An Ode to Works in Progress
review written by Ria Kealey // images provided by Ella Monnerat & Gut Feeling Collective
“Allow me to start at the end, around the edges, and work my way back,” begins An Ode to Works in Progress, the newly-released anthology of Gut Feeling Collective. In Ella Monnerat’s ‘Letter From the Editor’ they explain the organic origin of the collection, spawned from the series of writers’ workshops they have been running with co-editor Bella Aleksandrova in London for the past year. Collections of friends, peers and strangers gather fortnightly to workshop their writing, the only limit being the word count.
The freedom of form and theme inherent in Gut Feeling translates wonderfully to print. Ode is a welcome anomaly in the world of publishing – a collection committed to the nondeclarative is unusual, circumventing the usual pressure of perfection by simply publishing work as it exists at the time. So often the anxiety of future possibilities for work interferes with actually getting it out there – what if I come up with that perfect last line, or want to cut that section, or find a better title, after it’s already published? In Gut Feeling, you can be at ease. Yes, this is a published collection, yes, you’ve committed to a permanent rendition of this work, but all under the delightfully freeing title of “An Ode to Works in Progress”. In Holy Week, Ella Monnerat writes,“I was trying to say something before, but I am saying something else now.” Ode maintains the possibility, even probability, of wanting to say something else.
“Allow me to start at the end, around the edges, and work my way back…”
Some of the pieces end abruptly, or meander. Most are quite brief, only a page or two. There are throughlines of desire and home, the complexities of tenderness and grief in families, bright splashes of bedrooms and streetscapes, all meticulously indexed by Ella Monnerat. The index itself feels like a closing poem, a love letter to the careful attention of the editorial process, and I found myself unexpectedly moved by it. The entries range from “The Front Bottoms” (mentioned once) to “somatic perception and corporeality,” (twelve entries), crossing everything from “blood” to “Edwardian era” to “home”, “public transport”, “medical conditions”, “migration”, “tattoos” and “love” (thirty-five entries) in the process.
“Memory” can be found twenty-three times in the collection, of which Bella Aleksandrova’s poem I Ran out of Manor House… is a stunning, deceptively simple example: “Yes, there is honesty / in sadness sometimes. / Recalling memories / in bed and then / recalling / the recalling.” There is consistent attention to memory throughout the collection – recounting and being failed by it, rewriting it, living in it as a consequence of both nostalgia and trauma. Bodies and their messy attempts at communication also step across most of the work. Ella Monnerat in particular seems equal parts haunted and energised by the limits of language, of understanding and perception. They pay close attention to bodies, and to the spaces they occupy – most literally in In his room (“The rooms I remember most are the ones where I have spent the least amount of time”), but also in Blue, a scattered account of family medical emergency, gender, and language, split into four scenes. Their work shines with a sardonic lyricism: “A crash course in affect theory: fuck someone, then go to the dentist, then get a tattoo. Do it all in less than eight hours, see how you move according to each turn.” Owen Brakspear too wanders through the rooms of embodiment, memory and language in the present housing crisis, or, the house of love after reading verity spott: “their hands all arrested there / between their six legs, hanging there in the light of so many / worlds; their feet, at that awful gradient / of contentment - unknowing, un- / knowing !”
“There is consistent attention to memory throughout the collection – recounting and being failed by it, rewriting it, living in it as a consequence of both nostalgia and trauma.”
Many of the works are formally experimental, or simply wonderfully strange. Ray Veselý’s How I learnt to stop worrying and love the bugs is a hilarious piece philosophising about the potential communism and internal world of the cockroaches that live in the narrator’s walls, braided with tender musings on purpose, labour and identity. Ella Monnerat’s Holy Week transcribes the sound of the poem being performed with a proliferation of unusual punctuation, struck-through and underlined text, and fragmentation.
Charlie Hawksfield’s Tofu Candelabra is a surreal piece of flash fiction in which human hair is at turns a failed endeavour, a waste product, an ingredient in cupcakes made by a psychedelic medicine researcher, and part of an eviction letter. Barboring, whose work sparkles with unexpected imagery, seduces a “giant red but so very cute spider” who eats him in how i did not go to sex workers meeting: “no surprises; she licked me till i find my legs no more, no tiny bone all sapped; i rested in her belly so hairy and so rumbling, it reminded me Divine/previous life, when i was jonah, 3 days i’ve spent in whale’s belly - such a good vacation - are over”.
There is also a selection of glittering reflective essays (I use “essays” loosely here) scattered throughout the book. On invalidism and yarns by Elizabeth Bailey is a thoughtful reflection on embodiment and community through knitting in the wake of a knee injury. Lola Gillies-Creasey’s Trouthe and Honour, Freedom and Curteisye is a damning incision into the treatment of queer children in schools, returning again to the tangled mess of remembering: “The wound was my own; the wound still is my own. I thought I had outrun it. It outran me.” Simran Thapliyal’s Gutted: An Intergenerational account of Gut and Shame is a literal manifestation of the name “Gut Feeling Collective”, a heart-wrenching letter to her mother working through and around the bodily inheritance (/inhabitance) of intergenerational trauma. These works, alongside a myriad of others in the collection, illustrate the capacity for reflexive thinking, empathy, and connection clearly built into Gut Feeling Collective.
Ella Monnerat and Bella Aleksandrova have curated a collection that is as multifaceted as the writers whose work now lives in it. An Ode to Works in Progress is a testament to community, an archive of affect and memory, vibrancy and variation. I look forward to stumbling across these pieces elsewhere, wild, evolved – they are, after all, works in progress.
Gut Feeling operates as a feedback group for London-based writers. They host meetings every fortnight, and workshops periodically throughout the city. You can check them out on Instagram (@gutfeelingggg) if you are interested in learning more!