She runs Vino and Verses, an open mic poetry night at Chater’s in Saffron Walden, which has become a nurturing home for spoken word, connection, and fearless first readings. Her work, both on page and in the room, is rooted in curiosity, play, and creating spaces where people can explore poetry without rules, only encouragement.

Influenced by writers and musicians such as Patti Smith, Hollie McNish, Sylvia Plath, Dry Cleaning, and English Teacher, Bethany’s poetry is drawn to the weird and beautiful, often blurring the lines between the personal and the surreal. She is fascinated by how words, music, and community collide to create something that feels alive, urgent, and nurturing all at once.

Alongside a degree in the Arts and Humanities with a specialism in Philosophy, she collects vinyls, hunts for the weirdest books she can find, and works as a barista, fuelled by a deep love of really good coffee and food. Her practice is a testament to small joys and big obsessions, a belief that art is best when shared, experienced and lived.

Recently Read: Almond by Won Pyung Sohn; The Wax Child by Olga Ravn; Eileen by Ottessa Moshfeg; Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte. Currently Reading: Cursed Bunny by Bora Chun; Virgin by Hollie McNish; Artists Way by Julia Cameron

Charlotte juggles a disparate range of obsessions in both life and art: some visit like breaching whales, and some feature more centre frame for a while. The line between the visual and the written has always been blurred for her.

The nature of light and objects and their place in time, the world as she experienced it as a child, and the hooks and elisions of perception all have their significance in Charlotte’s life/art life.

Currently uppermost in her mind are the dens that appear and disappear, made from fallen branches in the woodlands around where she lives—how these relate to vernacular architecture, how their forms repeat and differ, and how they sit in their location—and how these compare to the many brick and concrete pillboxes that are scattered across the same landscape. Constantly with her is her preoccupation, intentional and involuntary, with play in language, her weakness for puns and spoonerisms, double meanings, and how far they and grammar can be pushed and to what end.

She looks to T.S. Eliot, Shakespearian blank verse, Tom Stoppard, the lyrics of Bob Dylan, R.E.M., Joni Mitchel; the art of Joseph Cornell, Joseph Beuys, Kenneth Armitage, Tacita Dean; in film, to Blade Runner, The Duelists, Le Weekend, Wes Anderson, Peter Greenaway, animation by the Quay Brothers, Stalker, and 1970s cinematography in general; to hedge alchemy as a metaphor; and to train spotting as a methodology.

After completing a fine art degree, Charlotte found herself working in the film industry as a draughtsman and continuing a largely virtual art career in her head. More recently, that art career has found a tangible outlet in writing poetry and reading some of it out in public at the poetry open-mic night Vino and Verses, set up, run, and compèred by the incomparable Bethany Callaway.

Recently Read: The Employees by Olga Ravn; The Wax Child by Olga Ravn; Friends of Friends by Geoff Sawers; Glyph by Ali Smith; Vermeer A Life of Lost and Found by Andrew Graham-Dixon; The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K Le Guin.
Currently Reading: The Bicentennial Man by Isaac Asimov; The Guermante’s Way by Marcel Proust (This is more of a life task, I’ve been slowly working my way through Rememberance of Things Past for fifteen years).