Newborn

Live at Bradford Literature Festival 4 July 2026 Bootleg

I do love being with audiences and not performing, but sharing, encouraging, being alive through literature in the moment, and standing with my ancestors at my shoulder.

Dear Reader

Last weekend at Bradford Lit Fest I took to the stage to share this crackling set of stories, new work and older pieces. I hope you might enjoy it while out for a walk, or while driving or travelling. For those of you tracking that I’m writing new things, there are a few surprises in here for you, as some of this material gets its first ever airing, and is likely to change as I go on with the new work. So enjoy this bootleg from the road. I do love being with audiences and not performing, but sharing, encouraging, being alive through literature in the moment, and standing with my ancestors at my shoulder. Listen as you listen, and you can hear their breath in my own.

I’m finding this time very interesting as I reclaim my creative spirit and author’s work with this sacred and ancestral urging on. I find them conversing with me in my meditations, of course, but also through so much art and inference. And being newborn, though having lived many lives, I find even now the questions of how to share this work, allow readers in, find like souls to talk to, and maybe create events and discussions with. The work has its own desire to connect, and that is something not pushed by ego, social media, or even platforms such as this. Being in front of a number of festival audiences this year is showing me something I don’t have a name for yet between author, text and the inner world of the reader/listener. I’ll say more if I ever find a word for it.

The writing now is slow. It keeps coming, even working two jobs to live, it keeps coming and asks me to sit and wait, to travel, and not to share too soon. I don’t feel I’m sharing this recording too soon, it seems like just the right time. I generally turn down requests to be interviewed or be on podcasts these days, as I feel we’ve slipped into art only being used for extraction capital a lot of the time, and I am an artist and author, and we do not have to accept ‘the way it is’. And yet there’s an urging to find a way to be part of a world in which the new is not what wins prizes, or is hyped and aligned with the extractive narrative, but rather is part of building something true within the concrete reality, something more like a wild, beautiful garden.

Love
John