Wales is all that we are
Cwlwm is six months old - so how are things going, and what's coming next?
It’s six months since we launched Cwlwm as a vote of confidence in people’s appetite for a different sort of writing about Wales, and a different way of sourcing that writing. Since then, we have published more than 50 pieces, featuring some of Wales’s most celebrated writers and also some people who have never written before but nevertheless have had important – no, vital – things to say about where they are from and what it means to be there.
In this first six months we have held workshop events in Rhosllannerchrugog, Llanelli, Llyn Syfaddan, Swansea and Newport, resulting in articles about trains, briefcases, migration, cultural democracy and grassroots arts. If our editorial vision for the next six months is anything, it’s to keep on building on this rich seam of great, grounded writing that blends perceptive local insight with that constant reflection on feeling and on place.
All parts of Wales tell us part of the story that makes up the tapestry of the country with which we identify, and in which we live. At Cwlwm, we are wary of grand narratives about our shabby nation. There are, naturally, advantages to be found in the idea of masses but these always arise out of finding specificity held in common, not the subsuming of that same specificity within the roughcast of an idea. So yes to the solidarity of working-class organisation and all the specific and local ways it was and is still expressed and yes to the struggle for the right to live in your language and the worlds created within it – but no to the one Wales, to the land of song, to the people as old as the rocks beneath them, to the flattening narratives of sameness, predictability and cliche.
We believe that Wales is all that we are. Now, there’s one way of reading that that’s a familiar narrative – the nagging voice of doubt and the desire to flatten distinctiveness within the comfortable mantle of ‘ordinariness’. We can see this expressed in Bwncath’s song ‘Fel hyn da ni fod’:
Glywaist ti’r ffaith mae dim ond dy iaith
Sy’n wahanol, sy’n dy ddal di yn ôl?[Have you heard that it’s only your language
That’s different, that’s holding you back?]
But what happens if we all take on that mantle and say that, if Wales is all that you can see of me, then all of what we are must be what Wales is. We may just be Welsh, but this is being Welsh: barber shops, borders, poetry, migration, austerity, old railways, old piers, rap, Ramadan, and demolished tax offices.
We want Cwlwm to be a place where we can learn about each other and about ourselves, where we can see the variety, strangeness and difference inherent in a small country, and the world seen from within it. That’s why we continue to aspire to feature writing that blends perceptive local writing – what’s happening in your area, and what’s happening on the other side of Wales that you might be interested in – with the best thinking about a wider range of topics: music, history, the environment, migration, identity and feeling.
True diversity should be the exciting pursuit of an idea of Wales through testing every angle and every edge and that is the metric we will continue to hold ourselves to in the coming months. As we said in our recent call for submissions, we are now looking for ideas for long read articles, to be published every Saturday until the end of the year. If you think you’ve got one, then get in touch.
Nobody wants a magazine to be navel-gazing, so we don’t want to dwell on the state of the magazine industry in Wales, or the challenges of running a platform like this. What we’ve said all along is simple: if you like what Cwlwm is doing, please consider pledging a subscription. We’ve no immediate plans to turn on subscriptions, or to limit free access to our articles, but it’s an important way of knowing when we might be reaching the point where subscriptions can be part of sustaining Cwlwm into the future.
So here’s to the first six months and a heartfelt thanks to all our contributors who have begun the work of showing us that difference doesn’t hold us back; it is in fact what we are: the spark of energy seeing something new in a country you thought you knew, and beginning to unpick the complex knots of experience that bind us together.
Merlin Gable and Dylan Moore are co-editors of Cwlwm.