EDITORIAL MAY 1ST 2025
Editorial: in the beginning was the chain …
Try being a bus driver and running a monthly poetry/spoken word event at a local pub. One night you’ve finished on time – maybe even a bit early – and the traffic is light as you drive home from the depot. You shovel a light meal down you, freshen up, get changed (rocking up at a boozer in uniform is a big no-no, professionally speaking) and head out to the venue. The event starts at 8pm (already a contentious decision as most of your core audience are used to 7.00pm starts for poetry events) and you’re a good few minutes early: certainly there’s enough time to grab a pint, gladhand the evening’s readers and make sure the function room’s been set up properly. You’re relaxed, comfortable, confident and it all goes swimmingly.
Next month, you’re still way off your terminus point, mired in traffic that seems to have modelled its immobility and miles-long tailback on the M25, and you should have pulled into the depot, interior lights extinguished and ‘SORRY NOT IN SERVICE’ on the signboard, twenty minutes ago. The next hour passes in a haze of gnashed teeth, mild perspiration and a fixation on the ticking away of every minute. Somehow you complete your run, navigate ridiculously excessive traffic on the way home, skip supper, take the fastest shower in history, throw on your casuals and hightail it to the pub. There’s nowhere to park nearby and your ever-increasing circles around the back streets finally secure you a spot half a mile away. You attempt a sprint that sets the ghost of Roger Bannister laughing fit to burst. You arrive five minutes late to your own event, skin the colour of an oil-well fire, hair plastered to forehead, clothes plastered to skin, out of breath and gasping apologies to audience and readers. During the reading, tiredness and irritation kick in. You don’t give the best of yourself. Quite the opposite.
From October 2021 to November 2024, I ran Open Book at the Organ Grinder public house in Nottingham. Its then-manager, Matt, had approached me with the idea of setting up a book group, one of a slate of projected regular events designed to bring clientele back to the pub post-Covid. I suggested a poetry evening instead and Matt gave me cart blanche. After a year, I was joined by Shaun Belcher who created Open Book’s online presence and subsequently received several panicked calls from me at the eleventh hour, formally deputising him as that evening’s MC because life, the universe and contraflow systems had conspired against me.
By late 2024, it became clear that Open Book was unsustainable. Rather than lumber on into irrelevance and dwindling audience numbers, we decided to go out with a bang. Our last hurrah, appropriately enough, was on 5th November 2024. Guy Fawkes Night.
Fast forward a couple of months and the Neil & Shaun Show had relocated to the ’Spoons at Mapperley Top (which is a locality in Nottingham, not someone’s Grindr profile). A couple of drinks each Monday; good company and wide-ranging conversation. I was still driving buses – still am – but retired from the poetry scene. Shaun had retired period. We both missed the hell out of Open Book. Some kind of substitute, sideline or reimagining was inevitable.
At some point, one of us said something to the other, purely speculatively: something about an online arts and culture journal. A platform from which we could fire the odd shot across the bows of safe ‘house style’ mundanity, echo-chamber self-promotion, networker narcissism and everything else that had come to define the so-called ‘poetry scene’. It was all very sketchy at first, then suddenly we were soliciting contributions and Shaun was designing the site in earnest.
Just as in Fight Club, the first rule of Fight Club being that you do not talk about Fight Club, the first rule of our nascent venture was that we did not subscribe to trends, movements or prevailing ideologies.
The second rule of our nascent venture was that we did not subscribe to trends, movements or prevailing ideologies.
Those rules served us well. They still apply.
Fast forward to right now and welcome to CHAINLINK. Forged in the furnace of a Wetherspoons coffee machine. Hammered into shape over an all-day breakfast. They can put the blue plaque up whenever they want.
Neil Fulwood
May 2025