Transreading the Archive with Corbel Stone Press

Explore the treasures of textual archives from around the world with experimental poet-publishers, Autumn Richardson & Richard Skelton of Corbel Stone Press.

Given the rise of retrogressive, insular politics and the proliferation of online media content that feeds personal ‘echo chambers’, it’s never been more necessary to look beyond our own selective, subjective borders and to engage with other cultures, ideas, and literatures.

Through the journal Reliquiae, Corbel Stone Press has sought to publish an expansive, esoteric, and challenging programme of bi-lingual archival texts from around the world. The press have featured songs, charms, poems, and narratives from a diverse range of mythological traditions, including Aino, Algonquin, Anglo-Saxon, Armenian, Babylonian, Chipewyan, Egyptian, Finnish, Greek, Haida, Indian, Italian, Koryak, Kwakiutl, Mesopotamian, Occitan, Pawnee, Polynesian, Inuit, Mexican, Navaho, Norse, and Sumerian. Despite their diversity, Corbel Stone’s published texts are united by a common thread – their focus upon the other-than-human world.

In this course, we will seek to move away from the idea of poetry as a vehicle for personal biography. Instead, we will look at ways of developing other modes of seeing – chief among them, the use of the Archive as both prompt and source material for new work. We will discuss the value of poets amassing a working archive of their own extant writing and the process of generating textual spolia from this corpus, as well as the richly intertextual work that can evolve from this practice. We will also look at translations of ancient texts, language grammars and glossaries, esoteric scientific documents and classification systems, and ethnological and mythological works, all with a view to broadening the gamut of our writing, and, crucially, estranging us from our own habitual thought-forms and aesthetic predilections.

This course is designed for poets who are interested in diversifying their practice, who are motivated to seek other viewpoints and to write ‘outside of themselves’, and particularly for those who desire to be more attentive to the other-than-human world.

5 fortnightly sessions over 10 weeks, starting 7 October 2025. No live chats. Suitable for UK & International students.

Concessions & Accessibility

To apply for a concession rate, please send relevant documentation showing your eligibility for one of our concessions to [email protected]. Conditions of eligibility are detailed here. If you have any questions or wish to be added to the waiting list of a sold-out course, please email [email protected].

What to Expect

Please check the left hand side of this page for information on how this course works in practice, under the heading ‘Course Style‘. If you’re unsure as to what any of the terms there mean, or if this course is a good fit for you, please visit our What to Expect page which includes some further information on how our courses function.

Image credit: corbelstonepress

About Autumn Richardson and Richard Skelton View Profile

Autumn Richardson is a poet, editor, and translator. Her work has been published widely in literary journals, pamphlets, and anthologies, and has been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, and Irish. Her collections, which include Heart of Winter, An Almost-Gone Radiance, and Ajar to the Night offer non-anthropocentric views of the world and are deeply informed by wide-ranging research into ecology, ethnology, ancient history, and philosophy. Since 2009 she has been co-director of multimedia publishing house Corbel Stone Press with Richard Skelton. Between 2013 and 2022 they co-edited the influential journal of ecopoetics and esoteric literature, Reliquiae, which published more than 300 writers in over 45 languages. https://www.autumnrichardson.net

Richard Skelton is a British writer, publisher, and artist. He has produced over a dozen books of experimental writing, primarily focusing on the ecology and archaeology of northern landscapes. These include Beyond the Fell Wall (Little Toller Books), Stranger in the Mask of a Deer (Penned in the Margins), and The Giving Way (Guillemot Press). He holds a PhD from the Centre for Place Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University and his work has been exhibited at galleries and art institutions worldwide. A DIY advocate in the tradition of small-press pioneers, the majority of his work is published through Corbel Stone Press, the Anglo-Canadian publisher he has run with Autumn Richardson since 2009. https://www.richardskelton.net.

"Every course I have done with the Poetry School has led me to discover new poets both in the assignments and the poetry of the other people on the course. I have been inspired to write new poetry and am in the process of getting some published. Overall a great experience."

- Spring 2025 Survey Response

The Poetry School