Hey lovelies,
I just found this BBC audio archive and wanted to share it with you.
We made this time capsule of a show ‘Telling Tales’ for BBC Radio 4 in 2019. It is a deep dive into my work and my worlds, Ali Gardiner and I talk about poetry, memoir, music, fiction, performance and some of the recurring themes in my dreams and in my work, life and death, courage and resistance, light and dark, hope and love.
This programme is jam packed: it contains clips of gigs and laughter and the 2016 LIVEwire album; a discussion on the writing process and creativity; unpublished excerpts from the very early drafts of the Mrs Death Misses Death novel. You’ll also hear clips of Mrs Death’s lullabies from an album I made with Peter Coyte which we did not release commercially yet. When I was writing my debut novel I wrote a lot of songs and made a work-in-progress documentary with Radio 4 too. This show gives you a glimpse into that whole time.
You’ll hear ‘A Valentine At Waterloo’ a poem-play written from another time, which is taken from a series of sci-fi stories I hope to collect and publish one day. This radio programme also delves into the inspiration behind ‘Pessimism is for Lightweights’ as it was new then and originally published in 2018.
This programme was broadcast in 2019 — Funny how this already feels so long ago. I think the pandemic altered time or lost time in so many ways. This radio show was broadcast before l ‘Mrs Death Misses Death’ was signed and then published by Canongate during the first lockdowns of 2021.
Gigging monster is back in her box and Writing monster is the boss of me again. I’m working on the next novel set in the Mrs Death universe. The working title of my second novel is ‘The Life Of Life’ - here’s a joyful picture of a perfect moment on an August afternoon editing, writing, whilst watching my tomatoes ripen. If only it would stay this summer warm and delicious for the whole process…
Listening back to this 2019 radio programme reminded me what it feels like to be inside the heart of the Life and Death and Time universe, it reminds me how brave I was, how brave we all have to be. How one is always trying to seek glimmers of hope and beauty and truth, always finding ways to say the big things, the difficult things, finding words to made sense of all of this mad man-made tragedy and loss, above all it is reminding me where I came from so I can find my way forwards to where I want to be. That’s one of the magic things that books do, take you home, take you elsewhere, take you to where you feel you belong, not just when you read them, but when you write them too.
Here’s the BBC show notes for ‘Telling Tales’
Salena Godden is an author and poet, whose latest publication declared that Pessimism Is For Lightweights. Livewire, a collection of studio recordings spanning nearly 25 years, was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award in 2016.
Salena is also a regular on radio and, in 2018, Radio 4’s Mrs Death Misses Death captured the creation of a new experimental work, in which death is personified as a woman.
We hear this documentary, as well as an earlier gender swapping poetic creation titled A Valentine At Waterloo, which was broadcast on Radio 4 as part of an episode of Verse Illustrated in 2011.
Finally, Salena talks about protest and hope, and reads the title poem Pessimism Is For Lightweights, from her latest collection for Rough Trade Books.
Presented and produced by Ali Gardiner for BBC Radio 4 Extra.
First broadcast on Radio 4 in 2019.
EIBF: Salena Godden and Joelle Taylor author portraits by Chris Close
Here’s my favourite picture from EIBF - sending love and thanks to Edinburgh International Book Festival friends for such a wonderful time. Thank you. I really enjoyed my events with you. Love this photo of my dear friend, poet and author Joelle Taylor and I being angel and demon.
Here’s some dates for your diaries:
September 21st: Hastings Book Festival, in-conversation with the brilliant author and BBC presenter and broadcaster Anita Rani
September 25th: Octavia Butler ‘Parable Of The Sower’ event. Readings and conversation recorded live, Backlisted Podcast, Foyles, Charing Cross Road
October 11th + 12th: Cheltenham Book Festival, two events with stunning poets Joelle Taylor, Andrew McMillan and Hollie McNish
Thank you so much for reading, listening, supporting these writing adventures,
Keep on keeping on, never give up, keep on keeping on and on…
See you here and see you there,
Xxsg
Poetry. Books. Gigs.
Out now: With Love, Grief and Fury
Out now: Springfield Road
Out now: Pessimism is for Lightweights
Out now: Mrs Death Misses Death
Linktree: https://linktr.ee/salenagodden
Bookshop: https://uk.bookshop.org
Great book post: Death In The 21st Century edited by Katarzyna Bronk-Bacon and Simon Bacon. In the shadow of the Covid-19 pandemic, death has become an all too familiar feature of the early 2020s. The 21st century has in fact produced a singular historical moment with its unique intersection of popular politics, environmental extremes, globalisation and technological innovation, which has correspondingly created distinctive expressions of death, as well. Organised into sections on the war on terror, technology, climate change, extremism and global pandemics, the short, reader-friendly essays in this volume highlight crucial encounters with death in the contemporary period. — Publisher: Peter Lang International Academic Publishers
Thank you to Bethan Michael Fox and Renske Visser of Death Studies Podcast for choosing to write about Mrs Death Misses Death ‘Death as a Black Woman, Readressing Erasure and the Personification of Death’. I am honoured to see my book included in such a fascinating collection of academic essays. Thank you.
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