Welcome, you’re here, have a dig around and if we have what you’re looking for, you’ll surely find it here.

The ‘we’ of DIRT is poets Alice Willitts and JLM Morton. Alice is also a professional gardener and soil nerd. Juliette created and runs Dialect Writers supporting rural writers, and Dialect Press publishes DIRT. Alice lives in the East of England on the agricultural Fens. Juliette lives in the West of England in the lush, watery vales. Soil and water.

When we partnered to propose DIRT we wondered if anyone would be interested in our experimental, plantable poetry. We decided to launch the idea with a crowdfunder because… we’re insane? Noooo! Because we hoped it was a great way to find support and maybe start a community that would be interested in the project longterm. It was nerve-wracking but to our delight, many inquisitive patrons signed up to support our research into how we might actually make plantable poetry and work out a financial model for paying poets to collaborate for the project.

Thanks to that amazing crowd-sourced support, we were able to research carbon-positive publishing and run a prototype collaboration. This meant walking ourselves through the writing process we envisage for commissioning poets and understanding the printing side of things. We print with vegetable inks on compostablepaper accompanied by seeds collected from Alice’s own garden or the city-pollinators project she co-founded, On The Verge Cambridge. Planted, the seeds soak up more carbon than is used to post the publications to you, which is how DIRT makes planet-positive publications.

The journey to this point has been delightful and full of challenges. Substack is a good place to tell the origin story, share our philosophy and reflect on how it works in practice.

We have a project page with wider news about the DIRT project if you’d like to see more of what we do https://www.dialect.org.uk/dirt — there are links on that page for buying copies too. Every copy sold, funds the next collaboration so your purchases directly pay writers and planet. We also thank our sponsors, Anglia Ruskin University, Laura Kinsella Foundation. We also love the carbon-balanced printers Ashley House and our designer Theo Willitts for working with us to find the best solutions.

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translation: people who like waffling on about ‘the same kind of shit’ as you. Which in this case is worthy, hair-shirt shit that makes the point that shit is exactly what’s needed to turn the dead soil we call dirt back into healthy, microbe and bacteria rich, fertile soil that can support ALL life on earth. No biggie.

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