At the Loco Klub 22nd of October
Doors at 19:00 event starts at 19:30
Finishes at 22:30
Join us for an evening of words, water, and wonder as we launch Sophie Dumont’s debut poetry collection Sculling. This is not just a book launch – it’s a celebration of the Bristol’s River Avon.
Lyrical, tender and fierce, Sculling traces grief, desire, and transformation through the movement of rivers, asking how we live, love, and let go.
Sophie will be supported by poetry from Bristol’s Caleb Parkin and Meg Avon.
Let’s create an Avon-loving evening rippling with community, mourning and merrymaking!
Dress code: Your rivery finest. Think river silks, moonlight sequins, driftwood crowns – anything that makes you feel like part of the tide.
About Sculling:
In her unflinching and tenderly obsessive collection, Sculling, poet Sophie Dumont explores a deeply personal relationship to the River Avon, as she circles the curses that unravel from a canoe club.
At the age of sixteen, Sophie Dumont trained to be a canoe coach before her own coach and partner of three years died suddenly in an aquaplaning road accident, which led to five of his organs continuing at least seven people’s lives. His heart was donated to a young man studying in the same city as he did.
Using the kayak as a vessel to traverse life’s accumulation of losses, Sculling speaks of how this bereavement caused Dumont to reflect on her relationship to bodies of water, from her own body to the state of pollution in UK rivers. Here, she explores the campaign for rivers to be given personhood status for rights to protection and inspects the symbiosis of her body and the river’s.
Sculling is a powerful investigation into categories of haunting, from a body living on through donated organs, through dementia’s slow erasure, and through witnessing her niece learn object permanence – that things continue to exist when they are not visible.
In her fiercely vulnerable and meticulous debut, Dumont probes the urge to call out when under a bridge, to hear oneself ricocheted back, changed:
‘. . . a boy in a red cap opens his throat, throws sound
into shadows, as we’ve all done,
in the reckless hope of its return.’
Image credit: Jae Frederick
About Sophie:
Sophie Dumont is a poet and copywriter based in Bristol and Bath. Her poetry won the Brian Dempsey Memorial Prize and has appeared in The Rialto, Magma, The Moth, Ink Sweat and Tears and Mslexia among others. Dumont has an MA in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University and has held writing residencies along Bristol Harbourside with Boat Poets and Exeter Quay through Literature Works.
About Meg:
Meg Avon of The River Bride is a Bristol-based celebrant, poet, activist, performance artist and environmental romantic. From Meg: “In June 2023, I married my local river the Bristol Urban Avon. I married them not just because I love the river deeply, but because I wanted to raise awareness about river pollution with a story that is engaging. Two years on and the relationship is still going strong. I have left my job as a community worker to pursue a career as a writer and campaigner, touring my first collection of poetry My Avon earlier this year.”
About Caleb:
Caleb Parkin was Bristol City Poet 2020 – 22. He’s published three pamphlets and his debut collection, This Fruiting Body was longlisted for the Laurel Prize; his second, Mingle, was published Oct 2024. He’s a PhD researcher with RENEW Biodiversity at the University of Exeter, and an experienced tutor and workshop leader.
Image credit: Vonalina Cake
Entry requirements: no age restrictions (under 18s to be accompanied by an adult over 21yrs, 1:1 ratio)