Ache is an intersectional feminist publisher exploring illness, health, bodies and pain. Founded in 2017, they publish exciting and urgent fiction, essays, poetry and visual art by women, transgender and non-binary people. For INSOMNIA, Ache commissioned three poets to engage with the idea of Alt-Text/Image Descriptions as poetry, and respond to Leah Clements' photographs.

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Insomnia by Kirstie Millar

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Kirstie Millar is a writer based in Manchester. In 2017 she founded Ache. She completed her MA in Creative Writing at UEA and was a recipient of the Ink, Sweat and Tears Scholarship. Her writing has been published by Prototype, 3 of Cups Press and was commended for the UEA New Forms Award. Curses, was published by Takeaway Press in 2019 and The Strange Egg will be published by Emma Press in January 2023.

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Hold the Night by Nina Mingya Powles

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Nina Mingya Powles is a writer, poet, maker and librarian. She is the author of several poetry collections and zines, most recently Magnolia 木蘭. In 2021, she published a collection of essays titled Small Bodies of Water, winner of the Nan Shepherd Prize. Tiny Moons, a food memoir, was published in 2020. She also writes an intermittent e-newsletter called Comfort Food. She was born in Aotearoa New Zealand, partly grew up in China, has family roots in Malaysia, and now lives in London.

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the solitary figure by Memoona Zahid

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purple light by Memoona Zahid

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Memoona Zahid is a poet and Ledbury critic based in London. Her writing has appeared in Lumin Journal, The Runaways Project, Tentacular and elsewhere. She is an alumna of the University of East Anglia's Creative Writing Poetry MA where she was the recipient of the Birch Family Scholarship. She is currently creating her first body of work.

This reading session focused on Leah Clements' short essay That Other Place, and excerpts from Jenn Ashworth's Notes Made While Falling. Both texts approach insomnia as a result, as well as a cause, of physical and mental illness, highlighting the link between sleeplessness and creative output.

In That Other Place (How To Sleep Faster, Arcadia Missa, Issue 10: Sleep [2019]), Clements outlines eight thoughts on sleep from personal experience, her own practice, and further research. Founded in a crip and feminist context, the text stems from an excitement at the goodies sleep can hold - from sharing collective dreams to carving out a space of one's own outside capitalism, and also faces and to a degree embraces some of the horrors of sleep, such as death-likeness, and sleep paralysis.

Notes Made While Falling (Goldsmiths Press [2019]) is an experimental memoir and a critical exploration of traumatised and sickened selves in fiction and film. Visceral, intense, and at times hallucinatory, it delves into questions of creativity, spirituality, illness, and the limits of fiction. The book centres on the author's experience of traumatic childbirth, its long aftermath, and the roots of trauma and creativity in an unusual childhood. The excerpts in this session focus on insomnia caused by and circularly exacerbating physical and mental illness, and its relationship to creative production.

On the 14th December 2022, the Feminist Duration Reading Group met at South Kiosk, and read That Other Place and an excerpt from Notes Made While Falling aloud together. In an experimental attempt to make the conversation inclusive and accessible, whilst retaining the intimate environment of the group setting, the group's responses to these texts was recorded by speech-to-text software, and is held here as an open document that can be read, edited and commented on by any reader.

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Meeting transcript: 14 Dec 2022 FDRG: SLEEPLESS TEXTS BY LEAH CLEMENTS & JENN ASHWORTH at South Kiosk

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Expanding from the exhibition INSOMNIA, RTM.fm produced and broadcast a 3-episode show on the critical, poetic and artistic potential of Alt-Text/Image Descriptions.

RTM is a radio station based in Thamesmead, SE London, run by the artist space TACO! as a platform for community-produced culture, debate, art and music. INSOMNIAC RADIO has been edited and produced by Flo Lines and developed in collaboration with artist Leah Clements, curator Mariana Lemos and artist Niamh Schmidtke from South Kiosk. The episodes include contributions by access support advisor and V.I.P (visually impaired) performer Ebony Rose Dark, artist Vivienne Griffin, Ache Magazine and poets Kirstie Millar, Nina Mingya Powles and Memoona Zahid. Episode 2, ID Poetry, features poetry readings that can be found elsewhere in the archive, under A Poetry Evening With Ache Magazine.

Artist Vivienne Griffin reads a visual description of Leah Clements' exhibition INSOMNIA

A recording of the full evening of poetry readings with an introduction by curator Mariana Lemos

Artist Leah Clements talks to curator Mariana Lemos and artist Niamh Schmidtke from South Kiosk about her exhibition INSOMNIA, and the use of image descriptions in her practice and others'.

We sleep nightly and spend about a third of our lives dedicated to this state. However, defining it is tricky and explaining why we do it is even more so. In her presentation held on 14th January 2023 at Copleston Centre in Peckam, Alice Gregory provided a sleep 101 - answering some of the most fundamental questions related to sleep, including 'what is sleep?'; 'why do we sleep?' and 'what happens when it goes wrong?'.

Held here is a compilation of audience Q&As on every aspect of sleep from the event.

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Transcript; Sleep And Psychology: A Q&A with Prof Alice Gregory

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Alice Gregory is a Professor of Psychology at Goldsmiths, University of London. She has contributed to several diverse research areas, including the longitudinal associations between sleep and psychopathology, behavioural genetics, sleep paralysis and exploding head syndrome. In addition to her scientific contributions, she also excels in the public engagement of science. She has published a popular science book (Nodding Off, Bloomsbury, 2018) and a book designed to help children relax before bedtime (Sleepy Pebble, Flying Eye Books, 2019). She has provided information about sleep to both the Department for Education and the Department of Health and regularly contributes articles to the media (having had work published and mentioned in the Guardian, BBC Focus, GQ UK, Sud Ouest, Slate Fr, Independent).

In this recorded video conversation between artist, writer, and researcher Jamila Prowse and artist Leah Clements, the pair draw out themes in each others' work, and find overlaps in their practices: both forged in the 'other place' of crip time.

Jamila Prowse is an artist, writer and researcher who works across moving image and textiles to consider methodologies for visualising mixed-race identity and the lived experience of disability. She is drawn to stitch-making and patchwork as a tactile form of processing complex family histories and mapping disability journeys and moving image as a site of self-archiving and autoethnography. Presently, Jamila is an artist on UAL Decolonising Institute's 20/20 programme, where she will be in residence in the National Disability Art Collection and Archive from 2022-23, making a responsive work to their collection exploring the lived experience of disabled artists. This marks her ongoing exploration into ways of processing and expressing disability through art making.

Creatures that have evolved in liminal spaces; plants that are most visible and scented at twilight; beings that live by the moon cycle, are all evoked in this session. Visually impaired facilitator Andy Shipley guides us through different sensorial zones to explore the smells, tastes, sights and sounds of nature that exist at the borders between realms.

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Touching Insomnia: A script for two voices

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Andy Shipley has been visually impaired for much of his life. He has channelled this experience into his work, seeking to change popular attitudes and perceptions about disability, specifically visual impairment. Andy works with individuals and groups to enable them to re-establish relationships with their non-visual senses, which are often suppressed and neglected by the ocular-centric nature of our modern society. Andy's workshops take participants into a multi-sensory exploration of liminal existence: life spent at the edge of a sensory threshold, between different realms.