Welcome to Notes from the Margin
A newsletter and writing community exploring what it means to belong in nature, in landscape, in class, in grief.
Hello, I’m author and poet Wendy Pratt. I write about what it means to belong and I help other writers do the same.
Welcome to my newsletter: Notes from the Margin.
Notes from the Margin is an exploration of belonging and a community of writers finding their own sense of belonging. It is a kind of commonplace book in which small points of connection are gathered. The margin of the title is both the place at the edge of a page where notes are made, and a place of in-betweens, of not quite being identified or categorised. These are places of profundity and revelation for me.
About Me
I grew up in rural and semi rural North Yorkshire, UK, in a family who had strong connections to their farming ancestry. I grew up in a place where I stepped from my front door and was gone into the fields and the lanes almost immediately. I grew up in a wide glacier-scraped valley that is full of hidden history; an archive of the people who worshipped, ritualised, worked, hunted, lived their lives here. I still live here, in this valley. I have no reason to leave.
I am an outsider, a weird sister. I don’t quite fit in. I have lived my life in a series of liminal places - gateways I have never quite passed through - as a rural working class woman, as a bereaved mother, as an infertile woman, as a working class writer working in a middle class field.
The only place I’ve ever really felt at home is in nature.
Perhaps you are the same. Perhaps you are interesting in the margin’s voices, perhaps you too live your life in the margins, or in the liminal places - the gateways between places, where definition becomes difficult. Perhaps you feel you need to give yourself permission to tell your story, perhaps you don’t feel your place on the margins is valid.
I write about belonging, and sometimes grief, landscape, history and often nature. I write about finding my own place in the line of my ancestors and how to exist in that line when your childlessness means the line stops with you. Mostly I like to sit in the spaces between the big thoughts and just exist, and my life is about pulling it down onto the page.
I’m Wendy Pratt, author of five poetry collections.My latest, Blackbird Singing at Dusk will be published by Nine Arches Press in 2024. My previous poetry collection When I Think of My Body as a Horse won the Poetry Business book and pamphlet award. My nature/landscape memoir The Ghost Lake will be published by The Borough Press, a division of Harper Collins in 2024. I am founder and editor of Spelt Magazine; a print magazine dedicated to validating and celebrating the rural experience through creative non-fiction and poetry.
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Notes from the Margin is a free newsletter which will arrive in your inbox every other week, on Thursdays, for free.
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When you subscribe to Notes from the Margin paid, you will have access to pay walled posts which will arrive direct in your inbox on Thursdays. These posts are aimed at helping you to develop your own voice in writing, connect to the world around you and find your place within it. Paid subscribers can enjoy
Insider essays
Writing prompts
Journalling exercises
Opportunities lists
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Access to the Notes from the Margin closed Facebook group
Notes from the Margin Bookclub
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for subscribing, whichever plan you choose, I’m happy that you are here.
