Everlasting Yeahs
and unlearning binaries
Tactics Tomato
Here’s a slightly overlong and polemical pomodoro playlist should you like to listen to something while you read what follows. Thematically connected to the second part of the newsletter.
Everlasting Yeahs
As mentioned in the last edition, I was recently a part of a ‘speed networking’ session with students in Leeds University’s School of Performance & Cultural Industries and the School’s Industry Advisory Group.
I was asked two questions that stuck with me. One student wanted to know how I handled rejection. My answer probably sounded like “Feel sad or pissed off, maybe have a little swear for 10 minutes, then move on. The right thing will come along soon.” There may even be readers who have, in a moment of madness, turned me down for something, but I promise I don’t hold a grudge. Often.
More seriously, I think there is always something to bear in mind about fit and what you can learn, especially when you pay attention to patterns. But often it is best just to move on the next opportunity or go for a walk. This is a lesson I learnt very early sending out terrible poems to magazines, back in the days of the Stamped Addressed Envelope. “Oh good, I sent myself some rubbish poems!” I would exclaim seeing my familiar handwriting plop back through the letter box…
An even more interesting question was the follow up another student asked: “What have been the most important ‘yeses’ you’ve had in your career?”
This is, of course, a kind of ‘Desert Island Discs’ question, so my mind always goes simultaneously blank, wordless, and then overflows with too many possible choices. But a couple of pictures and people pop into my head…
I think of the late Paul Donnelly, a poet and magazine editor from Southport who I had got to know (by letter, not in person) when I was publishing my poetry magazine Scratch. Paul was a very interesting but mainly unknown poet – I later published a book by him as well as featuring him often in the magazine – and also an adult education tutor in a high security prison. I was still working as a head chef in a vegetarian restaurant, but feeling the urge to do more with my writing.
So I could gain some experience, Paul invited me to do my first ever writing workshop – in the prison. This is – I now understand - a mad, bad and dangerous way to start, but I did it, enjoyed it despite the terror, and used it to talk myself into some workshops for young people, and then (eventually) into the next scene.
(I was later an official Writer In Residence in two prisons, but it didn’t suit me and I wasn’t very good at it. I found it stressful, all-consuming without ever feeling I’d got beneath the surface, and in juggling freelance life at the time I made myself ill. I’d like to think I’d be better now but I’m not sure. Some yeses are not what they at first seem: I’ve a hatful of those but that’s a different newsletter theme.)
That next scene, the next big yes, was from the interview panel who gave me my first proper job in the arts, as Literature Development Worker for Cleveland Arts (now known as Tees Valley Arts). [Young people: ask me to parse the very 20th Century phrase Literature Development Worker for you one day…] One of them had greeted me with “Ah, you’re the chef!” which had not filled me with hope. The other candidates (it was one of those awkward processes where you meet each other) were all really experienced writers and activists. I had books by at least two of them.
And yet somehow I was given the job, which was the start of what Walter Jackson would call my uphill climb to the bottom, as well as the reason we moved to our house in Eaglescliffe 32 years ago. It really was a life-changing yes. I have a very cinematic memory of running through the tight streets of the Groves in York to tell my wife, who was out walking our two year-old in his buggy. We upped sticks and moved without a second thought.
Both of these fall into two related categories of Yes: the Potential Yes and the Opening the Door Yes. Such yeses are the very opposite in their spirit of some of the rejections I’ve had. [Writes something blunt about several universities and a few people then deletes it.]
Such yeses don’t come from everyone. Some people wonder why you should go with the potential you see in someone when you can have someone or something proven. Some don’t see the potential in people who don’t look or sound like the people they know. Others don’t see why they should open the door for someone who might need that opportunity or support, as I did. They often live with the mistaken belief no one ever opened a door for them.
If you have a good run, which I’ve had, you get enough yeses amongst a lot of rejections to make a life. But those two early ones were especially significant as votes of confidence and open doors. These days I find the most welcome yeses are still votes of confidence in my potential to come up with an interesting and useful way of looking at something, or to help others think about things. Those are the yeses I urged those students to look for.
There are two other things that question made me think about. The yeses I’ve described came about in situations where I had put myself out there, slightly in ignorance of the ‘rules’. I had done this not because I knew how things worked but precisely because I didn’t. If my family background had given me any insight into literature, publishing or the arts, I might have been put off. Call it naivety, ignorance or wilful blindness but I knew so little I didn’t even realise I might be excluded. (I could maybe work this up into the Autodidact’s Catch 22.) My mum (who knew nothing of the cultural world) and Jean-Paul Sartre had given me the idea I was as good as anyone else, like anyone else was. I still get the odd bruised forehead from thinking this, but that’s not the end of the world. My point here is: you will not get a yes if you do not ask the question. Do not let the data deter you.
Finally, those yeses were an example to me, a challenge that I’ve done my best to live up to. Open the door. Hold the door open. Blow the bloody doors off and let people wander in. Don’t be a gatekeeper or a bouncer. Say: your name’s not down and you are coming in. Say yes to people who ask for support. Mentor. Share. Give your space away. Take risks with your yeses. Connect - collaborate - multiply.
I’ll say it again: share. That position and power, that expertise, that job title, that rep: it was never only yours in the first place.
Beyond: Into Ambiguity
It’s been a while since I wrote here and there’s been a lot of funny stuff going down in beyond the arts, in the world. I’ve run out of time/space to enumerate all the ways the world is falling short, but here are two open letters that illustrate what I mean.
1. An open letter to the Equality and Human Rights Commission from the Culture Sector, April 2025 : in response to the guidance following the Supreme Court’s recent ruling on sex-based definitions, with massive negative knock-on effects for the rights of trans and non-binary people. (If you think it’s time now for trans and non-binary people to have fewer human rights, please feel free to hit the unsubscribe button.)
2. An Open letter against Access to Work reforms. The letter warns of devasting losses in the UK cultural sector if disabled people are less able to work – as experienced by Jess Thom, Tourettes Hero, who has already had to stop work due to a reduction in support. I remember hearing about the challenges of Access to Work when researching disabled people’s involvement in the cultural sector for Arts Council England, with EW Group, back in 2017. It simply can’t make sense - economic, cultural, human - to turn the clock back even further.
What so many of the politically and socially regressive arguments – from those to Trumpism to the Reform agenda on migration, and much else – share is a kind of nostalgia for binary simplicity. It’s been a truism of leadership in the VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity) era that leaders need to be comfortable with ambiguity. It’s clear that a lot of people simply don’t want to be: it’s confusing, exhausting and frustrating for them. They’d rather sort things into good/bad, black/white, true/false etc.
“There’s men and there’s women and that’s that, simple, couldn’t be otherwise, never has been” is now apparently not the position of someone baffled by modes of being unfamiliar to them, but of the Supreme Court. But it’s as simplistically mistaken as those that said “It’s Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve” in the days of Clause 28 or resistance to gay marriage. This aversion to complexity is not a right/left political distinction either: there are plenty of people on all parts of the spectrum who are reluctant or unable to let go of the binary sorting hat.
One of the quieter poems in my last collection addresses these evolution of identities, sexualities and genders in a deliberately slant fashion, so I’ll end with that, to give a different not. A different person might have made something more polemical, and some readers might prefer something more obviously assertive, - “Unlearn your binaries!” - but the openness of it points I hope more to the culture of passionate possibilities I believe the world is open to, or to being comfortable not fully understanding everything. We may have to fight to keep it so, though.
They talk only about last night, what they did and
set free from the old grammar of he said she said the words float, one minute secure in their antique suggestions, the next replete only with possibility. A finger traced a name on a thigh, but whose? This is evolution in action, something invisible until motion-captured, sped-up. We should enjoy the feeling. Lean into it. We do not have to specify everything. Keep up. Calm down. You might feel lost but the raw/cooked asymmetries will not work as we move through this next passage of time. I could say more, but I have finally caught on: exegesis is a fingerprint, our only hope the unknown, unlearnt, enamoured.