About
dialect /ˈdʌɪəlɛkt/ noun 1. a particular form of a language which is peculiar to a specific region or social group.
"the Gloucestershire dialect seemed like a foreign language"
MEMBERSHIP-WORKSHOPS - COURSES - MENTORING
Dialect is an inclusive literary development platform for rural and edgeland writers.
Our home is in Gloucestershire but we reach rural writers all over the UK and beyond.
Dialect is here to nurture talent, connect with communities and offer rural writers opportunities to share their work.
Juliette Morton & Emma Kernahan, Dialect Directors (credit: Carmel King)
Our Story
Dialect launched quietly in July 2020 with an online Summer School of taster workshops. A programme of workshops around Stroud Book Festival followed, along with regular critique workshops, courses, a Writer In Residence scheme in partnership with Lake 32 and an Arts Council funded mentoring scheme. We are now offering regular courses focused on the craft of writing and immersive writing workshops and retreats in intriguing rural locations. Dialect is now a Community Interest Company, committed to investing in literature and author development. We have recently launched Dialect Press, specialising in collaborative work by writers and artists.
Ethos
Dialect speaks from the edges of things. We celebrate the remote and the pastoral, the mountains and hills, the woods and the wilderness, the coasts and waterways, but also the small town and its suburbs, the retail parks, verges, dual carriageways, wastelands, lay-bys, scrapyards, agricultural spaces, derelict mills, industrial estates, motorway services, recycling centres, the spaces and voices in-between.
JLM Morton (Image credit: Carmel King Photography)
The founding Director of Dialect is Juliette (JLM) Morton, a widely published poet and writer interested in the interplay between language, power and place. Highly commended by the Forward Prizes, she’s also winner of the Laurie Lee, Geoffrey Dearmer, International Dylan Thomas Day and Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust Poetry prizes. Her work has appeared in Poetry Review, Magma, Poetry Birmingham, Rialto, The London Magazine, Mslexia, Berlin Lit, Anthropocene, Bad Lilies and elsewhere. Her first collection, Red Handed, is out with Broken Sleep (2024). Originally an academic by trade and an experienced educator with many years working in international development, Juliette studied at Goldsmiths, Sussex and Manchester Universities, graduating with MAs in literature and creative writing and a PhD in literature exploring gender and whiteness/race.
Poet in Residence at Sladebank Woods, a woodland sandwiched between a ‘National Landscape’ and a housing estate, Juliette has long dreamed of setting up an initiative to give talented writers in rural Gloucestershire the same access to great quality development opportunities as their urban counterparts.
For more info, including events and readings, see www.jlmmorton.com
Emma Kernahan (credit: Carmel King Photography)
Co-Director of Dialact, Emma Kernahan is a short fiction and comedy writer based in Stroud, Gloucestershire. With a background in support work, her writing focuses on the realities of life in rural communities, as well as reflecting her love of local history and folklore.
Emma’s work has been published in The Independent, Ellipsis, The Vision Project, Stroud Short Stories, The F Word, Yorkshire Bylines, and in McSweeney’s. She won the Gloucestershire Writers Network Prose Prize 2018, the Funny Pearls Short Story Competition 2019 and was shortlisted for the Bath Flash Fiction Award 2019.
‘Lions’ was nominated by the New Flash Fiction Review for Best Microfiction 2020, and ‘Milk Teeth’ was listed in the BIFFY 50 - Best British and Irish Flash Fiction.
Since the start of the pandemic she has also written regular updates for the Stroud Association of Mythical Entities, some of which can be found in Glos Mythos (published by Dialect Press).
Alice Willitts is the editor of DIRT, our ecopoetry imprint.
Alice is a writer, editor and plantswoman from Cambridge. She is the author of Think Thing: an ecopoetry practice,(Elephant Press, 2021), With Love, (Live Canon, 2020) and Dear, (Magma, 2019). She graduated with Distinction from the Creative Writing Poetry MA at UEA in 2018. She was shortlisted for the Ivan Juritz Prize 2018 for the p0_EM experiment in fractal poetics. She runs the #57 Poetry Collective in Cambridge and is collecting rebel stories in the climate emergency for Channel Mag. Co-editor Magma 78: Collaborations issue (Nov 2020).
In gardening, she makes playful gardens for clients who love plants and transforms public spaces into wild and wonderful playgrounds. She is a co-founder of On The Verge Cambridge dedicated to increasing plants for pollinators in the city. River Cam Erasure is a new poetry project raising awareness about damage to the Cam's chalk stream ecosystem.
Advisory Group
In January 2021, Dialect established an informal advisory group to gently steer the development of the organisation. The group members bring a huge amount of experience as writers themselves, but also as publishers, critics and educators.
Philip Rush
Philip Rush was born and grew up in Middlesex and London. He taught English in Gloucestershire schools for forty years. He has been running an independent poetry press, Yew Tree Press, for several years now and hosts regular poetry events at the Museum in the Park. He endorses poems which combine the surface appeal of well-composed prose with he meditative qualities of a period of silence or of a walk through familiar countryside.
Marvin Thompson
Marvin Thompson was born in London to Jamaican parents and now lives in south Wales. His debut collection, Road Trip (Peepal Tree Press, March 2020), is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. In 2019, his magical realist war poem was submitted by Long Poem Magazine for the 2019 Forward Prize for Best Poem.Thompson was selected by Nine Arches Press for the Primers 2 mentoring scheme. Reviewers of the anthology described his work as ‘a virtuoso performance.’
Mel Golding
Melanie Golding is a writer and musician/composer with a background in community arts and education. Her first novel, Little Darlings, was published worldwide in May 2019 and has been optioned for film. She currently runs community choir Sing Your Heart Out Stroud, creates music and stories for Cotswold-based early years arts collective Playcircle, is studying for a PhD in Creative Writing and working on her next novel, cited for publication later in 2021.
Felicity Everett
Felicity Everett is a writer whose work focuses on themes of class, friendship and belonging. She grew up in Manchester, lived, worked and raised her family of four in London. In 2014 she returned from a four-year spell in Melbourne. Australia, to live in Stroud, Gloucestershire. Felicity’s early career was in children’s publishing. She published her debut adult novel, The Story of Us in 2011. Since then she has published two more, The People at Number 9 (2017) and The Move, (2020), both with HQ, an imprint of Harper Collins.
Caroline Sanderson
Caroline Sanderson is a writer and books journalist based in the Cotswolds. She is Associate Editor of The Bookseller, and the editor of ALCS News, the monthly newsletter of the Authors’ Licensing & Collecting Society, for whom she also hosts a podcast, Authors’ Matters.
Caroline is Artistic Director of Stroud Book Festival, and an Associate Fellow of the Royal Literary Fund. She regularly interviews authors about their books on page, screen and stage, and is also the author of five non-fiction books of her own.