Bending The Arc
Bending The Arc publishes stories, poems and features that bend the arc of the possible towards a thriving future on Earth. As a subscriber to Bending The Arc you’ll receive new, thrutopian work directly to your inbox for a fortnight twice a year.
The editors Laura Baggaley, Ilse Pedler, Katherine Stansfield, Hilary Watson & Alice Willitts are writers from different corners of the United Kingdom – we are poets, novelists, essayists, storytellers. We have a shared belief that better futures are achievable, and that imagination is the key to igniting change.
Our current writing practices are thrutopian. We tackle the dark and difficult challenges of the present day in a spirit of stubborn optimism. Our aim is to write thriving, desirable futures into being.
We followed Manda Scott’s (self-study) Thrutopian Masterclass. Each week for six months, we heard from changemakers and practitioners in a range of disciplines and discussed how we might incorporate these lessons into our own thinking. It was a crash course in practical, concrete information, covering (to name just a few) net positive cities, regenerative business practices, alternative political structures, new currencies, circular economies, renewable energy projects, new employment models, theatre collectives, sustainable agriculture, heroic myths, sociocracy, ecological civilisations...
We were inspired!
We learnt that there isn’t just one path to a positive, liveable future. There are many. But the path we’re currently on isn’t one of them. Change is urgently needed. The human race needs to act differently, to live differently, which necessitates changes in thinking, but it’s hard to make things happen when you haven’t yet imagined what’s possible.
Thrutopian writing imagines ways through to a world we could live in and be glad to leave to future generations. It tells stories about tangible change and walks us along the challenging path from here and now to a hopeful, liveable tomorrow. It accepts unpredictability and upheaval as foundational to the times that we’re living in, but doesn't dwell in that fear.
We agree with Jim Dator that “any useful statement about the future should at first seem ridiculous”. We dare to be absurdly hopeful.
Our aim is to inspire writers far and wide to explore thrutopian ideas in their own work, so that readers everywhere can have their own imaginations ignited towards what’s possible, and what’s desirable for tomorrow.
We hope to start an avalanche of possibilities, not to be unique ice crystals working alone. May our magazine be the start of something bigger – for now, we showcase bending the arc of the possible.
Read our latest issue and find out more here: Bending The Arc Magazine.
We’ll Meet You There by Ilse Pedler, Hilary Watson & Alice Willitts is inspired by the notion of ‘thrutopia’, a narrative that neither succumbs to the paralysing horror of dystopia nor the disconnected fantasy of utopia. Instead, thrutopias chart a viable path between the two, a route from where we are now to where we need to be.
This pamphlet is urgent and restorative - deeply attentive to the world in its precarity and insistent about the possibility of healing. Weaving the poems of three talented poets together, the polyphony of the collaboration is striking - each voice, while distinct, contributes to a layered experience that resists singularity in favour of a more dynamic and inclusive form of witness. We’ll Meet You There was published just in time for the Spring Equinox, on 20th March 2026.
Buy the book from Dialect Press.