poetry Archives - Story Radio Podcast

Chateau d'Orquevaux Writers' Salon

Tabitha Potts interviews Beulah Van Rensburg, who helps run the writers’ and artists’ residency at the Chateau d’Orquevaux, about its history and aims. We then hear a selection of poets’ and writers’ works-in-progress.

Alison Clarke is a poet, historical fiction and fantasy author, and visual artist. She is the author of M: The Mystical Odyssey of Harriet E. Wilson and Phillis: A Poetry Collection (University of Calgary Press, 2020), a #1 Amazon bestseller, as well as the award-winning YA fantasy series The Sisterhood, for which she won Diversity Magazine’s 2016 Writer of the Year. She received the 2020 Fil Fraser award for her contributions to literary and visual art, and was a panellist at Seattle Worldcon 2025. Alison believes that stories can change the world.

Buy M: The Mystical Odyssey of Harriet E. Wilson:

UK: amzn.eu/d/f1sUgPn

USA: a.co/d/6NqDbom

Canada: a.co/d/1i8bo2f

Eli Schaub: Eli is a fourth year creative writing major at the University of South Dakota, yet has been writing since his sophomore year of high school. He has written poems, plays, and short stories over the years. His goal when he graduates is to become a fantasy author, although he also loves writing stories in different genres and modes.

Sophia Bea: @sophiabea.dot on Instagram

Karin Hadadan is a three-times author, filmmaker, speaker and teacher, and the author of When Nothing Makes Sense: Finding God in the Gap Between Prayer & Answer. She also runs the PORTAL app and a Substack newsletter. Follow her at @icietnu on Instagram.

Michelle Lizet Flores is the author of the chapbook Cuentos from the Swamp, alongside the titled works Invasive Species, Places We Build in the Universe and Carlito the Bat. Follow her at @shellyflowers on Instagram.

Anna Maria Manalo is a recipient of the Denis Diderot award as a literary artist in residence at the Chateau d’Orquevaux, and holds a residency at Studio Faire for autumn 2027. She is the first Filipina-American author writing in the supernatural historical suspense genre, and the first to bring a creative nonfiction approach to it. A former screenwriter and therapist, her screenplays Under Tango Road, The Tulpa Effect and Uncharted Darkness have placed as quarterfinalists and top-ten finishers in competitions. Drawing on true accounts of the paranormal gathered across 27 countries, she is the Amazon bestselling author of Haunted Heirlooms and Unholy Structure. She lives in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.

Follow Anna Maria at annamariamanaloauthor.com or @TheSinisterArchives on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook and Substack. To contribute a true encounter to her blog, email cinescriber@gmail.com.

Tabitha Potts is the host of Story Radio and the author of the gothic novel The House of Dust and Shadows (Rowan Prose Publishing), as well as the short story collection A Book of Short Stories (Wish Hounds Press). She holds a creative writing MA from Birkbeck and attended a residency at the Chateau d’Orquevaux, where she began work on her second novel, The Devil’s Picture Book, a historical novel set in 1980s Oxford. In this episode, she reads from her work in progress.

Season 4

Iris Murdoch Poems from an Attic book cover

Interview with Dr Miles Leeson editor of Poems from an Attic by Iris Murdoch

Long hidden in an attic, vivid and revelatory poems shine a new light on the life and loves of Iris Murdoch.

In the dusty attic of Iris Murdoch’s Oxford home lay a battered, black chest. In 2016, when the chest was finally opened, Murdoch’s life in poems was revealed.

Renowned for her fiercely intelligent novels and groundbreaking philosophy, Murdoch was one of the great writers of the twentieth century. Yet she is also known for her equally radical life – intense friendships, relationships with both men and women, and an open marriage – about which much has, often controversially, been written. Now, her tightly wrought and vivid poems reveal a new, deeply personal account in Murdoch’s own voice. They range over the preoccupations closest to her heart, from the state of Ireland to memories of a first love lost in the Second World War.

We speak to Dr Miles Leeson, one of the editors of Poems from an Attic by Iris Murdoch, to learn more about this exciting discovery and how it adds to our understanding of the work of the famous philosopher and novelist.

Dr Leeson also reads three poems from the book, ‘Reverie in Winchester Cathedral’, ‘I find that honesty is a hard thing’, and ‘Macaw in the Snow’.

Dr Miles Leeson is Director of the Iris Murdoch Research Centre at the University of Chichester and Visiting Research Fellow at Kingston University. He is Lead Editor of the Iris Murdoch Review, Series Editor of Iris Murdoch Today with Palgrave Macmillan, host of the Iris Murdoch Podcast, and has published widely on Murdoch’s work.

He published Iris Murdoch: Philosophical Novelist in 2010, the edited collection Incest in Contemporary Literature (2018), the festschrift Iris Murdoch: A Centenary Celebration (2019), the co-edited collections Iris Murdoch and the Literary Imagination (2022) and Iris Murdoch and the Western Theological Imagination (2025), co-edited her selected poetry Poems from an Attic: Selected Poems 1936-1995 (2025), and is currently writing Visiting Mrs Bayley and Other Essays (2026) Iris Murdoch and Feminism and editing The Oxford Handbook of Iris Murdoch (2028).

You can find out more about him and his work here:

https://www.chi.ac.uk/people/miles-leeson/

Iris Murdoch

Iris Murdoch was born in Dublin in 1919. After working in the Treasury and in the UN, she discovered philosophy, eventually becoming Fellow at St Anne’s College, Oxford. Her philosophical concerns are at the heart of the 25 novels for which she became famous, gaining the Whitbread Prize for The Sacred and Profane Love Machine and the Booker Prize for The Sea, The Sea. Until her death in 1999, she lived in Oxford with her husband, the academic and critic, John Bayley. She wrote poetry all her life.

The Iris Murdoch Society

Buy the book: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/470920/poems-from-an-attic-by-murdoch-iris/9781784746124

Music: “The Silver Swan” (O. Gibbons), performed by Denis Carpenter, Clara IMSLP (CC BY 3.0): https://clara.imslp.org/work/51148 — <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/" rel="noopener…

Season 4

Medieval Women: In Their Own Words interview with Dr Eleanor Jackson and Julian Harrison

In this episode Martin Nathan and Tabitha Potts interview Lead Curator Dr Eleanor Jackson and Julian Harrison, about the British Library’s latest blockbuster exhibition, Medieval Women: In Their Own Words, where visitors will discover how the voices of medieval women still resonate across the centuries and speak powerfully to our world today.

We discuss famous historical figures such as Joan of Arc and Julian of Norwich as well as discovering forgotten women such as the the rebel Margaret Starr who joined in the Peasant’s Revolt, Maria Moriana, a woman who argued that slavery was illegal in order to prevent herself being sold, and the mediaeval Welsh poet Gwerful Mechain who wrote a poem praising the vagina.

Medieval Women: In Their Own Words runs at the British Library from 25 October 2024 – 2 March 2025. The exhibition is supported by Joanna and Graham Barker and Unwin Charitable Trust.

Reading: Hafsa bint al-Hajj, translated by Yasmine Seale.

Music: Early Music New York, Frederick Renz, Director, which comes from “Music for Medieval Love; Early Music New York, Frederick Renz, Director; exCathedra Records, USA.”

This episode was produced by Tabitha Potts

Tabitha Potts is a short story writer and novelist, recognised with an Honourable Mention in the Alpine Fellowship Writing Prize. Her debut novel will be published by Rowan Prose Publishing in 2026.