26/05/2025
News from our friends in Gloucester ...
Anthony Nanson & Awen Publications
Stories and books that engage with the world
There have been some changes over the last few years and it may be awhile since you last heard from me and my Awen and Fire Springs fellow travellers. I’m now, at last, sending out my own newsletter to interested people, with updates about my writing and storytelling and my collaborations with others, including the small press, Awen, that I took over from Kevan Manwaring in 2015. I’ve realised that, instead of trying to sustain separate communications for Awen, it makes sense to bundle these various strands in a single newsletter – and a single blog, merging the old Anthony Nanson and Awen blogs. Much more doable!
What all this work – writing, storytelling, publishing – has in common is an interest in ecology, spirituality, and well-crafted language, hence an ‘ecobardic’ commitment as explained in An Ecobardic Manifesto. My newsletter won’t be very frequent, maybe once a month. It will contain news about books and relevant events, plus links to blog posts and the like. I hope very much you’ll stay in the loop. If you don’t want to receive further newsletters, Unsubscribe is down there!
I care passionately about stories and writing that say something worth saying and at the same time are beautifully crafted with skill and effort. Publishing is facing a new crisis as AI mobilises to flood the market with effortless derivative texts that will serve no meaningful purpose. My commitment is to the integrity of high-quality creative work whose authors speak from their experience and imagination, from the depths of their heart, as conscious embodied beings. Hence the need to spread the word with a newsletter!
One good example is Helen Moore’s exquisite and hard-hitting collection of poems, The Mother Country, which I published in 2019. Since then, Helen has earned a PhD on ‘"Rising in and for our life-source, Earth": Ecopoetry as Engaged, Embodied, Co-created Expression of Ecocentric Consciousness’. Awen has been quiet since The Mother Country because I’ve been so busy with other projects. I’ll briefly mention a few of them. One was my completion, in 2023, of my own PhD on ‘Ecobardic Desire: Storytelling and Storywriting as Catalysts of Transformation in People’s Relationship with the More-than-Human World’. Like Helen, I had the privilege of being supervised by Arran Stibbe, whose latest book came out from Bloomsbury last year: Econarrative: Ethics, Ecology and the Search for New Narratives to Live By.
In 2020, Kirsty and I published with the History Press a third volume of Gloucestershire’s traditional tales, Gloucestershire Folk Tales for Children. Martin Vaux interviewed me just last month on his Three Ravens Podcast with a focus on Gloucestershire folktales. Do have a listen to the podcast.
I published with Bloomsbury a monograph called Storytelling and Ecology: Empathy, Enchantment and Emergence in the Use of Oral Narrative. This was runner-up in its category in the Association of American Publishers Prose Awards 2022. A conversation with Catherine Heinemeyer and Liesl King prompted by the book appears in a Conversations in Social Justice podcast.
In 2022, Hawthorn Press republished under a new title, Storytelling for Nature Connection: Environment, Community and Story-Based Learning, a book I co-edited with Alida Gersie and Buck Schieffelin back in 2014. This book is a resource for educational responses to the ongoing ecological crisis. There’s a linkage between global crisis – ecological, economic, political – and the personal crises of individuals. During the pandemic, I collaborated – as creative coach and editor– with Swedish psychiatrist Katrina Carlsson on her acclaimed book Crisis Integration with Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, published in 2024 by the American Psychiatric Association.
Right now, Awen has a number of new books on the way. Due out in June is Alistair McNaught’s new novel, The City by the Sea – an extremely powerful comment on our challenging times. Alistair is a superb literary stylist, whose first novel, The Tragicall History of Campbell McCluskie, I published in 2018. Also imminent is Irina’s verse narrative plus essay, In Memory of Her: Mary Magdalene, Beacon of Light. Reviews by Charlotte Hussey and Diana Durham of Irina’s previous book, Heloise Speaks (with Amethyst Press), are posted on the blog. Further details in my next newsletters!
With my very best wishes,
Anthony Nanson
Storytelling and Ecology by Anthony Nanson (Bloomsbury)
Finalist, Association of American Publishers Prose Awards 2022. Honours, Storytelling World Awards 2022
The Mother Country by Helen Moore (Awen)
'From pain comes knowledge, realisation, redemption, and it is a strong voice here that shares those insights.' Dawn Gorman
