Gaia Holmes

Fusions is a series of exclusive online masterclasses featuring short story writers who also write in other forms.

1: The Mermaid In The Bathtub with Gaia Holmes

“The carnivalesque stories [in ‘He Used To Do Dangerous Things’, by Gaia Holmes] stage vengeful fantasies, in which the dispossessed and victimised overturn repressive hierarchies through magical powers.

In some of the stories, though, this happens not so much through the intervention of the supernatural, but through a kind of mundane, everyday magic, where the utopian and the real overlap, if only momentarily.”- Jonathan Taylor in ‘Morning Star’, November 2024

In the first of our new Fusions series of masterclasses, award winning poet and short story writer, Gaia Holmes, will discuss the ideas and inspirations behind ‘He Used To Do Dangerous Things’, her debut collection of short fiction (Comma Press, 2024). She will talk about how it felt to live next door to a sea monster for six months, share tips and texts from some of her favourite authors and offer up some practical and inspirational writing prompts to help you to generate your own original works of fiction.

Please note: our classes are small, intimate and friendly. To book, follow the link below:

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/fusions-a-word-factory-masterclass-with-gaia-holmes-tickets-1777043959319

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Everyday Magic: a five-week creative writing course at King Cross Library, Halifax with Gaia Holmes

From the 23^rd of August to the 20^th of September

The American writer, Raymond Carver, said:

“It’s possible, in a poem or short story, to write about common-place things and objects using common-place but precise language, and to endow those things – a chair, a window, a curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman’s earring – with immense, even startling power.”

And Susan M. Pearce, professor of museum studies at the university of Leicester, says:

 “Objects can have about them a glow of significance, sending sparks of their own into the imagination of the beholder…” 

In this 5-week course with award winning writer, Gaia Holmes, we’ll look for the extraordinary in the ordinary, the magic in the mundane. We’ll explore the realms of ‘personal artefacts’ and be inspired by the stories that common-place objects have to tell.

Where: King Cross Library, 151 Haugh Shaw Rd, Halifax HX1 3BG

When: Saturday mornings, 10.30- 12.30 from the 23rd of August to the 20th of September

How much: 5 sessions= £50 (£35 concessions)- tea/coffee and delicious edible bits & bats provided. Booking advised.

For more information contact Gaia gaiaholmes@hotmail.co.uk

Tel: 0772 4620842

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I’m delighted to announce the publication of ‘He Used To Do Dangerous Things’, my debut collection of short fiction, from Comma Press.

“This collection deals with themes of environmental campaigning, homelessness and the cost-of-living crisis, told through brittle and precarious relationships and threaded together with magic realism and the haunting power of landscapes.” 

As well as the topics described above, this collection features a multitude of birds, several nuns, 3 power cuts, 1 (possible) murder, lots of eggs, lots of batteries, tortoises, octopuses, black dogs, morphine, gin, lemon cake, wine, blood, beautiful weeds, coercive control, liberation, caravans, kintsugi, origami, lies, Halifax, the Highlands, the ‘good dark’, and 40 references to potatoes in various forms.

And though they are fiction, most of these stories have blossomed from a seed of truth.

Here’s what’s written on the back of the book:

“A grieving woman tells her counsellor increasingly elaborate and contradictory accounts of the night her partner died…

A solitary pensioner, cut off from the world in the depths of lockdown, resorts to sitting in his apartment block’s meter room to watch the electricity gauges surge with life…

A travelling vending machine operator takes his goldfish with him on his long-haul journeys to alleviate its separation anxiety…

The characters in Gaia Holmes’ debut fiction collection adopt complex and ingenious mechanisms for processing a world that is at once too close and too far removed, needing to feel the presence of others, whilst also being overwhelmed by it. Whether it’s the trauma of the pandemic and its many isolations, or the chaotic, draining lives of loved ones or neighbours, these stories explore the ingenuity of people striving to rebuild themselves, fortify their defences and, most courageously, connect. 

Bringing with her the open-hearted lyricism, intense textures and inherent strangeness that set her poetry apart, Holmes arrives at the short story as the finished article: a master chronicler of 21st century Britain.”

If you’re local, you can purchase a copy of ‘He Used To Do Dangerous Things’ from The Book Case in Hebden Bridge https://bookcasehebden.wordpress.com/ or https://bookcornerhalifax.com/

or you can buy it directly from Comma Press online here: https://commapress.co.uk/books/he-used-to-do-dangerous-things

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I was very lucky to have been one of 9 poets involved in this wonderful film by Geoff Cox.

” ‘Tell It To The Trees’ is a collaborative project bringing together poetry, video, music and sound design. Commissioned poets wrote poems inspired by their visit to a small, three-acre woodland site at Scammonden, West Yorkshire, planted in winter 2005-6 by voluntary tree planting group, Colne Valley Tree Society. After their initial visit, the poets returned and were filmed performing their poems in the woodland.

Accompanying original music for a trio of alto flute (doubling piccolo), bass clarinet and viola was also recorded on site. The music is based on a dawn recording in the woodland of the lilting song of the willow warbler, a migratory bird that winters in sub-Saharan Africa, returning in spring to the young woodlands they prefer.

Though in some cases the poems’ relationship to the woodland is quite abstracted from it, tree planting, a slowly maturing young oak woodland and the mini bio-diverse world it is engendering, as well as the need for such places and spaces for ours’ and the planet’s well-being, underpin the project.”

Film and music by Geoffrey Cox

Music performed by Tracey Smurthwaite, Jennifer Moss and David Milsom

Music recordings by Alex Harker, assisted by Simon Connor

Part-funded by Arts Council England

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You do so well to keep up with my obsessions.

In the past you have brought me wooden owls, hand-made perches for my birds, niger seed, cuttle fish, sunflower hearts, mealworm, lavender, fine bone China frogs, Jay’s feathers, hag stones, sea urchins, wishing stones, mermaid’s purses, Kraken rum, Apostle spoons, water colour paints, chestnuts, quince, acorns, vine tomatoes and bamboo boxes full of light.

Today you bring me toast, tea and custard creams in bed, leave me with my books, go out and brave the briny lash of February by the sea, come back later with your pockets full of blue, for me, so much blue.

You tip it out onto the rug and it fills the room in our borrowed home with salt and waves and curlew song, and blue, so much blue, and you light the fire, pour us both a glass of wine,

and we sip, and we stare at, we study, this blue gift that now lies between us. And we try to determine its colour, this particular kind of blue.

And we talk about Orkney, how the darkness came without warning, the way we clumsily tangoed through my grief (which was the sore, raw, pulpy blue of a bruise) every night to the songs of Carlos Gardell in my father’s dusty workshop surrounded by bald, white, un-glazed vases and death masks and raku bowls and jars of pigments.

We talk about how, despite all the whiskey and the weeping, we almost remembered the dance in the morning, how, some nights we slow-danced together in our dreams.

We talk about how we kept missing the bright blue, electric green, flashing, pulsing, peep show of the Aurora Borealis because we were too tired, because I was too blue, because I needed to dream of other colours for a while.

We talk about the way we made a bed up on the floor of the damp caravan, angled the pillows so that we could see the sky before we slept. tried to rename the constellations to match our moods and drifted off with sharp, bright lines of stars glowing on our tongues.

We talk about that snowy dawn in May when  you dragged me down to the harbour in my pyjamas and wellies, to hear the seals singing, to see jellyfish, the colour of Turkish Delight, wobbling amongst the deep, green dulse on the strandline.

And you say this blue I’ve brought you is the colour of a robin’s egg.

And I say this blue you’ve brought me is the colour of contentment. If I’d known before, this is the kind of blue I’d have asked for.

Gaia Holmes

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‘Unloved Flowers’ is about resilience, bats, homelessness, justice and beautiful weeds. It is my contribution to ‘The Cuckoo Cage- New Origin Stories’, a recent anthology published by Comma Press.

“In this unique experiment, twelve authors have been tasked with resurrecting that tradition: to spawn a new generation of present-day British superheroes, willing to bring the fight back to British shores and to more progressive causes. From the dimension-jumping statue-toppler, to the shape-shifting single mum raiding supermarkets to stock local foodbanks… these figures offer unlikely new insights into shared, centuries-old political causes, and usher in a new league of proud, British (social justice) warriors…”

commapress.co.uk/books/the-cuckoo-cage

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