David Cooper

First thing Monday morning: looking down Oxford Road from the School of English @manmetuni.bsky.social

‘My memory of the seaside dissolves into the memories of the people in the photographs. And everything we need to know is in these small things we hold in our hands’: a typically brilliant piece of writing by @wildtwin.bsky.social

As we pause between the storms . . . Thomas Creswick (1811-69), ‘Morecambe Bay’ (Bolton Library & Museum Services).

‘The storm breaks down the day’s last hour./ It slams through trees in the neighbour’s garden/ like air mechanically displaced/ by compartments of another world sliding past/ this one’: from ‘Starcraft’ by Karen Solie.

‘Across the Bay’ by the brilliant Lela Harris: part of ‘a remembered landscape series, inspired by’ the artist’s ‘wanderings around my home in the Lake District’ & - to my great delight - the cover of my new @livunipress.bsky.social book ‘Reading Place Writing’ lelaharris.co.uk

The John Parham Fellowship is a biennial award of £5,000 supporting innovative research in ecocriticism and the environmental humanities. Funded jointly by John Parham’s estate and ASLE-UKI, ECRs and those outside ft academic employment are especially encouraged to apply. asle.org.uk/awards/john-...

TONIGHT!

All the talk of a new Beatles attraction in Liverpool has reminded me that, a few years back, I wrote about the history of St John’s Beacon & my childhood memories of the tower as an ‘extraterrestrial lighthouse’ in the centre of the city www.routledge.com/From-the-Lig...

‘…it’s that connection between the part & the whole, the moment & the universal, which is the trick of the diary’: Mark Cocker reflects on completing his 1000th @theguardian.com country diary www.theguardian.com/environment/...

‘Let my eyes at the last be blinded/ Not by the dark/ But by the dazzle’ (Norman Nicholson, ‘Sea to the West’): the Mersey from Otterspool.

Book launch: ‘The Architecture of Connection’ by Jen Orpin @themodernist.bsky.social on Thursday, 22 October, 18:00-20:00 the-modernist.org/blogs/news/t...

Come along & 🎉celebrate 🎉with us, our 💫120th 💫anniversary ! Online event, with friends in subject assoc’s - interdisciplinary exchanges - exploring our vital roles in current times. Also, premiering a special commissioned #poem by #teacher-poet 💫 Ali Al-Jamri englishassociation.ac.uk/confronting-...

A new book for the new academic year: my monograph, ‘Reading Place Writing: Geography, Form, Immersion, 2010-2020’ has been published by @livunipress.bsky.social as part of the @englishassociation.bsky.social ‘English at the Interface’ series www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/book/10....

‘Each time I’ve been to Fingal’s Cave, the sense of natural magnitude dwarfing human endeavour has been inescapable. Turner’s painting amplified the feeling: a luminescent, natural arch opening into the unfathomable past’: Fiona Stafford on Staffa.

I’d encourage everyone to read this heart-breakingly beautiful piece by @wildtwin.bsky.social intoday’s paper & then, if you haven’t already done so, buy a copy of ‘Wild Twin’ from @littletollerbooks.bsky.social amp.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle...

Predictably, at the end of Induction Week, I’m spending Saturday evening in bed having come down with some sort of bug. Can anyone recommend any good place/landscape/geography podcasts that can take me elsewhere as I feel sorry for myself? Thanks!

Exploring the explorers’ maps: free hybrid RGS-IBG lecture by Katherine Parker on 28 October www.rgs.org/events/upcom...

The Sound of the Fens: wonderful BBC Open Country in which Martha Kearney visits Helpston & Fen Edge to explore how the landscape has changed since the days of John Clare. Features Francesca Mackenney discussing Clare’s soundscapes www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...

‘I want to make some kind of gesture. An offering. A mark of passing. And to leave it here. Tied to the land’: about to re-immerse myself - for the nth time - in the extraordinary deep map of Richard Skelton’s ‘Landings’.

Just spent much of the train commute home dreaming of walking into this painting (‘Washdaybreak’, 2003) by Martin Greenland martingreenland.co.uk

Delighted to see the new special issue of the Journal of Historical Geography out: Reflections on histories and philosophies of geography. Edited by Heike Jöns, myself, Pauline Couper & Federico Ferretti: #geosky www.sciencedirect.com/journal/jour... 🧵

Mapping the Tube: 1863-2023 - exhibition at The Map House - from 25 October to 30 November - exploring the evolution of London’s Tube system and the London Underground map. The exhibition will feature some of Harry Beck’s hand-drawn & annotated manuscripts www.themaphouse.com/exhibitions/...

‘The Outrun’: special preview screening of Nora Fingscheidt’s adaptation of Amy Liptrot’s remarkable memoir at HOME in Manchester on Thursday, 26 September homemcr.org/film/the-outru…

ICYMI: The Centre for Place Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University is keen to support applications for 2025 Leverhulme Early Career Fellowships. Please get in touch via email if you’re interested & want to find out more about the internal selection process www.mmu.ac.uk/research/fel...

JOB: lecturer in Geography (f/t, perm). We're looking for a cultural geographer to join us at York St John Uni from January. Closing date 13 Oct. Details online at jobs.yorksj.ac.uk/vacancy.aspx...

Apologies to those who already know this, but Hookland is a pre-enchanted landscape you already own. It's there for your use if needed or wanted. Fill your boots.

‘Making Geography Matter: Opening up the Doreen Massey Archive’ - a brilliant funded PhD at the Open University. Closing date: 7 January 2025 www.oocdtp.ac.uk/making-geogr...

Spent much of the day thinking about the past of the Portico Library thanks to the doctoral research of Michelle Ravenscroft; spent the evening in a trustees meeting & thinking about the Library’s exciting future in the centre of Manchester www.theportico.org.uk/reuniting-po...

‘What we need to question is bricks, concrete, glass, our table manners, our utensils, our tools, the way we spend our time, our rhythms. To question that which seems to have ceased forever to astonish us…’ (Georges Perec).

Spent a wonderful day yesterday at the Liverpool Travel Seminar at the Bluecoat reflecting on & celebrating the field-shaping work of @timyoungs.bsky.social Many thanks to all involved for making it happen.

Publication day for the new, expanded version of 'Marshland' - out now via Influx Press www.influxpress.com/marshland 'Layered London, black, funny, marshy, full of horrible vigour & hidden channels.' – M. John Harrison.

The Cumbria Wildlife Trust fundraiser to secure and ecologically restore Skiddaw has just hit the half-way mark. Please donate if you can: @georgemonbiot.bsky.social @wanderinggaia.bsky.social @irishrainforest.bsky.social @alexvont.bsky.social

Here’s the paperback edition of A Book of Noises from Granta Books. It will be on sale in October

Early morning commute to work: ‘This writing business is going really well as I’ve written over 500 words - all of them excellent - & it’s not even 8am.’ Early evening commute home after a day of meetings: ‘I don’t know what a sentence is.’

Today has been spent travelling from Lowestoft to Romney Marsh to Dorset to the Upper Thames in meetings with some of our brilliant postgraduate researchers in the Centre for Place Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University. Today has been a good day.

Here’s an updated link www.mmu.ac.uk/research/fel...

The Centre for Place Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University is keen to support applications for 2025 Leverhulme Early Career Fellowships. Please get in touch via email if you’re interested & want to find out more about the internal selection process mmu.ac.uk/research/fello…

‘All my life I have restlessly been looking for a home, for a room. And it was here all along’: I’ve just been left breathless by the beautifully traumatic final chapter in Wild Twin by @wildtwin.bsky.social Published by @littletollerbooks.bsky.social on 18 Sept littletoller.co.uk/shop/books/lit…

The end of summer . . .

Delighted to see my colleague Andrew Michael Hurley's novel STARVE ACRE getting the in-cinemas-now film treatment. A nice, gnarly bit of folk horror as the evenings draw in.

Trespass: call for submissions - essays, fiction, poetry, interviews, book reviews, music, visual art and photography - for the brilliant ‘Elsewhere: A Journal of Place’. Deadline: 30 September www.elsewhere-journal.com/submissions

Stunned that, in the brilliant Wild Twin, @wildtwin.bsky.social refers to ‘Cherry Blossom (AKA Boot Polish Head), the man [in Liverpool] who paints pretend hair on his skull with shoe polish’ as, for years, I’ve assumed that he was a product of my childhood imagination or family myth-making . . .

‘Nostalgia is an illness, perhaps. And yet, it’s beautiful. I live in memory. I live in the present moment but the past is here too, sometimes shimmering, sometimes dimming in the same space as the now’: #amreading Wild Twin by @wildtwin.bsky.social from @littletollerbooks.bsky.social

WILD TWIN BOOK LAUNCH, 25TH September. Details here: www.waterstones.com/events/an-ev...

Albert Vincent Reade, ‘Morecambe Bay June 1932’.

Please follow, repost & like the Nature Writing feed & don't forget to add #naturewriting to posts about your reading &/or writing based on the natural world. Thank you 💚 bsky.app/profile/did:...

‘I’m in car park world, a space with its own politics, culture & memory. Not an unplace, but a place apart’ (Gareth E Rees): Bank Holiday Monday landscape.

Landscape studies by the Kendal-based artist, Lela Harris, who has received great critical acclaim for her brilliant ‘Black Lancastrians’ exhibition at Judges’ Lodgings, Lancaster lelaharris.co.uk

‘We pass and fade on the face of the/ earth, sun-nets drifting over distant hillsides, the cloud/ shadows. We become the half-sensed ghosts’ (‘Moor’): #amreading - slowly, sadly - the unsurprisingly wonderful ‘Cairn’ by Kathleen Jamie.