebrate the landscapes we live in. Our contributors are encouraged to go forth and find distinctive visions that startle us, rural or urban, modern or prehistoric, industrial, post-industrial, fantastical, natural, political, however they come. But each must be meaningful, surprising, felt.
Submissions
The editors welcome original submissions in written, audio and visual genres. Submission should reflect The Clearing/Little Toller’s concern with the natural environment, but within this broad subject-matter we encourage a diversity of interpretation and approach.
If you’d like to submit work to The Clearing, please email theclearing@littletoller.co.uk. Please refer to the submission guidelines. While we receive many submissions we will get back to you as soon as we are able.
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