Join Maria Sledmere in conversation with Carl Lavery and Colin Herd for the launch of Midsummer Song, presented by Thinking Culture.

A celebration of Midsummer Song (Hypercritique), a book by Maria Sledmere recently released through NoUP, an imprint of Tenement Press. Described by the publisher as ‘an autopoietic almanack of disambiguated ideas, a pale fire of a poem’ and ‘a spiralling work of scholarship’, this ambitious creative-critical work will be launched in conversation with Carl Lavery (Professor of Theatre and Performance) and Colin Herd (Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing). Expect a mix of reading, discussion and audience Q&A.

The book is developed out of Sledmere’s work as a DFA candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow, and was selected via open submission. Moving fluidly between lineated verse and essaying, Midsummer Song positions itself as a choose-your-own-adventure style guidebook for living in and against the anthropocene. Attending to climate emergency, the global pandemic and accelerations in technology, its lyrical ‘I’ feels through these issues as they reach every enclave of daily life, often threatening thought itself. This is a book ‘on the need for song as midsummer inches its way toward an axiomatic autumn’.

There will be books for sale at the event, or you can preorder online.

More information about Midsummer Song (Hypercritique).

About the author and discussants:

Maria Sledmere is an artist, editor, educator and writer based in Glasgow. She is the author of over twenty creative publications, including Cinders (Krupskaya, 2024), An Aura of Plasma Around the Sun (Hem Press, 2023), Cocoa & Nothing (with Colin Herd, SPAM Press, 2023), Visions & Feed (HVTN Press, 2022) and The Luna Erratum (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2021). With Rhian Williams, she co-edited the anthology the weird folds: everyday poems from the anthropocene (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2020). Sledmere lectures in English & Creative Writing at the University of Strathclyde and is managing editor of SPAM Press. With Kevin Leomo, she is one half of Project Somnolence: a portable lab for exploring the sonic ecologies of sleep.

Carl Lavery teaches theatre and performance at the University of Glasgow. He has written several books on ecology and performance, including his most recent text, An Idea for a Theatre Ecology (2025). He works closely with the artists Simon Whitehead and Lee Hassall. He is currently working on a project on performance as lyrical address, a blurring and rethinking of Aristotelian categories in the name of something non-dramatic, a ‘cosmic mimesis’ extraneous to action and narrative.

Colin Herd is a poet and senior lecturer in Creative Writing at University of Glasgow. His books include Too Ok, Glovebox, Click & Collect, You Name It, Oberwilding – with S J Fowler, Cocoa & Nothing – with Maria Sledmere and Swamp Kiss. He has recently acted as a mentor for Queer Words 2, and presented his poetry at Association of Scottish Literature’s Queer Form Symposium. He has interests in poetries of ekphrasis, pop culture, performance, endurance, correspondence and anti-poetry. He has also edited or co-edited four anthologies of poetry: Glasgow Cities, Edwin Morgan and All Becomes Art (1&2). His work has been described by Dennis Cooper as “a treasure trove of razzle-dazzle stylings, superfine wit, charismatic discretion, and a vacuuming tenderness. Herd’s gift for words is exquisite and adventurous and armed to the teeth, and these poems are its perfect measurements.”