We’ll Meet You There

3 Mar

A collaborative interview with Ilse Pedler, Hilary Watson & Alice Willitts

For poets Alice Willitts, Hilary Watson and Ilse Pedler, 2024 proved to be something of a turning point. They had all become disillusioned with trends in eco-poetry for a seemingly endless cataloguing of loss and destruction while simultaneously shaming humans. So along with writers Katherine Stansfield and Laura Baggaley, they spent much of the year immersed in the study of thrutopia, working their way through Manda Scott’s ‘Thrutopia Masterclass’ for writers, which covered topics such as regenerative agriculture and landscape adaptation, regenerative cities and architectural solutions for climate change, economic models and circular economies, power production of the future, community action groups and initiatives and much much more. They’ve been inventing, repurposing and retrofitting poetic forms to uncover expressions for this new way of looking at the world. What do we need poetry to be in our time of era-defining shifts in world-order? Can we fall in love with the future again and how could an attitude of positive futurism translate into poetry?

To see how they’ve answered these and other questions, you can pre-order their co-authored poetry book, We’ll Meet You There, which Dialect Press is delighted to be publishing in March 2026.

What is Thrutopia?

Ilse: Thrutopia is a relatively new term coined by Professor Rupert Read to describe writing that guides us through the climate emergency to a future that is sustainable and achievable. So much of what is written about the environment at the moment is either dystopian or utopian, neither of which is always helpful, as you can find yourself flipping between despair and something that seems unreachable. Through-topias are narratives of how to navigate the route from where we are now, to where we may be in years to come.

Hilary: We realised that what we needed to write was an alternative but achievable society, one that is sustainable, non-exploitative, working in a balanced way with the environment and above all, it was so important to create a longing and desire for that possible future.

Alice: The poems we’re writing treat unpredictability and turbulence as foundational to the times that we’re living in and so they don’t dwell in that fear, instead they focus on equally possible alternative futures. Thru-to-poems are more than ‘hopeful’ or ‘positive’, they’re poems of intention and longing, that could change our belief in ourselves as people who can make a future for our species on Earth, re-integrated with the web of life.

Ilse: One quote we really liked was from Jim Dator, an American futurologist, who said ‘any useful statement about the future should at first seem ridiculous’. The perverse kind of logic of this really rang true.

Alice: So if what we write seems ridiculous now, it could mean we’re on the right path. Let’s imagine poems are culture’s detritivores, breaking down the dead matter falling from the dying systems and returning the nutrients to people as stories to sustain new kinds of spaces, systems and narratives of possibility.

Hilary: Right, because death is part of a cycle, not an end… you just need to look at fungi to see that at work.

How has this work changed your writing?

Ilse: We’ve been thinking a lot about the role poetry has in society, how poetic forms have evolved over time and how they can evolve further using Thrutopian principles.

Hilary: We wanted to think about salvage, recycling, retrofitting and repurposing existing forms, facts and language, into new forms. We’ve also invented completely new forms for example the duplex crown (taking inspiration from sonnet crowns and Jericho Brown’s duplex).

Alice: The change in my writing has been radical. I can see now that my last collection, Kiss My Earth, was me writing my way out of the despair of being a long-term eco-activist and seeing that we were losing the chance of a liveable future. I’m a mother and the pain of my own helplessness under the crushing geo-political failure to act responsibly is unbearably frustrating. To turn those feelings of rage and love into poetry that charts a different outcome has become essential to me. It’s true that I seem to be an incurable optimist but that doesn’t mean I'm naive, far from it. I know what we’re capable of as a species and I decided to orient myself deliberately, doggedly and with all my creative powers to write ‘for’ the kind of humanity I believe to be possible. Poetry is deep, real-world resourcing as far as I’m concerned. I’ve also discovered I have some loud-arse ‘inner pulpit energy’ which has amused us all greatly.

Hilary: There’s also been a shift in daily practices wider than the writing – because these ways of thinking offer suggestions to subtle changes. Now I do daily things like garden or shop, in ways that align with regenerative practices. Transition town concepts have been really interesting and very empowering.

Ilse: I agree, I looked online to find my nearest transition town and found it was my local town, Kendal, and I now volunteer at the Food Larder there!

How was the process of collaboration for you all?

Ilse: It was so supportive and generous. Also what emerged was how our individual voices blend together so well in the collection. We each have our own strengths but also a collective voice. Alice is the stubborn optimist among us and her poems are so full of imagining and joy and hope. Every time I read ‘In the heart of this’ I want to shout ‘yes!’ at the end. I’m, rather predictably as a veterinary surgeon, the healer in the group wanting to explore ways we can heal the planet with poems like ‘Remedies for the Earth I’ and ‘II’. Hilary has an eye on policy and activism and in her gorgeous set of poems ‘Feather Speech’, ‘&’ and ‘Avis Femina’ describes the campaign for swift bricks to be put into every new house built. She is also amazingly inventive having created a new constellation in her poem ‘Camelus Capitus’.

Hilary: It’s clear from Ilse’s full collection Auscultation that she absolutely loves playing with form, whereas I’ve not been so playful with new forms previously. But thinking about what forms could hold these new types of poems got me really into it, and Ilse and I were especially pushing each other towards new forms. I never thought I’d use a spare weekend to create a duplex crown, for example, but I’m delighted that I did.

Alice: Week in week out through that year of study, the three of us would exchange poems and push each other further, asking where our drafts were perpetuating old ideas and actively developing thrutopian elements to replace them. We had to map out what thrutopoetry meant for us and see how our poems matched up. It’s been hard, rewarding work.

What does the future hold for you?

Alice: One thing’s for sure, new narratives are needed urgently and thrutopia is part of a much wider movement turning towards building a compassionate, collaborative, peaceful world. We need this collective, cultural upswelling of diverse voices — stories, poems, lyrics and prayers are technologies that lead collective action across society. I want to teach this work as widely as I’m able. Thrutopia is where my poetry and activism can co-exist in a beguiling way.

Hilary: Yes, Thrutopian literature can rapidly imagine the multiplicity of scenarios ahead to model new ways of living and we can see which ideas stick. Changing the story about our future will change the future. This movement extends beyond art and literature and into ‘real lives’, in real places and can be adopted in all ways of thinking.

Ilse: On a practical level we’ve created a Thrutopian Substack magazine, Bending The Arc, with our fellow thrutopian writers Kath and Laura. It’s full of poetry, fiction, instructional tips for writing in a thrutopian way and ideas for positive action. Discovering thrutopia for me feels like being given a choice again.

Hilary: It is my belief that we will create the future we long for only because we are able to master the art of telling the most compelling stories. Stories that are delicious, irresistible, mesmerising. Stories that cultivate a deep, deep longing.

We’ll Meet You There is available for pre-order from https://www.dialect.org.uk/bookshop/p/well-meet-you-there-preorder

The online book launch will be on 19th March - 18.30-19.30, sign up here https://www.dialect.org.uk/events/dialect-press-launch-well-meet-you-there

Further reading

Manda Scott’s Thrutopian Masterclass

Bending The Arc magazine https://bendingthearcmagazine.substack.com