Chapel
DIRT: plantable ecopoetry collaborations that literally go back into the earth!
Chapel is the prototype for our ecopoetry imprint, a collaboration between poets and DIRT founders JLM Morton and Alice Willitts.
We tested out the model of co-writing and print production, creating a poem and a short essay, inspired by a climate science prompt provided by one of our original Kickstarter backers. In true pamphleteering spirit, the end result is a double-sided broadsheet printed with vegetable inks on compostable, plantable paper, accompanied by a packet of seeds that will help to send this piece of work back to the earth. We are what we preach 😉
Thank you for supporting DIRT. We hope that soon we can begin to commission pairs of poets to cocreate their own plantable poetry.
JLM Morton
JLM Morton is a writer and poet whose work explores rural identity and belonging, ancestry, place and practices of care, repair and solidarity across human and other-than-human worlds. Winner of the Laurie Lee, Geoffrey Dearmer, Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust Poetry and International Dylan Thomas Day prizes, her work is published widely including in The Poetry Review, The Rialto, Magma, Poetry Birmingham, Places of Poetry, Sunday Telegraph and recently in Living With Water (Manchester University Press, 2023). In 2023 she was longlisted for the Nan Shepherd Prize. Her first full poetry collection Red Handed is forthcoming with Broken Sleep Books (2024). She is currently poet in residence at Sladebank Woods, a semi-urban woodland sandwiched between a housing estate and an AONB. Find her online at: jlmmorton.com
Alice Willitts
Alice is a writer, editor and plantswoman from the Fens. She is the author of Something Light Written (Elephant Press, 2023), Think Thing: an ecopoetry practice, (Elephant Press, 2021), With Love, (Live Canon, 2020) and Dear, (Magma, 2019). She runs The 57 Poetry Collective in Cambridge and is the editor of DIRT with Dialect Writers. She graduated with Distinction from the Creative Writing Poetry MA at UEA in 2018. She was shortlisted for the Ivan Juritz Prize 2018 for the p0_EM experiment in fractal poetics. She collected climate rebel stories for Channel Mag and was delighted to co-edit Magma 78: Collaborations issue (Nov 2020).
She believes in putting hope into action. She is a co-founder of On The Verge Cambridge actively increasing plants for pollinators throughout the city. River Cam Erasure is a protest poetry project raising awareness about damage to the Cam’s chalk stream ecosystem.
In Nov 2021 she was the grateful recipient of a DYCP grant from Art Council England to write her second collection. Calls To Me Longingly is forthcoming from Blue Diode Press in 2025.