Introducing our latest recruit!
Introducing DG Herring, our new associate editor and author of our first publication, ‘The Sheliand’.
David writes…
I have joined the editorial team at Dithering Chaps at a very exciting time for this fledgling indie publisher.
Last year, with Gena at the helm, we first published my own poem, ‘The Sheliand’. This was very much a suck-it-and-see and proof-of-principle affair, though, if I may say so myself, a rather stonking poem!
Then, we put out an inspirational collection by Simon Bowden. This created a light-bulb moment for us, where we suddenly saw Simon’s ‘Gifts of the Dark’ collection emerge from the much wider portfolio he had submitted. (We felt like Michelangelo visualising the Pietà in an unhewn block of marble at the Carrara quarry!)
This year, things have really picked up for us …
Anne Peterson charmed us with her bitter-sweet series of poems, ‘Going Home’, which traces Anne’s initial sense of dépaysement at moving to a country so different from her previous life and charts her growing familiarity with a warm-hearted people and their country rhythm.
Then, the name Dithering Chaps travelled to all four corners of the globe due to our involvement in running the Bournemouth Writing Festival’s ‘Lines in the Sand’ flash fiction and poetry competition. We received many hundreds of entries and it was a buzz to see writing from the USA, Australia, Saudi Arabia, Luxembourg, Korea and Azerbaijan… as well as from local writers here in Dorset.
Dithering Chaps was responsible for the first judging sift of competition entries and produced the long-list from which winners were chosen by our two named judges, Dr Natalie Scott and Charlotte Fodor.
STOP PRESS - we are proud to announce that we have now published the print version of our ‘Lines in the Sand’ anthology. You can buy it here...
For me personally, the judging sift process gave me the confidence that, like Gena, I have the eye and the poetic ear required to be a perceptive and sensitive reader of others’ work. At times, such was the quality of many entries, we felt like Ezra Pound discovering TS Eliot for the first time. (Sadly, like him, being an editor also means striking through pages of writing that just don’t work...)
As a result, I am honoured to call myself Associate Editor of Dithering Chaps.
It’s been a baptism of fire as my first job has been to receive ten-page samples from all forty ‘Lines in the Sand’ competition winners, one of whom will be published in their own chapbook later this year. I’ll be giving Gena a shortlist of the half a dozen writers I am most captivated by.
This is a difficult task given the quality of this pool of writers. Dithering Chaps don’t want to go down in history as the publisher who rejected the next James Joyce. Perhaps one of our key attributes will save us.
Lots of dithering…
David performed at Bourn Jammy (part of the Bournemouth Writing Festival’s 2024 offering) and has poems forthcoming this year in The Salzburg Review, Orbis and Stand Magazine.