At a showcase this Wednesday, Northumbria undergrad and MA Creative Writing students will have excerpts from their prose, poetry and scripts performed by professional actors at Live Theatre. It should be a lovely event and a great opportunity for our writers! www.mynewsdesk.com/uk/northumbr...

55 BURGERS 55 FRIES

What are the unique things music can do to explore and evoke the past? Is writing a song set in 1985 any different from writing one set in the 19th century? Join Aurora Engine, Detroit Tourist Board and me to discuss songwriting and history on May 17th: www.eventbrite.com/e/songwriter...

[Gorbachev’s therapist]: Mr Gorbachev, tear down these walls!

Can’t even go to wizard school on your home island of the Earthsea archipelago anymore. Because of Roke

Rejected by the New Generation Thinkers scheme for the final year I was eligible, so pleased to announce that I’m now actually the mid-career establishment and my Thinking is already hegemonic so it’s fine actually :)

The Loneliness of the All-Staff Email

M. R. James-ass headline

Fun dinner party fact for the vegetarians in your life: Quorn is often assumed to be an English company but it was actually founded in Ireland in 1985, by Mike O’Protein

Bartleby the Rizzler

For sale: poetry library, never read

today's info that i came across & have no use for beyond a briefly satisfying spiritual ripple is that winona ryder's ringtone was, for a time, leonard cohen's "i'm your man"

[Tom Petty if he was a seagull]: Cause I’m woooorm… worm-charmin’

Leaving Gafcon in protest at this to start a new even smaller splinter group called IDGAFCON www.christiantoday.com/news/gafcon-...

Telling my cat she used to be a wolf. They don’t know different

Haha yes.. sickos..

The Libraro prize is a competition 'giving readers an active role in championing emerging talent.' My entry is THE YEAR'S DEEP MIDNIGHT: a literary mystery following a dropout from a Catholic seminary who solves a murder with the help of the elderly Graham Greene: app.libraro.com/manuscript/d...

For the last five years, I've been writing 'a memoir in Mountain Goats songs,' looking at every year in my life 1990-2020 through the lens of a song by @themountaingoats.bsky.social. That project comes to an end today with two final episodes, one for 2020 and an epilogue. Links for both below!

Delighted to be in the new issue of @popmusicjournal.bsky.social RIFFS with a piece on 'Jeffrey Lewis's Model of Art-Making: Between Amateur and Auteur,' looking at Lewis, Daniel Johnston, and the ways artists in lo-fi traditions position their own practice: riffsjournal.org/2026/02/12/r...

NEW ISSUE: Riffs 9.1: Pop! Art School Reunions Edited by Ed McKeon The pieces in this issues of Riffs reflect on the relationships between pop music, pop art, art school, and experimental music and performance. Available to read Open Access: riffsjournal.org/volume-9-iss...

2019 episode of my @themountaingoats.bsky.social now up! Two more to go - 2020 & and epilogue. Today's episode (which I'm not posting on a workday) is about a strong homemade edible, meeting the President of Ireland, and making the art you love your own. thirtyyearslater.substack.com/p/2019-up-th...

Today's episode of my @themountaingoats.bsky.social newsletter/podcast is about self-reference, expanding ambition, and being further along in your own timeline. Which is really sort of what it's all been about! It's 2018 and the song is 'Younger.' thirtyyearslater.substack.com/p/2018-younger

[Craig Finn voice:] He was always baked but never fried

Those horses running in a circle aren’t even original. That’s just zoeslop

Thanks to @andotherpoems.bsky.social for publishing this late last year - sharing in time for tomorrow’s hopefully less intense moon!

Does the Lionel Bart estate get royalties from all these ice cream trucks playing ‘Food Glorious Food’?

They kicked me out of culinary school. I’m persona non gratin

Imagining a cursed alternate reality where Jessie Buckley won 'I'd Do Anything' and got to play Nancy in 'Oliver!' on the West End, but it meant Jodie Prenger had to be Agnes in 'Hamnet'

[Serge Gainsbourg ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ voice]: Danny and Clive…

turns out if you put on a long black coat and walk into cupboard in a church, people will just tell you some pretty wild shit

Another episode of my @themountaingoats.bsky.social newsletter/podcast just went up, on one of my favourite tMG albums and one that marks a big sonic shift - as well as a new kind of self-reflection: thirtyyearslater.substack.com/p/2017-stenc...

[Craig David 7 Days voice]: Qui tollis peccata mundi,

Our next Songwriters in Conversation event, at Baba Yaga’s Loft, North Shields, will be on Feb 15th from 5pm with Gelfling and Nathy SG (Martha/Onsind) on the theme of love songs! Tickets here: www.eventbrite.com/e/1979524668...

Today's episode of my @themountaingoats.bsky.social podcast/newsletter is about work songs, desperation, and what an ageing wrestler can do when he can't see your way clear to a change in perspective. It's 2016 and the song is 'Blood Capsules.' thirtyyearslater.substack.com/p/2016-blood...

[Trump hearing about the Stars of Track and Field in his earpiece]: Beautiful people

[Fighting the craving, losing, cracking into a chocolate mint]: It’s after eight somewhere!

Handing back student work that’s been written by ChatGPT with a 0 followed by the comment “This essay will never stand in authentic wonder before the Beauty of God’s creation.”

They call it ambient music cause you can take an Ambien to th’ music

They put me in the rink, mama

New post on Now Here We Are 30 Years Later, my newsletter/podcast about @themountaingoats.bsky.social, taking a look at a song from one of my favourite tMG albums, 2015's 'Beat the Champ,' thru the lens of Roland Barthes' essay 'The World of Wrestling': thirtyyearslater.substack.com/p/2015-unmas...

4 Billionaires Crumble? I’d love to see it!

We had a great time on Sunday at Songwriters in Conversation: Folk Traditions, talking about the way ideas of community, impersonality, and using what you have to hand might feed into modern folk-inspired music. Here's Janice Burns at soundcheck, singing one of two beautiful unaccompanied ballads!

📣Come do a PhD at Northumbria! We've just announced this year's batch of full-fees scholarships: www.findaphd.com/phds/program... If you'd be interested in working with me on anything poetry, prose or songwriting-related, please get in touch to talk about your ideas so we can craft a strong proposal

This Sunday’s event previewed in NARC. magazine! Still time to get tickets… narcmagazine.com/preview-song...

Slowly but surely getting into the home stretch of my 30-year @themountaingoats.bsky.social newsletter/podcast. Today's post is about Ozzy Osbourne and the joy/shock of playing music around the world when you never expected to make it beyond Birmingham: thirtyyearslater.substack.com/p/2014-song-...

One week left to get tickets! www.eventbrite.com/e/songwriter...

If a soundcloud rapper can become mayor of New York City, perhaps the stage is set for a harsh noise President

Finally got around to The Secret History - I loved it for lots of reasons, not least the idea that one of the few viable paths open to you after a series of life-ruiningly bad decisions is to become a specialist in early modern literary studies