Jojo Tulloh writes about her journey to find the spring that sustained Hope Bourne, an artist and writer who lived alone in a caravan on Exmoor

Can local stories offer inspiration in unlikely places? Sarah Royston roams the byways of history and folklore, finding new ways to encounter ordinary landscapes.

Our guiding words for 2024 are Care, Hope and Disruption - and it's the first of these, care, that we are holding onto most tightly in this dark and decidedly chilly part of the year.

DIRT’s editor Alice Willitts introduces the Imaginarium, a new collaborative forward thinking project supported with a generous grant awarded by the Sustainable Futures Fund.

Hope is the thing with feathers, but the skies are dark and the world is heavy to hold … finding light pooled in the corners of our writing community.

(both laughing) otherwise known as artists Nick Grellier and Emily Lucas collaboratively interview themselves for their forthcoming publication with Dialect Press, enjambments.

Caroline Shaw and Katie Lloyd-Nunn introduce their new in-person poetry course for 2024.

Sarah Davy, who lives close to Hadrian’s Wall, reflects on the felling of the tree at Sycamore Gap and what it means for her creative practice, her community - and for hope in the age of climate crisis.

Rachel Goodman and Elvire Roberts on collaboration and the voice that arose from the space between them. Their pamphlet Knee to Knee will be published by Dialect Press in early 2024.

Read a feature on Dialect in the July 2023 issue of Good on Paper.

Cover art by (both laughing)

Where does personal grief end and ecological grief begin? How do we articulate and honour pain and unthinkable loss - for ourselves and for our world?

What lies beneath - artist and writer Deborah Cox on reading the landscape

Deborah Gray is selling the family home - she spends an evening reflecting on the past and burning old documents

Electra Rhodes continues her work on the London Library’s ‘Emerging Writers’ programme and finds herself with a problem every writer wants

DIRT’s editor, Alice Willitts, invites you to plant ‘Chapel,’ the poem she and JLM Morton co-authored to pilot DIRT.

Sometimes thoughts transform into an intoxicating urge to do something good in the world. Beware! This article may inspire a new creative project …

Sarah Davy works with fiction to explore climate change and its effect on rural communities.

Novelist and flash-fiction writer Helen MacDonald explores how the ability to write creatively can be lost following a bereavement.

Poet Kate Potts on finding the right form and process to explore imposter feelings.

‘… in the end, when the reflection is done for the moment and the imagery is resting, they are a call for action, for social justice, for equality and generosity, for nature and the sanctity of the natural world.’