REVIEW: Writing Our Space: An LGBTQ+ Anthology

Writing Our Space: An LGBTQ+ Anthology

Writing Our Space is a marvellous anthology offering up to you, Dear Reader, an assured collection of layered experience, delicate, firm, contrasting in flavour, substance, perspective and taste. It’s like a Queer mille-feuille, sumptuously constructed so the contrasting tiers combine into something outweighing its constituent parts.  With sweet empathic poems, buoyant pose, stark essays of searing truth, all baked in with an editor’s eye for combinations which set off and foil the wider collection.

As an anthology it works, as a compendium of Queer voices, gently roaring of lived experience it’s a decadent delight.  Its foundation is intersectional, that of the true identity, of us, being each one to ourselves our own infinite variety, depending on where the light falls that day, brining one facet of our multitude of experiences into full furious focus.

The book jumps around, from pain to sardonic observation from the roar of full powered empowerment to a scream of a new life just born, it writhes with potential, but each segment is just a taste of that writer, the windows thrown wide open onto their world. Flung wide we breath in the winds of their change, sail across oceans of possibility in a few short paragraphs and have our hands held in the caverns of endless grief.

It’s many voices, each given equal space and time to capture and keep our interest.  It’s written by us, for us, with us, to us.  The very paper it’s printed on is Queer, it has to be, for it honours the intention of the ink to express personal gospels which contain enchantment.

Writing our Space with a foreword from editors Eilidh Akilade and Ross Tanner which explores the genesis of the book and the collection of short pieces elicited from a wide LGBTQI+ pool of writers is wonderful. I could gush about it, but I’ll say buy it, read it, enjoy it for yourself; then gush.

Supporting publishers which support our community is key to getting our own stories in print and reading about others who share our outlooks and hopes for a better future.

Out now  £7.99 from publisher Arkbound Press to order or for more info see their website here