No Spider Harmed in the Making of this Book: An Anthology of Spiderlit for Arachne's Eighth Anniversary

Eight years ago, when I started Arachne Press, I was searching for a suitable name, and came up with a short-list of 5 I wanted something that felt like it had some history, and a strong female statement of intent. I sent that list of 5 to everyone I knew who had anything to do with publishing authors, creative writing tutors, librarians, publishers, printers opinion was fairly evenly divided, then someone came back saying 'anything but Arachne because I hate spiders and other people who hate spiders won t buy the books' and I thought 'Really? Really??' and being of a contrary nature, that made my mind up for me.

Arachne was on the list in the first place because we wanted out website to be integral, and because as I writer myself I often use spinning and weaving as a metaphor in my writing and as a metaphor for writing and because one of my very first published stories was Arachne s Daughters which tells the story of a talk given by a spider (in semaphore) at an archive meeting of the Arachno-Lesbian league, 13 years after the revolution

Fast forward seven years and watching the historic judgement of the Supreme Court in rejecting the legality of the prorogation of Parliament, I was entranced by Lady Hale s spider brooch, and texted my partner, who as outside the court: ' It s going to be alright she s wearing a spider'. A completely illogical response, but as I turned off the TV and went back to my desk I thought, time for a spider anthology, and Oh! Its our eighth anniversary next August! I was not expecting many stories and poems, and was resigned to publishing a slim volume of eight poems and eight stories, and possibly including Arachne s Daughters, but no! This was the biggest response we ve ever had to a call out, despite my strictures to avoid horror, and that no spider should die; except, perhaps, heroically. So thank you to all those writers who upheld my faith in human nature and thank you to Lady Hale for giving me the nudge to celebrate spiders properly.

David Mathews is one of the winners of the Solstice Shorts Festival Short Story Competition. His story in Solstice Shorts: Sixteen Stories about Time is Wednesday Afternoon.
For 35 years David was a work psychologist. That gave him a license to mind other people’s business. He comes from Wales and lives in Bath and SW France. Recently his collection of short stories was shortlisted for the Impress Prize, Brittle Star magazine published his story ‘Florence, who made mustard’, and Audio Arcadia are currently recording ‘Removed’ about a man who looks for stones.

Sarah Lawson was born in Indiana and educated at Indiana University and Glasgow University, but has lived in London since before decimalisation. Her poems, translations, and book reviews have been published widely. Her translation of Christine de Pisan’s Treasure of the City of Ladies (1406) was its first English translation (Penguin Classics). Her translation of Moratín’s El sí de las niñas was performed at the Prince Theatre in Greenwich, and her own play, ‘Gertrude, Queen of Denmark’, a feminist take on Hamlet, was performed at the Lion and Unicorn in Kentish Town. Her poetry collections are Below the Surface (Loxwood Stoneleigh, 1996) and All the Tea in China (Hearing Eye, 2005); Hearing Eye has also published her pamphlets, Twelve Scenes of Malta and Friends in the Country, and a haiku collection, The Wisteria’s Children (2009).

Sarah has a poems in The Other Side of Sleep and No Spider Harmed in the Making of this Book, and a short story in Departures

Sarah is one of six poets featured in Vindication.

Kate Foley is a widely published, prize-winning poet and former president of Suffolk Poetry Society. She has read in many UK and European locations. Her first collection, Soft Engineering was short listed for best first collection at Aldeburgh.

Her working life has ranged from delivering babies to conserving delicate archaeological material. She became Head of English Heritage’s scientific and technical research laboratories. Although she has always written poetry it wasn’t until she gave up the day job that she began to publish more widely.

She now lives with her wife, between Amsterdam and Suffolk, where she performs, writes, edits, leads workshops and whenever possible works with artists in other disciplines.

Cherry Potts is the Director of Arachne Press, for whom she is editor of almost all our anthologies and runs the Annual Solstice Shorts Festival.
Cherry is the author of an epic fantasy novel, two collections of short stories, a photographic diary of a community opera, and has had many stories in anthologies, magazines and online. Her novel of sibling hatred in the 1920s, The Bog Mermaid, won the Quill LGBTQ+ Prose prize 2022.