The Learned Pig

I wake with the 3 am moon. It’s bursting at the seams and achromatic white. There’s a pure incandescent light that stretches across the night sky. My whole upper body is drenched in its rays while still lying in bed stumbling through the dream that woke me. It’s a vision of a cylinder with luminescent blue trim and lights the same luminescent blue scattered down its tube into a vanishing point that leads to a star system. I’ve had this dream before.

A journal has landed. ECHTRAI is, in the words of its editorial team, “a journal of writing and visual art, dedicated to bringing together the work of a diverse cross-section of writers and artists with an interest in landscapes lost, abandoned, forgotten, and mythic. Written works will include a wide variety of essays, poetry, poetic prose, short fiction, experimental hybrids, academic papers, and republished works on a bi-annual basis”.

A Good Life and Subsistence are part of Kindling (Lantern Publishing and Media, September 2021), by Linnea Ryshke, a collection of poetry, photography, visual art and essays following field experience working at a small-family meat farm. Centered on an ethnographic sensitivity, the book offers a gentle, honest, yet stirring narrative of an environment in which nonhuman animals are valued based on economic gain.

Before Assumptions Before assumptions, awareness takes me to the furthest limits of the senses. What are the stars? What grows in the dirt? What a spectacle is this body I use! All of these things need not the first glimpse of explanation before assumptions. I could baffle you with ideas of the man who searches the elements, in his effort to reunite with what was had simply before assumptions.

burning & wildoat-picking when I was a teenager: After … wading amongst rods of wheat-heads or fine barbed fibres of barley awns, crouching to an horizon of swaying corn to spot the taller intruders of wildoat heads – thrust above like green pylons, the spear tear-drops of their husks & awns spreading threatening chandeliers of weed … After … gripping the fine-ribbed, juice-filled stems close to the ground to tug dark-clad roots free, shaking soil away, folding thick stems, compressing...

This is an extract from Listen, we all bleed, a brilliant new collection of essays and other texts by Mandy-Suzanne Wong, published by New Rivers Press, November 2021. You can order your copy direct from the publisher. Table-Turning “A table acting in a frantic manner”: making noises “far removed from any approach to common sense” and wiggling unassisted, often with an “agitated . . .

Lille Gris was dreamt up before Brexit and Covid-19 changed everything. In December 2017 an invitation arrived to participate in an exhibition programme at the North Atlantic Lighthouse in Hanstholm, Denmark. This presented an ideal opportunity to open new dialogues on the welfare and intelligence of farmed pigs. In our previous work, CARNEVALE, Cath Keay and I had designed sculptural playthings for pigs.

Lille Gris was dreamt up before Brexit and Covid-19 changed everything. In December 2017 an invitation arrived to participate in an exhibition programme at the North Atlantic Lighthouse in Hanstholm,… This is part of CARNEVALE, a collaborative art-science project that explores animal welfare questions and the enthusiasm of pigs for investigative play. Click to see the rest. … Popcorn Piñata         Pig Kerplunk     Melon Mines     House of Many Doors     Fruit Machine     Apple Barrel        …

It’s late March and my neighbour Keith is gloating. “I’ve put my onion sets in, and my potatoes, and a few spring onions and carrots. Just off to sow some radishes. Not too keen on them myself, but Ann likes them.” Keith is nearly eighty and is out daily, bending, digging and weeding in his huge garden. He loves tulips, dahlias, gladioli, anything brightly coloured, and he puts me to shame with his vegetables. I haven’t even sorted out my old seeds yet, let alone bought any new ones.