SMILE, CLAP, DANCE, SING

SMILE, CLAP, DANCE, SING is a concrete prose text; a standalone piece and also a component part of a larger body of creative practice about waste, included here in the anthology, Seen From Here.

Seen from Here: Writing in the Lockdown is a collection of stories, flash fiction, poems, autofiction and conceptual writing gathered during the April and May Covid-19 lockdown, bringing together UK-based writers, poets, performance makers and artists.

Published in a PDF format by Unstable Object, an imprint launched by Etchells and Horvat for this occasion, the book is available to buy on a pay-what-you-choose basis, with 100% of proceeds to be donated to the Trussell Trust, a UK food bank charity.

The writing in Seen from Here is extremely diverse – spanning (amongst other things) enigmatic fiction from Will Eaves, Eley Williams, M. John Harrison, Courttia Newland and Fernando Sdrigotti; compelling poetry from Maria Sledmere and Marvin Thompson; powerful autofiction from Lara Pawson, Season Butler and Tony White; prescient language artworks from Fiona Banner aka The Vanity Press, Caroline Bergvall and Andrea Mason; and compelling performance texts from Selina Thompson, Chris Thorpe and Rupert Thomson. While some of the work reflects directly or indirectly on the lockdown experience and the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, other pieces offer glimpses of past events, other realities and fictional landscapes. All but one of the texts included in the collection are previously unpublished and most are newly written, emerging from the isolating state of the lockdown to form a hallucinatory portrait of the concerns, intimate realities and fragile fantasies of the UK in the pandemic zone of 2020.