Ripple Bed Press is an innovative publishing house which seeks, supports and commissions new writing that explores the key themes of place-making, wayfinding and regional identity through innovative approaches to poetry, fiction and essay.
Our name is taken from one of the Black Country’s most prominent geological wonders: The Wren’s Nest Ripple Beds. This famous site within the UNESCO Black Country Geopark is a limestone outcrop where the tropical Silurian Ocean currents are fossilised into the cold, grey matter of the earth. We take this as a figurative expression of how being and landscape converge and as a way of thinking through the ineffable qualities of the creative process.
Ripple Beds are sedimentary structures that indicate areas where geological materials have been agitated by the waves and currents of water. What we see when we study these is the coming together of things in flow and things fixed. They are the conjugation of a past, present and future experienced in a singular time-space and seemingly stable locality. They trap the life and conditions of Earth’s history, upend them, transform them, and display them in the new and now. They record the substances and the forces that create place and moment.
Creative writing follows similar geological processes. The writer agitates situation, memory and experience and seeks to actualise a form built from multifaceted elements. New literature is harnessed to the past through tradition and convention, but also pushes into to new lands and produces new paradigms. It is, like the Ripple Beds, concerned with friction and flow, past-present-future, the capturing and shaping of tricky territories.
We’re interested in this attention to place, identity, culture and community through writing. We want to nurture the lithic, stratigraphic and petrologic metaphors of place-identity and place-making through innovative creative writing methods.
