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Calque Ideas provides an opportunity for writers to think aloud, using their own experiences and knowledge to approach topics in an accessible and attractive way.
Our first three pamphlets, in a perfect gift bundle.
ONE: New Worlds, New Stories, or Can Science Fiction Really Save the World, by Helen Marshall
Helen Marshall’s essay investigates the potential to a writer of immersive worldbuilding, and the ways in which science fictional methods present a series of sometimes unposed and often unanswered questions about our own assumptions. If we, as readers and writers, are to turn literary worldbuilding into something more than a set of black v. white
decisions, a picture of an environment in which continuity is all, and develop it into a useful tool for finding out what we don’t know, we will need to learn to embrace radical uncertainty.
TWO: Within the Magic Circle of an Alien Will. Dreams, archetypes, the unconscious, and creative practice, by Liliana Cârstea & Timothy Jarvis
Liliana Carstea and Timothy J. Jarvis make the case for a literature of constraint, finding that ritual and the external organisation of any writing environment open new spaces for the discoveries writers may not yet know they are going to make. Blending personal history and a range of reference that runs from Jungian archetype to Raymond Roussel and the Oulipo, the two authors gesture to the ways in which a text can serve as a map of the unconscious that is created by our passage through it.
THREE: Poems Are Toys (And Toys Are Good for You), by Jon Stone
Jon Stone sets about to try to get us to do things with poems, rather than further the widespread idea that a poem is a statement—heart-rending, striking, overwhelming—of something relatable made by a particular individual. In a refreshing turn to the idea of poem as object, Stone argues that if we can only start thinking of a poem as something to play with, a device which holds no single meaning, but which instead is activated by our engagement with it, then many of the entrenched positions readers and practitioners espouse will be shown for the coercive expressions they are.
FOUR: Making Nothing Happen: On Poetry and Translation as Tools for Resistance
James Womack, in this brief essay addresses the idea of poetic activism, and poetry as activism. Womack discusses some of their experiences as a poet on the edge of various political groups, charged with using poetry to change people's minds or to highlight various kinds of injustice. The conclusions they come to are that we need to think of poetry less as a tool for effecting actual change in the world, but rather a complement to determined and focussed political action.
