Dialect Writers Collective

Dialect HQ huddle at St Andrew's Harbour 🤎🧡💛 we've had such a blast at @stanzapoetry and we are *rinsed* in all the best ways. More soon. . . . 📸 @hlcopley 🙏😘

Hello, hey, hi! New around here? We thought it was time to say a little more about what we do… MEMBERSHIP-WORKSHOPS - COURSES – MENTORING-PUBLISHING 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 writers opportunities to share their work. 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. We are Emma and Juliette and we (at least try our best to!) run Dialect. 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 (Dialect Press, 2023). Find her on insta at @crappyliving Continued in comments ... 📸 @carmelkingphoto

GROW 🌱 hey emerging writers residing in rural, edgeland type spaces! If you're looking for some nurturing support to help you grow your writing, get unstuck and enrich your creativity, then our scheme could well be for you. Applications are open now until 30th September 2024 at midnight 🫎🌼🪺 #mentoring #amwriting #creativewriting #creativepractice #creativity #writers #writinglife

In our Reading for Writers group last week we discussed the differences and similarities of flash fiction and prose poems... FF as comic anecdote that overshoots the punch line? PP as a tautnessof intellectual enquiry? Genres with oxymorons for names? We enjoyed disagreeing with each other very much 🌟 Anne Carson unanimously loved 😍

Forest people! 🌳 our words in the woods retreat yesterday 🍃 "Wonderful day of writing staring at fires and the tops of trees and talking to likeminded souls in a beautiful nourishing setting thank you 🙏🏻 ❤️‍🔥" ~ Kate

@chapelsofrest what a great setting for our mini writing retreat today 🌳 novels were progressed, short stories finished, knotty plot knots untied 💚 plus, amazing views, watching all the weather roll in and out across the Severn Vale 🌬

DOBUNNI POETRY FESTIVAL 16–17 October 2026. Hosted by Gloucestershire Poetry Society & Dialect Writers Collective. We’re pleased to announce the dates of our first poetry festival! And what a line up we’ve got in store. Stroud is a town rich in creativity, but it has never had a poetry festival of its own. In a place known for its independent spirit, its artistic communities across disciplines, and its deep connection to landscape and radical thought, this absence is striking. The Dobunni Poetry Festival 2026 aims to change that, establishing Stroud’s first dedicated poetry festival and creating a cultural home for writers, readers, and audiences of all ages, supported by our festival bookseller Borderless Books. By naming the festival after the Dobunni, we’re honouring a lineage of creativity, resilience, and connection to place. It signals that this is a festival grown from the ground up - shaped by the people who live and work here, attentive to the rural territory that has always held stories, and committed to celebrating the voices that rise from it today. The festival will run across two days, 16–17 October 2026, bringing together headline poets of national standing with the exceptional talent already thriving in the region, platforming poets and publishers from the west / south west. For now, kindly save the date in your diaries – tickets will be on sale very soon. We hope to see you in October! #poetryfestival #dobunnipoetryfestival #stroud #cotswolds #gloucestershire LINE UP Pascale Petit Alison Brackenbury Ambient Receiver Zoe Brooks Claire Carrol Chaka Jason Conway Hannah Copley Nick Degg Kym Deyn Karen Downs-Barton Suyin du Bois Angela France Lucy Holme Adam Horovitz Alun Hughes Andrew Hykel Mears Aaron Kent Living Matter JLM Morton Pey Oh Alycia Pirmohamed Kate Potts Philip Rush Martha Sprackland Ellora Sutton Alice Willitts Jonny Fluffypunk & Uta Balduf x Art Lab Slight afterparty with Lost Mythos + special guests

Poetry Competition announcement! The first ever DIRT Plantable Poetry Competition is happening in June. “Honestly, DIRT’s one of the most magical things to be a part of, just do it!” says Hannah Copley who wrote ‘Hertz’ with Alycia Pirmohamed. We’re inviting poets who want to experience writing in collaboration to submit work for our first DIRT plantable poetry competition pamphlet. Links on the competition page will add competition dates in your calendar NOW so you can be reminded when submissions open on June 1st and close on June 14th! Link in bio. .uk/dirt/dirtcomp26

DIRT has been shortlisted for the Michael Marks Publisher Award, and now you have the opportunity to become a DIRT poet with our first poetry competition. We’re inviting poets who want to experience writing in collaboration with another poet to submit work for our first DIRT COMPETITION plantable poetry pamphlet. Judged by DIRT editor and experienced collaborative poet @poetalicewillitts , and guest editor and Foyle Young poet @_joewright._ . Previous DIRT poets include Clare Pollard paired with Anglia Ruskin student Freya Sacksen, and Alycia Pirmohamed paired with Hannah Copley. Link in bio. Warmest thanks to the Michael Marks judges for spotlighting DIRT @karenmccarthywoolf , @tristramwords and Eleanor Dickens. #MichaelMarksAward #Shortlisted #DIRTPlantablePoetry

If your poems are gathering in little constellations // if you can feel a pamphlet forming but don’t know how to shape it // this workshop with JLM Morton is the place you get it together, get organised, and get it done! Whether you’re sitting on a messy stack of drafts or a nearly-there manuscript, this is a day for clarity, momentum, and that satisfying click into place when the work suddenly makes sense when put together. Best words. Best order - as Coleridge (almost) said. We’ve got a great venue for this one at the deconsecrated Chapels of Rest on Bisley Road, Stroud @chapelsofrest , Friday 15th May, 10am – 4pm. Bring your own lunch and enjoy panoramic views across the valleys and over towards the Severn vale! Your tutor for the day is JLM Morton, an award-winning poet and emerging publisher whose commissions and projects have recently been selected for the Poetry Book Society Summer Pamphlet Choice and shortlisted for the Michael Marks Awards. Safe pair of hands. 🔗🔗🔗 in biome to book or go to >>> .uk/coursesworkshops/get-it-together-making-a-poetry-pamphlet #poetryworkshop #poetrypamphlet

Lots of workshops, courses and retreats coming up at Dialect - making a poetry pamphlet, life writing, woodland day retreat, performance skills and more online, in Stroud, Nottingham, Cirencester, France. Find out more 👇🏽👇🏽👇🏽 /p/coming-up . #amwriting #writingcommunity

Our Earth-positive pamphlets were recently shortlisted for the Michael Marks Publisher Award. Hurray! DIRT’s ambition is to shift the whole window of expectation in poetry book production to publications that are fully aligned with today’s ecological urgency. Earth-positive publishing started here! Could you be the next DIRT poet? Have a look at our competition page. Link in bio. Huge thank you to the judges, Michael Marks Award and @wordsworthgrasmere @britishschoolatathens @britishlibrary @the.tls #MichaelMarksAward #Shortlisted #DIRTPlantablePoetry