About
Learn the story behind Ings Press, its founding, its ethos and the people involved.
Founded by editor, publisher and poet, Mike Farren.
As an editor, I have been and remain part of the Yaffle Press team from that press's foundation in 2019. I have also worked on a wide variety of academic books and journals, and have held editorial roles for several other print publications and websites.
As a writer, I have had three poetry pamphlets published: Pierrot and his Mother (Templar), All of the Moons (Yaffle) and Smithereens (4Word). My poems have appeared in journals including The Rialto, Stand and The Interpreter’s House and in anthologies from Valley Press and The Poetry Business. I am also one of the hosts for two spoken-word nights, Rhubarb at the Triangle in Shipley and Beehive Poets in Bradford, West Yorkshire.
A press focused on authors and on bringing readers the best in contemporary literature
Why 'Ings Press'? An 'ings' is a water meadow - a marshy area on a river's flood plain. A word of Norse origin, it's common in Yorkshire and the north, wherever Vikings settled and named the land.
Strange name for press, then? Perhaps, so here's the origin story! I grew up on a street called Ings Way, in Fairweather Green, Bradford. It was a street that sloped fairly steeply upwards and my family were toward the top, so unlikely to be flooded, though the bottom of the street was adjacent to Chellow Beck, perhaps justifying the name.
Reasonable as it may be to name a press after the street I grew up on, the name did not actually occur to me until after my own first poetry pamphlet had been published, by a company called Templar Poetry. As Templar's Way ran behind my house, it seemed obvious to name my own press after the street that ran to the front.
Between darkness and darkness, through a gap in blackout curtains, I watch the washed-out northern sun crawl across a gable of bone-white brick, listen as the couple with nothing to say sit on the wall and take forever to say it, imagining a world where all directions matter, not only here, only north, only you as you drew me: magnet to my compass; lit mead-hall to my sparrow, in its moment out of the night.
Second Avenue, Heaton
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