Writing Wild Issue 17
And we are off...
Thank you!
Hello, wonderful wild ones - and welcome to those who have joined the Wild Women Writers’ Salons recently. As we enter a new month, I would like to extend a huge thank you to our wonderful authors, Dr Liz O'Riordan, Jean Hannah Edelstein, and Katy Bowser Hutson, who kicked off our new season of salons with such a beautiful, powerful conversation. This Tender Territory — illness, advocacy and creativity: writing with, through, and beyond breast cancer was such an honour to host — a tender space indeed, and full of wisdom, hope, insight, honesty, and community. Exactly what this space is made for. Thank you also to all who shared the space with us, for bringing your tenderness and open-hearted presence to the conversation.
(Paid subscribers can view the salon recording by clicking on the video link below)
If you have been impacted by breast cancer and would like to access support and information, you can start here:
Missed the salon?
If you missed it, don’t forget that if you upgrade to a paid subscription, you can access the recording below in this newsletter (and all recordings for the season as we go forward) — as well as extra author interviews, book recommendations and writing prompts! Plus, you will be helping to support the work behind the scenes that makes the salons happen.
Coming up in July…
Our next salon, The Way of Water, is on Thursday, July 31st, from 7:00 to 8:30 pm UK time (online and recorded for delayed viewing). We will be welcoming the wonderful Eiren Caffall, Jennifer Kabat, and Chioma Orekeke for a deep dive (pun intended) into all things watery — exploring what it means to write through tides of creativity, climate change, and fluid belonging. The event is live and recorded for delayed viewing. All ticket holders receive a link to the recording.
Salon 16 - The Way of Water
Writing through tides of creativity, climate change, and fluid belonging.
With Eiren Caffall, Jennifer Kabat, and Chioma Orekeke
Thursday 31st Jult 2025 — online — 7 - 8.30 pm UK time (and recorded)
‘… All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was …’
Toni Morrison
Join us for Salon 16, as we gather at the edge of rising tides, flooded cities, and shifting selves to explore what it means to write with water, through change, and toward something more fluid, more hopeful. I will be joined by three extraordinary writers — Eiren Caffall, Jennifer Kabat, and Chioma Orekeke.
The Wild Women Writers’ Salons are carefully curated to bring together writers whose words resonate with one another, creating a space for meaningful, creative conversation among authors, readers, and all those interested in living life a little more wildly.
📣 Writers, readers, climate-thinkers, and curious minds — you are warmly welcome.
Introducing our Salon Guests
Eiren Caffall
Eiren Caffall is a writer and musician. Her work on loss, oceans, and extinction has appeared in Orion, Writer’s Digest, Guernica, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Literary Hub, Al Jazeera, The Rumpus, and the anthology Elementals: Volume IV. Fire, (The Center for Humans and Nature, 2024). She received a 2023 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant, a Social Justice News Nexus fellowship, and residencies at the Banff Centre, Millay Colony, Hedgebrook, and Ragdale. Her books include her memoir The Mourner’s Bestiary (Row House Publishing, 2024) and her novel All the Water in the World (St. Martin’s Press, 2025).
All the Water in the World
Set in a post-glacial New York, this lyrical, speculative novel follows a young girl and her family as they escape a flooded city, carrying the remnants of human knowledge and memory northward by boat. In the years after the glaciers melt, Nonie, her older sister, and their parents, along with their researcher friends, have stayed behind in an almost deserted New York City, creating a settlement on the roof of the American Museum of Natural History. They hunt and grow their food in Central Park as they work to save the collections of human history and science. When a superstorm breaches the city’s flood walls, Nonie and her family must escape north on the Hudson. They carry with them a book that holds their records of the lost collections. Racing on the swollen river towards what may be safety, they encounter communities that have adapted in very different and sometimes frightening ways to the new reality. But they are determined to find a way to make a new world that honours all they've saved.
Inspired by the stories of the curators in Iraq and Leningrad who worked to protect their collections from war, All the Water in the World is both a meditation on what we save from collapse and an adventure story of survival and hope.
Jennifer Kabat
Jennifer Kabat is the author of the twinned memoirs The Eighth Moon and Nightshining, published by Milkweed Editions in 2024 and 2025. Both books were supported with grants from NYSCA and the Silvers Foundation. She received an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for her criticism and has been published in BOMB and The Best American Essays. Her writing has also appeared in Granta, Frieze, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, The Believer, Virginia Quarterly Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, The New York Review, and The White Review. A finalist for the essay prize at Notting Hill Editions, she often collaborates with artists. She’s part of the core faculty in the Design Research MA at the School of Visual Arts. An apprentice herbalist, she lives in rural Upstate New York and serves on her volunteer fire department.
Nightshining
Her first year in Margaretville, New York, Jennifer Kabat wakes to a rain-swollen stream and her basement flooding. As she delves into the region’s fraught environmental history, it becomes clear that this is far from the first — and hardly the worst — disaster to have occurred in the region. Tracing connections across time, she uncovers Cold War weather experiments, betrayals of the Mohawk Nation, and an unlikely cast of characters, including Kurt Vonnegut’s older brother, Bernard, all reflected through grief brought on by her father’s recent passing.
Inquisitive, experimental, and with lyrical incision, Kabat mirrors her own life experience and the essence of being human, connecting readers to the land around us and time before us. A propulsive, layered examination of the conflict between the course of nature and human legacies of resistance and control. Part memoir, part environmental reckoning, it is lyrical, wise, and powerfully personal.
Chioma Orekeke
Chioma Orekeke was born in Nigeria, grew up in London, studied law at UCL and has successfully applied those skills to winning domestic squabbles ever since. Her debut novel, Bitter Leaf, was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize – Africa Best First Book, and her short story Trompette De La Mort received First Runner-Up of the inaugural Costa Short Story Award. As a self-labelled transethnic, she divides her time between the bustle of London, the hustle of Lagos, and the rustle of rural France. Water Baby was longlisted for the Climate Fiction Prize.
Water Baby
In Makoko, the floating slum off mainland Lagos, Nigeria, nineteen-year-old Baby yearns for an existence where she can escape the future her father has planned for her.
With opportunities scarce, Baby jumps at the chance to join a newly launched drone-mapping project, aimed at broadening the visibility of the informal settlement and her community.
When a video of her at work goes viral, Baby finds herself with options she could never have imagined – including the possibility of leaving her birthplace to represent Makoko on the world stage. But will life beyond the lagoon be everything she’s dreamed of? Or has everything she wants been in front of her all along?
A brilliant, tender exploration of visibility, voice, and place.
Introducing our Salon Host — Victoria Bennett
Victoria Bennett is a disabled writer, carer, and mother. A firm believer in everyone’s right to write their own story, she has dedicated much of her working life to nurturing spaces where people can do just that, founding Wild Women Press in 1999. When not juggling writing, care, and managing her chronic illness, she can be found tending her new apothecary garden in Orkney, where the wild things grow.
Her debut memoir, All My Wild Mothers: Motherhood, Loss, and an Apothecary Garden, is an intimate memoir of grief, growing, and what it means to care for ourselves, for each other, and the Earth. A testament to the love and radical hope that can grow in the broken places, it offers a quietly positive manifesto for a changing world. Nautilus Book Award Winner 2024.
‘An impossibly moving memoir of gardens, herbalism, and the rigours and rewards of care... It heralds the arrival of an exciting new voice in nature writing’ (Cal Flyn)
Her forthcoming book, The Apothecary By The Sea: A Year in an Orkney Garden, is due out in May 2026.
WHAT ARE THE WILD WOMEN WRITERS’ SALONS?
Each salon is carefully and individually curated, with considerable thought given to pairing authors and their writing. This pairing allows us to bring something new to the conversation — a space where all the books intersect and begin to tell an additional story. All participants, including myself, read and responded to the selected books, engaging with them as readers, writers, and creative peers.
This is more than a literary panel — it's a community. We're creating a welcoming and inspiring space to gather, engage and inspire positive change. In this collaborative, creative space, the audience and authors come together to delve deeper into the words and what it means to write them.
ACCESSIBLILTY
The salons are held 100% online via Zoom on the last Thursday of each month. These sessions are typically held from 7:00 to 8:30 p.m. UK time, with some sessions scheduled from 1:00 to 2:30 p.m. UK time to accommodate authors with other commitments or specific needs.
We prioritise comfort and self-care during the salons — and all the rest of the time too!
The salons support live captions and are recorded and subtitled for delayed viewing. Funding through Creative Scotland will also enable me to increase access to the salons by providing British Sign Language (BSL) interpretation for some of the salons during the 2025-26 programme. This will be noted on the individual events.
How do they work? What is Pay What You Can?
I am a disabled author and carer, and founder of Wild Women Press and the Wild Women Writers’ Salons. I am passionate about creating positive change, and I believe words can help us do this. That is why I share mine, and why I have dedicated over half my life to creating spaces where others can share theirs. When we tell our stories, when we listen to other people’s stories, we connect. In this ever-divisive world, that feels so important to do.
I run the salons from my home. This is not an organisation or a business, but it does need an income to survive, as do I.
No personal profit is made from the salons — all revenue generated from ticket sales and subscriptions is reinvested in the project to support the authors, those working behind the scenes, and to make the project possible in the future. This year, I have been fortunate to receive a small grant towards research and development from Creative Scotland, which will help me build in further access and support my work and contribute towards the authors’ time and commitment, but it doesn’t cover the full cost of the programme, or the hours it takes to make it happen. That is where your support comes in.
The salons are offered as Pay-What-You-Can. This is not because I have a secret income. It is because I want to create an equitable space where everyone can participate, and where we foster a community that values worth but does not exclude people based on their ability to afford it.
However, it might be helpful when deciding what to donate to have the following price points as guides.
A minimum ticket donation of £5 is suggested. This won’t cover the salon or the work, but it goes some way.
£8, £16, and £24 are offered as realistic price points, as estimates of the cost to support the project, acknowledging the time, creativity, and energy generously given by our guest authors and all those involved in making the salons happen.
BUT please do not feel you cannot attend if you cannot meet these price points. As a disabled, low-income parent-carer, I am very aware that there are times in life when we can’t find those funds, no matter how much we want to. If this is you right now, please know that you are still very much welcome.
All and any donations and paid subscriptions are vital to this space's ecosystem, and as always, we are grateful for your support.
So let’s get the conversation started…
Want to read the books?
The salons are carefully curated to bring authors together to discuss their work, exploring connections and creative practice. All the books can be read as stand-alone, but something magical happens when you read them together and carry on that conversation between the works.
Did you know that you can find all the authors’ books and recommended reads on our Bookshop page, or you can buy the author's books directly (deliverable worldwide) from Sam Read Booksellers?
Why Upgrade to Paid?
Be part of the growing Wild Women Writers’ community
The salons are entirely unfunded. All paid subscriptions support the work behind the scenes to make the Wild Women Writers’ Salons and the newsletter happen. In exchange for your support, you get:
access to all previous newsletters
access to recordings of the full programme of salons;
additional interviews with our guest authors on their writing and inspirations;
additional reading recommendations from our guest authors;
bespoke writing prompts from our guest authors;
occasional additional writing opportunities and courses;
The chance to be part of a nurturing community of creative practice!
Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription today.
Writing Wild (Wild Women Writers' Salons) is a reader-supported publication. By subscribing, you support the work behind the scenes that makes this project possible. Thank you.
Self-Care Snippet
‘…Remember you are half water. If you can't go through an obstacle, go around it. Water does…’
― Margaret Atwood
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