NAMED after Richard Bradbury’s first novel about Frederick Douglass, the Riversmeet project combines literature with activism.

As the website declares, Riversmeet focuses on high-quality writing, performance and teaching which engages with contemporary issues by linking the past to the present. 

Riversmeet is a quiet powerhouse; publishing books, producing theatre, short films and interesting blogs as well as running Slow Reading courses. Eschewing the tacky mission statement, it quotes Walter Benjamin: “In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overwhelm it.”

Let’s start with the Slow Reading courses; for whom is this educational process intended? Where do the writers/readers come from? If you don’t discriminate in favour of the unprivileged and people without formal education, then why not? 

I think it’s useful to set the Riversmeet Slow Reading Project in the wider context of the very significant decline in provision for adult education in the last 20 years. One small example: the current national offering by the Workers Educational Association for literature courses is just 10. Twenty years ago I taught three a year in the south-west (Devon/Dorset) alone.

The Open University’s effective abandonment of the open degree path has meant a significant reduction in students who are unwilling to pursue a single degree course. 

Riversmeet has become more possible since I finished working for the Open University, where I was both an associate lecturer and vice-president of the UCU branch. 

The Slow Reading Project came from three impulses. First of all, my wish to get away from a model all too familiar to many humanities academics. Hurrying through to achieve “coverage.” In parody, a week for Ulysses, another week for Mrs Dalloway etc. A model all too similar to consuming commodities.

I wanted to persuade participants who have been told that these books, all too often elevated as difficult or obscure, could become readable if given time. I have lost count of the times I have been told by someone that they want to read Ulysses but thought it would be too hard. 

Second, the Covid lockdowns gave some people that time. 

Third, a perception that there was a gap between book groups and college or university degree courses that we might bridge. 

Now, those three impulses together meant that our audience was demographically restricted (though some of our regulars defy that) and one of our ongoing tasks is to try and widen participation. But I think it would be beneficial for us all to recognise how tough that might be. After all, there are some perturbing statistics about the decline in reading among all ages, genders and class groups. So we might just acknowledge that.
 
Do you need a political project in the present to engage creatively with the past, as Joyce had the events leading to the Easter Rising, for example, and has anti-racism informed your own engagement with Frederick Douglass?

Some of our other work is addressing that issue. The Fredrick Douglass project was born in part from my frustration at not being able to engage with the rise of Black Lives Matter. At the time I was shielding due to being clinically extremely vulnerable. For the first time in over 40 years I was unable to participate in person in an anti-racist movement. 

The Douglass project (which focuses on Douglass’s 1846 visit to Britain) has taken us into the local prison twice — and we are developing an ongoing connection there. 

The theatre project that is the next stage is part-funded by a contribution from a trade union and we are committed to performing in non-traditional spaces; the local labour club, a GWR social club.

Some of the impetus for this came from a conversation with a local taxi driver who, when we talked about the Frederick Douglass theatre project asked: “Would I be allowed to come?” I found that both shocking and revealing about the work we have to do. 

In the past we have staged theatre work in the skittle alleys of rural pubs. We are also developing a theatre piece about Shelley’s brief period living in Devon for performance in London next May.

This is also a work about political surveillance. Shelley was spied on by the British state, and the play draws a direct parallel between the historical situation and the fact that, as pointed out by the theatre’s artistic director, there are more CCTV cameras to the square mile in London than there are in Shanghai.
 
Who is your audience?

Our short films are designed to connect the past and the present. For example, Eamonn’s Boots grew from my experience of participating in the Afri Famine Walk and made use of an extract from my novel, Riversmeet. Afri is an organisation that uses the annual memorial famine walk to raise funds for famine relief in Africa. They have also drawn parallels between the 1840s poorhouse provision and the direct provision arrangements today. 

Now, I do see merit in study as a means to an end. I always asked the OU students I worked with why they were embarking on six years of additional hard labour. For many, it was a route out of a work situation, towards promotion in the work they already held, the first step towards domestic autonomy. That was always both enlightening and a salutary reminder of the power of education; still more so when I started teaching in prisons. The determination of those students was humbling. 

At the same time I also see merit in study for its own sake. Jenny Odell’s How To Do Nothing has been influential on my thinking in recent years. Its redefinition of “nothing” as a resistance to the work ethic of capitalism is the 21^st century version of Karl Marx’s son-in-law Paul Lafargue’s “The right to be lazy.”
 
The method assumes that the “normal” present can be recognised as a construct, given the example of the past — is it possible to attempt this deconstruction without political purpose? Where is that political purpose derived from?

That might easily be seen as a utopian aspiration in a period when we have faced austerity for years, struggled with the impact of Covid, lurched into a cost-of-living crisis and now have a government who almost seem to relish the prospect of “tough decisions” that are going to make lives harder. And, yes, of course, when faced with all of that it is very hard for anyone to lift their gaze and look past the immediate demands. But if we don’t try, we are imprisoned by the immediacy of the present and much less able to move beyond it.  

That’s why, also, the past and its connection to the present is so important to the overall project. Standing on the street yesterday I had a conversation with someone who was despairing about the present situation in Palestine, unable to see a way beyond the present awfulness. I asked him if, in 1988, he would have predicted the collapse of the apartheid regime? “Good point,” he said and he looked a little less pessimistic. For me, literature acts as a means to see the possibilities.
 
For the purposes of literary creation, is it better to have “progressive politics” or “radical politics”?

Progressive and radical are similar but mean different things to different people. Maybe radical is a question of speed of change, and progressive is just something going in the right direction (ie left!). They are subjective terms and we would want an opening up in terms of where our society is taking us — towards socialism — against oppression, reaction — all that.  

But I want to return to your first question on who are we for and why, as it’s both pertinent to our future development and also perhaps the most intractable problem for us. We are a very small organisation, with as yet almost no external funding. Our experience of applying for Arts Council funding has been that it is a dispiriting and exhausting process that produces neither funds nor helpful or supportive feedback. So we are propelled into using the Slow Reading courses as a mechanism to generate income for other projects. And I love doing them. 

We do also, I’d point out, cost a great deal less than the obvious competitors and even then we offer discounts!

For more information see: riversmeetproductions.co.uk.