Pens of the Earth

Submissions for 2021 are now open. Our theme is ‘Small Differences Add Up’ and you can read all about it here. We look forward to reading your work!

Thanks to everyone who has helped us grow our forest by donating to our Tree Sisters fundraiser. So far, we have raised enough to fund the planting of 817 trees.

This tropical reforestation project has now funded the planting of more than 15 million trees across the tropics, in locations such as Madagascar, Mozambique, India, Nepal, Brazil, Kenya, and Cameroon. We’re glad to play a small part in this.

Next year, we continue to raise funds and hope to achieve our target of funding 2,000 trees.

Many thanks to everyone who has donated. And we wish everyone a healthy, happy Christmas and New Year. With love from Pens.

Seeking the 2020 Rainbow – A Celebration.

It started with a theme asking writers to explore their experiences of this strange year and to consider how the burgeoning of nature may have helped.

And what a wonderful response we had. There has been so much honesty, resilience, humour, love and joy, so many unique perspectives and reflections. The idea of our interconnection with nature shone through, as did the desire for positive change to help us, our neighbours, and our planet. We truly couldn’t have asked for more. Thank you!

Pens of the Earth is run by volunteers, and we have many people to thank:

• Our comms team: Annie Kirby, who set up and scheduled our social media; Christine Lawrence, whose online presence is a joy to witness; Beth Lewingdon, Richard and Helen, who have all helped to prepare the content.
• Our ‘inspiration’ contributors: all the creative writers and tutors who contributed prompts or involved their writing groups; all those amazing environmental campaigners, organisations, tree planters, protectors and wild nurturers who are working tirelessly to make life greener, happier and healthier.
• Our editors: for their perceptive and thoughtful editing: Margaret Jennings, Wendy Metcalfe, Sue Shipp, Richard and Helen Salsbury.
• Star & Crescent: Paris Ali-Pilling and Sarah Cheverton, who were generous with their time and website space, helping us to get to a wider audience.

We will be hibernating for the winter, drawing strength for new growth in 2021. However there’s plenty on our website to keep you occupied. Check out our previous publications, or get involved with some of the inspirational environmental groups who have so inspired us.

Our new run of stories, poems and non-fiction has begun! We’ll be featuring new work over the next four weeks for our theme ‘Seeking the 2020 Rainbow’ (plus a couple of others that fit our previous themes).

Click here to read our contributors’ work, and keep coming back as we publish more.

Our media partners Star & Crescent will also be featuring many of these pieces, for which our undying thanks!

And … another update to the inspiration page for our 2020 submission window Seeking the 2020 Rainbow. Thanks to all those who have generously contributed their words and photos.

Our inspiration page has been updated with prompts and observations for our new submission theme. More to come!

We are open to submissions until 30th September 2020. Check out all the details here.

Our media partners Star & Crescent have begun their three week run of publishing our articles,  stories and poetry. Many thanks to Paris, Esti, Tom and Sarah for all their support. More to come!

We are running a creative writing workshop in association with the University of Portsmouth on March 19th 2020 on the theme ‘Streets for People’. Details here.

Read about the tireless gardeners, planters and environmentalists helping to green up the city in our series of four articles on Planting Portsmouth:

• Trees and the City
• Wilder Portsmouth
• Pocket Parks
• Community Orchards