Our Community Valentine

Join us in the afternoon of February 14th from 2-4pm for a very special literature event with two guest readers, Deborah Finding (My Marxist Valentine, poetry) and Tash Walker (The Log Books, non-fiction). Deborah and Tash will be sharing extracts and insights from their newly-launched work, as well as being in conversation about the experience of writing and producing work that highlights the deeply personal and intrinsically political need for community and solidarity.

Deborah Finding, the Soho Poly’s first poet-in-residence, will read from her brand new poetry collection, My Marxist Valentine (Write Bloody UK), which is an exploration of love and solidarity set against a backdrop of capitalism and individualism.

Would he ever say, ‘I love you?’

Would she ever say, ‘You were right about historical materialism?’

The poems in My Marxist Valentine chart a relationship of contradictions between an idealistic and romantic narrator, and her eponymous antagonist, a man of science, study and silence, at least where love is concerned.

Seeking answers in the relationships of revolutionaries like Eleanor Marx, Rosa Luxemburg and Emma Goldman, and attempting to extract dating advice from Marx’s Capital, poet Deborah Finding invites the reader to consider if, when, and how love can be truly radical.

The personal is always political in Finding’s work, and accordingly, the socialist bros who don’t share the domestic and emotional labour at home are subject to just as much of a skewering here as the tired Hollywood tropes of romance. Does Marxist Valentine really hate the Brontës? Or does he just not want to talk about his feelings? Is joy really an indefensible proposition in tough political times? Or can we plan the uprising and have fun at the same time? My Marxist Valentine calls on a wide cast of characters, where Jane Austen goes up against Karl Marx to provide some critiques of leftwing hypocrisy, and a communist Mr Darcy finds himself referencing Judith Butler and Taylor Swift in the same sentence on his search for the ideal anti-capitalist comrade to join him in the good fight.

‘Urgent and playful, My Marxist Valentine restores ‘love’ from the mingily privatised sphere of capitalism and patriarchy, and radicalism from the duties of joyless, grinding anger. With warmth, wit and formal exuberance, Finding gives us an erotics of solidarity: a comradeship that places jouissance, joy and laughter at the centre of shared struggle.’

FRAN LOCK

‘Inventive and tremendously enjoyable, My Marxist Valentine manages to make the incongruities of love and politics sing off the page thanks to Finding’s innate understanding of pace and form, comedy as defence and pathos. A compulsively readable, funny and smart collection.’

LUKE KENNARD

**

Tash Walker will be reading from their co-authored book (with Adam Zmith), just out with Faber, The Log Books, which is an intimate history of LGBTQ+ life over four decades, discovered in a stash of forgotten, handwritten notes.

In a crawlspace at the offices of Switchboard, a queer helpline in operation since 1974, lies dozens of log books kept by volunteers describing the phone calls they had taken: a teenager whose parents had kicked them out of home for dressing as the wrong gender; a lesbian terrified of having her baby taken away from her; a man arrested for chatting up another man in a public toilet; a young person wanting to know how to come out.
These logs were traces of tens of thousands of queer lives, a bridge to a past hidden from people like Tash Walker and Adam Zmith in their youth, captured by people who lent an ear to those in need. Walker and Zmith came of age in the time of Section 28, a law which banned councils and schools 'promoting the teaching of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship'. In recovering these logs, they encountered people grappling with feelings, questions and problems both familiar and different, and set out to learn from - and sometimes speak to - those on both sides of the calls.
Charged with joy, gossip, sensuality, humour and sometimes fear, and with a potent relevancy to the world today, these stories are brought together in The Log Books. Walker and Zmith capture queer lives in stunning detail, embarking on a journey of both collective history and self-discovery and propelling it into the very foreground of our national history.

'A fantastic journey through an overlooked archive bursting with humanity and real life on every page.'
DAN SNOW
'Among the most vivid social histories I've read about contemporary queer life in Britain.'
OISÍN MCKENNA, author of Evenings and Weekends
'In opening the Switchboard archive, and all the vulnerability and thrill contained within its pages, this book manages to capture something of the essence of what it means to be alive.'
AMELIA ABRAHAM, author of Queer Intentions

Dr Deborah Finding is a queer feminist writer with a background in academia and activism. Her previous poetry pamphlets are Vigils for Dead and Dying Girls (Nine Pens, 2023) and Amortisation (Live Canon, 2024). Her poems have appeared in Magma, Propel, fourteen poems, The Little Review, berlin lit, and she has also written for DIVA magazine, The Guardian and the Huffington Post. She won the Write By The Sea International Poetry Prize, the Indigo Dreams Spring Poetry Prize and the Live Canon pamphlet prize, and has been placed, commended or shortlisted in many other competitions.

Tash Walker is a writer, award-winning podcast producer and community organiser who has worked with institutions such as the Barbican, the BBC and Queer Britain. They were on the board of Switchboard for 8 years.

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

Get App

Host or Publisher Soho Poly