WRITING
Books / Selected Poems / Selected Essays
BOOKS
TO FALL FABLE
To Fall Fable, a poetry chapbook from Variant Lit, was published on 1st Jan 2021.
In these poems, meaning, memory and plants are all overgrown. It’s ivy wrapped around a lamppost – a fable turned prophecy. Here a forest learns to speak its confusion; Adam and Eve fall from the garden of Eden; a song is accidentally bitten to death, and yet – always – love resprouts. To Fall Fable offers a fall which occurs again and again, finding resonance and promise through multiple iterations of the same. Desire is ultimately revealed to be fecund: spawning both joy and trauma, abuse and hope.
THRIFTWOOD
THRIFTWOOD is a mixture of personal memoir and cultural and literary criticism, which explores the ideas of the liminal, changing place and liminal, changing body as related. As a scout, Alice Wickenden's personal experiences of growing up and developing both sexual and nonsexual relationships were all seen through the mirror of camping. A vital and engaging text, THRIFTWOOD provides a starting point for jumping off and thinking about puberty, while also incorporating thoughts on a wide variety of things such as Shakespeare, The Vaccines, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and fairy tales.
PRAISE for THRIFTWOOD:
‘A truly astonishing achievement, and a testament to what creative non-fiction writing can do at its very, very best — at its most daring, its most moving, and its most exquisite. Alice Wickenden uses stunningly beautiful prose to weave a personal history together with criticism and memoir to produce a piece of work you will never forget. Alice's observations about trauma and abuse, love and betrayal, memory and narrative, are as beautiful and moving as they are arresting and lucid and razor-sharp. She is an incredibly special writer and thinker and I'll read anything she writes. — Lucia Osborne-Crowley, My Body Keeps Your Secrets
HOW TO DECODE YOUR ORANGE PEEL FORTUNES
How to decode your orange-peel fortunes is a pamphlet about tiny encounters. It’s about the moment the blossom comes into full bloom: perfectly pink, terrifyingly wonderful. It’s about going for a walk and seeing an astoundingly white butterfly; it’s about noticing roadkill and feeling, just for a moment, life teeter. It’s about those moments when the right song comes on at the right time, when nothing else makes sense but your favourite poem, how that can be enough. It’s about how entirely good it is when you eat fruit that’s so perfectly ripe that everything else in your life glows full of clarity. It’s about the time after you’ve been so sad when you begin to piece a life back together: small beauty by small beauty.
The pamphlet also includes a longer piece called ‘Conversations with the moon: An essay on poetry’, where the speaker talks to the moon, drawing on Amelia Lanyer and Sylvia Plath, luxuriating in the clichéness of it all. The moon doesn’t care about our sadness, but we tell it anyway. How human, how brilliant, is that?
SELECTED POEMS
SELECTED ESSAYS AND ARTICLES
REVIEW ESSAY FOR THE BRIXTON REVIEW OF BOOKS
A pitched review essay of Lucia Osborne-Crowley's I Choose Elena and Jeannie Vanasco's Things We Didn't Talk About When I Was a Girl.
This article asked how we move on after #MeToo, and whether the movement allows for nuance in the wake of telling your story.
BRB issue 10 (summer 2020).
ROUTINE MAINTENANCE
Done well, a concept album, or series of albums, are a type of art nothing else quite reaches. You can’t just read the lyrics; to get the narrative you have to listen. Concept albums, for me, are the perfect distillation of my desire to watch a story unfold. To introduce characters and a story in the restrained space of songs is a technical feat. A work of literature. ...
CONTACT
Please get in touch to find out more about me and my work: I am open for commissions.