Fig Tree Coal Special - Submission Call
Poems about mining, mining communities and the 84-85 Strike.
UPDATE: We are looking for poems to include in our printed anthology in addition to those already submitted and included in the two special issues that you can read now. The extended closing date is now August 31st 2025.
When I created The Fig Tree, I always had the idea that in addition to the regular issues, I would produce one extra issue per year on a theme. The Fig Tree itself is unthemed, any patterns that you might detect within an issue are coincidental, even though related poems may be placed together.
For 2025, the theme for the Special Issue will be Coal, encompassing mining, miners, mining communities and, because we are currently in its 40th Anniversary, the Strike of 1984-1985.
I was brought up in a mining community in Derbyshire in the 1960s and 1970s. I could see the (by then closed) Morton Colliery from my bedroom window. It continued being active for years, pumping ochre water into the local stream to allow other mines to continue operating. I knew one of the miners who died in the disaster at Markham in 1973 and my family was full of miners and men connected to the industry. The women were connected too, of course - maintaining the household while never knowing if their husbands or sons would become another of the casualties of an industry that, although much safer at the end, had harvested so many lives and injured many more. Mining was the inspiration for my poetry when I began writing in 2017, my first poem being a narrative ballad poem about the death of my Mum’s uncle Jim in a mining accident in 1935. I have written twice about this - the second of these is below. I had left home and was working in Birmingham in 1984, the first in my family to go to University. I was never going down the mine - they were a special breed and I wasn’t one of them. I had to rely on second hand reports about the strike, including from my Dad, who was an engineer who had been redeployed to keep the mines open while the men were out. It was grim and nobody won in the end. So, the subject is very close to my heart and I’ve been reading and writing mining poems on and off for the last seven years so I felt it was appropriate to put a collection together for The Fig Tree, with your help of course.
The submission guidelines are a bit different this time (check the special Submissions page for full details) and the issue will not have a Featured Poet, and it will hopefully contain more poems. The main difference is that I will be allowing previously published poems, but please let me know where they have been published before and please send in new ones if you have them. I will also accept a larger number of submissions per person.
The issue will be produced when I think I have enough of the right poems to publish, but there is a provisional closing date of April 30th 2025.
In the meantime, here is my second poem about Uncle Jim. Based on a newspaper article about the accident and its aftermath.
An Inquest Into a Mining Death, 1935
The jury donated their fees to the mother
of the dead miner.
The words of the witnesses had hung
in the stale air, crushing and suffocating.
How he was in the wrong place
at the wrong time.
How the company was not at fault.
It was sad of course, but part of life.
Before they filed out into the soot-soaked streets
she made sure she thanked them all
for their sympathy and generosity.