Tag Archives: poetry

Marlene Creates talking walking

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In May 2025, multi-award-winning Canadian photographer and environmental artist Marlene Creates is in Brighton, England, and Andrew Stuck takes the opportunity to meet her there.

They are walking in woodland not far from Preston Park train station and Andrew invites her to compare their surroundings to where she lives on the island of Newfoundland off the east coast of mainland Canada.

Marlene uses the 6-acre patch of old-growth boreal forest where she lives as an outdoor studio and now spends much of her time there observing how it changes with the seasons, photographing what she sees, and writing poetry to describe the unseen.

She’s been sharing this forest with primary school children, inviting them to go on multidisciplinary guided walks to learn about the nature of their local ecosystem, as well as concurrently bringing back to light terms in the Newfoundland dialect through video-poems.

Andrew and Marlene chat about her unusual field research back in the 1980s, when she came to Britain and rode thousands of miles on a 1968 Vespa motor scooter, and they discuss her walking art practice. The podcast ends with her reading a list poem composed of over 100 verbs that describe ways of walking. We retreated indoors to make the recording of Marlene reciting the poem. She also shared other words and phrases related to walking that she found in the Dictionary of Newfoundland English that she would like to be brought back into common parlance.

39’43” 21MB

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Feature Image credit:  Bernard Fougères

Matt Gilbert talking walking

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Matt Gilbert, the author of the ‘Richly Evocative’ blog has had a collection of poetry published recently called ‘Street Sailing’.

Andrew Stuck and Matt are on a walk together through Dulwich Woods part of the Great North Wood, an area where Matt volunteered to undertake conservation work.  

Frequently walking through the woods has been key to much of Matt’s creative writing process and in their conversation, Matt talks about his approach to writing prose as well as to writing poetry, and gives insight into the contemporary poets who have influenced and inspired him.

Although brought up in Bristol, Matt spent much of his life in West Norwood, what one newspaper described as “an anonymous suburb of South London” – a remark that has rattled Matt and prompted him to write the ‘Richly Evocative’ blog.  

22’57” 10.8MB

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