All the plants I have half-grown
A new pamphlet of ecopoetry with
Stewed Rhubarb Press, out on 11th March
My new pamphlet of eco-poems, All the plants I have half-grown, is out on 11th March 2024 with Stewed Rhubarb Press. This selection of ecopoetry begins with disconnection – from each other and our ecosystems – and reaches towards connection. Via goldfinches and skyscrapers, brambles and libations, compost and glitter, these poems feel along the sometimes strange and uncomfortable threads that link us to our ecologies – expanding the magic of queer kin-making across the borders of species.
“These poems have good rich soil under their fingernails. Speak to an intimate relationship with ecology, Linden McMahon is singing through the hard and rewarding work of growing a world of kinship, of reciprocity. With deep love and furious heartbreak, the lyrics here map out ways of knowing the world and each other that offer precious hope. There’s wide-eyed wonder here, but earthly knowledge too. The writing refuses cynicism and embraces a bodily experience of reality. Like all the best gardens, this pamphlet is full of flowers and thorns, full of rich scents and tangled roots, and is always growing towards the sun.”
– Harry Josephine Giles
“I have rarely read poems that try so honestly to enter into relationship with the non-human: plants, birds, fungi, land. McMahon’s poems are acts of connection, committed to imagining better. ‘The words link [us] to the lives that swirl around us’, knowing this work is tricksy and incomplete and doing it anyway. The poems are full of play and song and mourning: a mourning that is active, that goes out to plant and grow.”
– Miriam Nash
“The first thing All the plants I have half grown asked me to do was breathe. The book walks through gardens and forests and seasides, but always with its mind on the earth, the secret mycorrhizal networks thrumming under our feet. The pressures of the city, the demands of the built environment are always present, but these poems push back against their pressures, take their forms from the spaces between, like shoots between paving-stones. McMahon’s poems, particularly the quietly rhapsodic “Fairlight Glen”, insist that our bodies have roots, too, and learning to tend to them is the work of a lifetime.”
– Dave Coates
Read and listen now…
A selection of my writing, performance, and discussion
available online, mostly for free (full publication and
performance credits below)
Film: Speculative Fiction x Compost Mentis
I want to walk away
from ‘Speculative Fiction’
and have something to walk towards:
to make the stony spaces ours,
to learn to grow food
in the most unlikely places.
I want the soil back.
This short film is a collaboration with Compost Mentis, who turned my tribute to Ursula le Guin, Speculative Fiction, into a film-poem
Story: What the truth costs
My story What the truth costs is in Easter Road Press‘s Radical Intergenerational Honesty zine – it’s an intergenerational coming out story with a sprinkling of queer magic. The zine includes comics, poems and essays, and all proceeds from the zine go to Action for Trans Health Edinburgh.
Grandma smiled softly, and I couldn’t figure out if she knew what she was telling me, or if she was just remembering. The truth shone suddenly around her, though: a rich, buttery yellow glow. I wanted to tuck my truth more firmly away, shove it down in my pocket with the unworn badge, in case anyone could see it pouring out of me like that.
From ‘What the truth costs’
Podcast: I’m Socially Distancing With…
The Kite Trust interviewed me about poetry, nature, and gender euphoria on their lockdown podcast
Story and poems: Daring the city to fall into it
You can download my zine Daring the city to fall into it for free or by donation. It includes two poems and a short story about utopia, and I made it available as a small offering for the strange, historical times of the pandemic.
It suddenly started to feel like something was really cracking: the reality of how much everything was changing seeping through, grease through a paper bag getting more and more fragile.
That night the sky cleared, and as if in answer, split open: the Milky Way soaked its way across the horizon, rose until it was right above like a glowing mouth, daring the city to fall into it. Briar wandered into the garden, stood breathing it in until their neck cramped. Jaime found them lying in the cool grass with tears running down their sides of their face into the earth.
from ‘Daring the city to fall into it’
Anthology: We are a many-bodied singing thing
An anthology of speculative fiction and poetry inspired by endangered species and the people saving them. I edited and produced it as part of my work with Back From The Brink, and it’s free to download.
it’s my turn to speak now turn to
from ‘Knothole Moss Offers Directions to the Humans’, by Anna Kisby
knothole rotten bark low down
recall what you never knew even knee high
a moss eye
listen
Pamphlet: Hold Fast
As part of the Back from the Brink residency, I wrote poems that became part of events and installations alongside work from all the participants. I wrapped the residency up by bringing these together in a pamphlet, Hold Fast, which is free to download.
Collaborative zine: Connecting Words
Connecting Words is a fanzine for Bethnal Green, which came out of the Open Gardens Treasure Trail, commissioned by LADA and produced by Earthlings, a collaboration between me and Hari Byles. It includes poetry and stories from the project, as well as reflections on community collaboration and art.
I once read that the ground is like a parchment or interface for communication between the atmosphere, the earth and itsinhabitants. We (earthlings) inscribe it, and it constantly moves,
from ‘Mushroom’, by Hari Byles
erupts and throws things onto its surface, transcending its own boundaries as well as the made-up ones we draw onto it.
Poem: Love poem from heart to belly
Gutter published my love poem from heart to belly (which I blogged about here) in Gutter 14. They also included an online playlist to go with the issue, so you can have a listen.
Poem: Gold
Gold, along with an interview, was featured on the Indiefeed Performance Poetry channel. I would definitely recommend exploring the archives over there – there’s an amazing variety of poetry, along with an enormous store of great interviews about poetry and spoken word.
Publications
All my publications to date – from
literary journals to zines to
collective anthologies
All the plants I have half-grown, Stewed Rhubarb Press, 2024
We Are A Many-Bodied Singing Thing (editor), Back from the Brink, 2020
Hold Fast (pamphlet), Back From the Brink, 2020
Treasure In The History of Things (pamphlet and album), Stewed Rhubarb Press, 2012
One poem in Climbing Lightly Through Forests, Aqueduct Press, 2021
One poem for A Recipe of Me (commission), Ministry of Stories, 2020
Short story in Radical Intergenerational Honesty, Easter Road Press, 2020.
One poem in A Queer Anthology of Wilderness, Pilot Press, 2020
One poem in LossLit, 2019
Short story in The London Reader, 2019
One poem in Finished Creatures 1, 2019
One poem on Little Red Tarot, 2018
One poem in Shoreline of Infinity, 2018
One poem in Return Flight (commission), 2017
One poem as part of Poetry Treat (commission), 2016
One poem in Gutter 14, 2016
Three poems in Out There, ed. Zoe Strachan, Freight Books, 2014
Three poems in Flicker and Spark, ed. Regie Cabico and Brittany Fonte, Lowbrow Press, 2013
One poem in The List, ed. Kirsty Logan, 2013
One poem on Indiefeed, ed. Wess Mongo Jolley, 2013
One poem in Poems for Freedom, Freedom Press, 2013
Zines
You can buy these here!
Glitter – a single poem zine about queer ecologies and biodegrable glitter
Compost Mentis – a quarantine zine about soil care, with Compost Mentis
No Guilt in Pleasure – a zine about resisting capitalism by having a nice time
Lughnasadh – a single poem zine about grief, resilience, and seeds
Alter treego – a single poem zine about what I would be like if I was a tree
Pride – a single poem zine about queer family
Daring the city to fall into it – two poems and a short story about utopia
Earthlings – a fanzine for soil, with Hari Byles and others
Fat Kid Manifesto – a single poem zine about fat liberation
Speculative FIction – a single poem zine about imagining a better world
Collaborative anthologies
These are anthologies that I have co-produced with a variety of groups and communities – you can find out more about them here.
You Need to Have a Reason for Summoning Me – an anthology of fantasy fiction, Ministry of Stories, 2022
The Shadow Within and Other Stories – an anthology of Gothic fiction, Ministry of Stories, 2021
Blue Sparks Sizzling – an anthology of diary writing, Ministry of Stories, 2020
Connecting Words – a fanzine for Bethnal Green, with Hari Byles and others, Live Art Development Agency, 2019
Your Rabbit is Menacing the Neighbourhood , Meet Me At The Albany, 2019
Stories of Changing Lives Three, Royal Edinburgh Hospital Patients Council, 2017
The Gender Garden, LGBT Health and Wellbeing, 2016
Naked Among Thistles, with Ali Wren, Elephant Juice, 2014
Academic articles
McMahon, K (2019), Writing the Cards. Story Makers Dialogues [1], Carnegie School of Education, Leeds Beckett University.
McMahon, K (2019), Land as teacher: how connection with land, nature, and place can support creative writing pedagogy. Writing in Education [78], National Association of Writers in Education.
Performances
A selection of performances, including
my full length spoken word show, and
feature performances across the UK
I toured my full-length spoken word show, Fat Kid Running, in 2017-18:
EDINBURGH: 12th May 2017, Scottish Storytelling Centre, as part of Flint & Pitch Presents…
GLASGOW: 9th June 2017, Glad Cafe, as part of the Workers Theatre Weekender.
EDINBURGH: 13th June 2017, The Bakers Arms, as part of the LEAP Sports Festival Fortnight.
INVERNESS: 15th June 2017, Eden Court, as part of the LEAP Sports Festival Fortnight.
EDINBURGH: 28th July 2017, The Melting Pot, with LGBT Health and Wellbeing.
LONDON: 15th March 2018,, Camden People’s Theatre, as part of the Sprint Festival
LONDON: 4th June 2018, Camden People’s Theatre, as part of Itch Collective’s Skinned:Live Festival
I have performed across the UK – highlights from my feature performances include:
- Jazz Verse Jukebox, January 2019
- Come We Grow, December 2018
- Book launch for The Games, Harry Josephine Giles (Outspoken Press) – support, Sept 2018
- Below Stairs, May 2018
- Wilderness: New Queer Writing, May 2018
- Scarborough Poetry Workshop, March 2018
- Genderfuck Ball, Goldsmiths, Feb 2018
- Queer Theory, Dec 2017
- Other Voices, PBH Free Fringe, Aug 2012, 2013, 2014, 2016, 2017
- Stanza International Poetry Festival, March 2016 & 2017
- AntiSlam, Rally and Broad, Dec 2015
- Loud Poets, Dec 2015
- Forget What You Heard (About Spoken Word), Nov 2015
- Tricolour (National Library of Scotland), Sept 2015
- Eden Festival, July 2015
- Rally and Broad, Feb 2015
- East Kilbride Arts Centre, Feb 2015
- Project Naked, Jan 2015
- Edinburgh University Composers’ Orchestra (poetry soloist), Nov 2014
- Cummnock Music Festival, June 2014
- ACT! Festival for Social Change, Mar 2014
- TenRed, several dates 2012-2014
- Traverse Sessions, Oct 2013
- Dive, several dates 2013-2014
- Nozstock Festival (Herefordshire), July 2013
- Incite (London), June 2013
- Fail Better, May 2013
- Summerhall Festival Club, Aug 2012
- Leith Late, June 2012
Linden K McMahon 