Photo credit: Akiko DuPont
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Tom Chivers Tom Chivers (96-01) is a writer, publisher and arts producer who left the College in 2001. His books of poetry include How to Build a City, The Terrors and Dark Islands. His non-fiction debut, London Clay , was published in September 2021. Here Tom talks to Trevor Llewelyn about his life and career.
company and it's still there today. A lot of the people I work with don't fit into one genre or another, which means they will probably fit in with me. That company is still running, but you then made another decision to write your first non-fiction work, London Clay. About 10 years ago, an opportunity came along to do a project with a climate change charity called Cape Farewell. The project centred on the lost rivers of London which resulted in two walking tours down the River Walbrook and the River Neckinger. I did quite a few and they became really popular. I enjoyed the research process and I liked that they seemed to reach a different demographic to my usual kind of poetry crowd. A few years later I thought, ‘I am just going to try turning one of those walks into prose and see if it reads well’. I very slowly started to write a few more chapters until I had enough to take to an agent. Eventually I managed to get a book deal which was good enough to allow me to take almost a year off work to write it. The book has a real focus on the River Thames. The River Thames is the longest archeological site in the world and there is a real sense of stepping into another world when you go down to the foreshore. I think that has a very profound psychological effect, particularly for people who are struggling with their mental health. A lot of people go there to get some space away from the city, whether they're mudlarking or just walking their dog. You have really taken to mudlarking. I started mudlarking during lockdown. It’s a hobby where people go down to a river at a low tide and search for historical artifacts and fascinating on so many levels. The things we find in the Thames often have associations with all sorts of complex and often problematic histories, particularly in terms of the colonial history of Britain. What is next for you? I've been lucky enough to get an opportunity to go back to university for the next four years to complete a PhD in mudlarking along the Thames. I've only just started it, so I'm in that crazy period where I’m looking at all the different directions it could go in. If I have any talent, it’s the ability to synthesise, and so this PhD will incorporate human geography, physical geography, history, archaeology, geology and anthropology. I am going to be tracking how the dynamic geography of the foreshore is changing, including by the intervention of mudlarks. Saying that, I really want to unpick why people mudlark and try to understand what they see as their relationship with the river environment. There are so many people, particularly young people growing up in deprived communities in London, who have never engaged with the river at all, and it's this incredible resource that belongs to us all. If I can encourage anyone to go down to the river and feel better about themselves, that would be a really positive outcome.
What did you do once you left Oxford? I worked for an arts consultancy for couple of years. They did everything from running music festivals to writing policy reports. That was great because it gave me a crash course in how to operate in the arts. I left that job when I was about 23 and started working as an arts producer. Why did you specialise in poetry in particular? I am now known for writing non-fiction, but poetry was my thing for a long time; its musicality has always drawn me in. There's something about the compression of complex ideas into something somewhat abstract and obscure. Language appealed to me at a time when I was grappling with a lot of complex personal feelings. I started writing poetry with a kind of seriousness when I was about 16 and didn't stop until I was 36, but I haven't written any for a while since having children. You started running poetry nights in Herne Hill and Spitalfields ? The evenings were predominantly for poetry to start with, but I have always been interested in all the arts, so we started to incorporate other mediums of expression. The nights in Spitalfields were really popular, and we would have two or three poets, a couple of musicians, maybe a performance artist of some kind. We’re talking about Shoreditch in the mid-noughties so there was plenty of weird and wonderful stuff going on. Throwing these artists onto a bill together created a lovely atmosphere. I also ran an alternative literature arts festival called the London Word Festival with two other arts professionals. That went on for about four years. We managed to capture a little bit of the zeitgeist at that time, working with a lot of people who've gone on to become big names; comedians like Stewart Lee and Josie Long. I really felt like we were contributing something by bringing these different scenes together; music, comedy, spoken word literature and theatre. It was very abstract, but somehow it just clicked. Unfortunately programming differences meant that the Festival was not sustainable and it eventually folded. However, I had already set up my own publishing company called Penned in the Margins which I had been working on part-time and so I began to take that much more seriously. We managed to get some core funding from Arts Council England and published almost 100 books. What sort of authors did you work with? It's always been a real mix. I was deliberately looking for a mix of styles, demographics, ages and so on. We’ve begun to publish more non-fiction recently, but I suppose we're best known for poetry, and within that we're probably best known for working with newish writers. A lot of our writers become published around my age, so they sort of come up with me as it were. I felt that I could play a meaningful role in the literary world by bringing together three areas that do not usually speak to each other very much; mainstream literature, poetry and performance. That triangle was there right at the start of the
feel underprepared when I got to Oxford to read Medieval English. Of course, I had imposter syndrome like everyone does but I soon realised that I had as much right to be there as anyone else. What was it about Medieval English that you fell in love with? As I said, I was very lucky to be taught by Jonathan Ward. Jonathan had connections within the world of contemporary poetry and was good friends with Barry MacSweeney, who was just the most remarkable writer you could come across; radical, angry, smart, funny. He sadly died in 2000, but I was there at the last reading he did at the College. Barry had written this incredible sequence of poems inspired by the medieval poem Pearl , and I got into that, then I got into Chaucer, then I got into Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, then it kind of spiraled out of control. It was very natural for me to go to St Anne’s College, and there was serious medievalist teaching at Oxford.
What did Dulwich College mean to you? Looking back, what I remember most about Dulwich is one corridor with a small office at the end: the English department. Under the tutelage of Jonathan Ward and Jo Akrill, that is where I came to feel at home. They gave you the space to articulate difficult or left-field ideas in a very non- judgmental way; you were treated as an adult. You felt that you were given the opportunity to develop your self expression? There were lots of moments where I had the opportunity to do that. I was taught by Ian Brinton when I was 13 or 14 and he was a brilliant teacher, and somebody who treats young kids like they have ideas worth listening to. Both my parents were teachers, and I think that the greatest skill of teaching is not just imparting wisdom, but learning from the kids that you're working with. There was a real intellectual integrity and pursuit about the English department, which made you feel like the sky was the limit. That’s why I didn't
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