Cymru itself is an anthology
Welcome to Cwlwm – a new quality magazine for Wales, delivered via email.
Wales’ bookshelves have strained in recent years under the weight of new anthologies of writing that aim to describe, in the collectivity of the individual experiences contained within them, the nation we find ourselves in. Note their titles. Maps and Rooms. Home to You. An Open Door. The nation is presented as a welcoming house with many rooms and doors that lead in a number of directions. Land of Change. The Welsh Way. A country where for worse and for better, new and distinct paths are being trodden. Just So You Know, Cymru & I. An emphasis on the personal relationship each of us forms with the idea of the nation.
There are subtitles too, each hinting at something of the messy, knotty and complicated, but often beautiful, reality of Cymru in the twenty-first century. Writing from Wales. Stories of Struggle and Solidarity from Wales. Essays of Experience. Essays on Neoliberalism and Devolution. Essays on the Future of Wales. New Travel Writing For a Precarious Century.
Here is a country full of people trying to make sense of what we have and who we are, where we have come from and where we are going. We are grappling with unreliable narratives inherited from the past, with a precarious present, with an uncertain future. Here too is a country where there is creative talent in abundance, a rapidly changing nation that nevertheless continues to uphold and develop its heritage as gwlad beirdd a chantorion, a land of poetry and song. A nation of theatre and fiction too, and in recent years particularly of storytelling through film and television, gaming and animation. And as demonstrated by the anthologies listed above, Cymru is also a country of essayists, of creative nonfiction and high quality cultural journalism.
Perhaps the best known of all the recent essay collections is Welsh (Plural), edited by Darren Chetty, Hanan Issa, Grug Muse and Iestyn Tyne. Its cover features imagery inspired by the Wrexham Tailor’s Quilt, a patchwork created from discarded pieces of felted woollen cloth, carefully designed and stitched together over the course of ten years of the nineteenth century by master tailor James Williams. Its introduction explains this choice, drawing on the rich metaphorical significance suggested by the quilt in all its problematic glory: industrial and religious scenes supplemented with motifs arising from Wales’ role in the colonial conquests of the British Empire. The volume is conceived as a remixing, ‘reimagining the Wales we live and see’.
Our design also draws on metaphor related to Wales’ unique tradition of tapestry blanket weaving. Our pages are the new looms: where threads are untangled and unpicked, and tied together in different ways, where new patterns are produced and revealed.
Cwlwm will collect and curate personal essays, fragments of experience hint at the whole. We will explore and uncover lesser known places and platform lesser heard voices. We will publish analysis of current events but look beyond the demands of the news cycle, and review with a critical eye Wales’ cultural production. Here our diverse communities will meet and mix and mingle; merge, collide and intersect. We will examine our differences and what makes each part of our country unique in order to identify the ties that bind us. Our focus will always be people.
Diversity discourse often reduces people’s experiences and lived realities to the small and singular, the rigid dimensions of boxes to be ticked or left blank. We will always allow people to ‘write in your own answer’. We reassert the idea not only of Wales as a community of communities, but that multiplicity lies inherent within each, and within ourselves. If ‘I Contain Multitudes’ as the American poet Walt Whitman had it, how much more so a nation of more than three million?
45 years ago, Raymond Williams defined a generation of Welsh thinkers, writers and activists who talked about ‘this Wales we’re going to make’. A quarter of a century into the ‘process and not an event’ of devolution and we continue to describe the country like an experiment – a bit more tinkering and we’ll be there – rather than as an experience, a complex web of connections made, dreams dreamt and pain felt, united under the shimmering, elusive feeling of our Welshness.
What are we to make of life’s jumble of ideas and images and ideologies? That will be the ongoing work of Cwlwm: to collate and curate stories from across Cymru and far beyond, and to work with communities, to collaborate and co-create, seeking always to do so with values of solidarity, empathy and good humour.
The form of an anthology resists the idea of a single story, but it does impose a pattern of a kind. Anthologies are snapshots, cross-sections, takings of the temperature at particular times. But they are not authoritative. The twisting kaleidoscope of a magazine means that the remixing and reimaging can go on indefinitely – there is always another edition, another chance to respond, another chance to consider things from a different perspective, another opportunity to change your mind.
This article is the opening editorial to the Winter 2023 print edition of Cwlwm, co-written by Dylan Moore and Merlin Gable.