Hello

I took this adjacent photo from a rooftop of a multi-storey residential building off Nathan Road in Kowloon, Hong Kong in the summer of 2019. The lit-up doormat, bright red with gilded traditional script across it, is illuminated beside a loose pair of briefs or pyjama bottoms. Although upside down, it reads ‘Welcome’.

I started writing in Hong Kong. Since then, I have built up a body of work that is growing, and hopefully it never stops doing that. This website features all my creative work, published writing, radio shows, audio projects, and essays.

— Charlie Jermyn

Bog Bodies Press

I write for publications produced by Bog Bodies Press. C

  1. Mnemotope 002 - Published prose called ‘Lugworms under the mirage’

  2. Mnemotope 004 - Published prose called ‘The Passage of Pallets’

  3. Mnemotope 007 - Published prose called ‘Diving Bells in Sludge’

The Land

All About Alliums - I Published prose called ‘The onion, the boy, the basket, the mayhem’ based on a sighting of Jan Steen’s ‘A School for Boys and Girls (1670)’

Transcript Issue One

The essay Elsewhere, Walking in the Peatlands documents a ten-hour experiment conducted in August 2021: a walk from Leiden to Amsterdam in search of creative enlightenment.

If you would like to listen a recorded version of the essay, click the Soundcloud link. I interspersed each hour with music that reflected the landscape and circumstances in which I found myself. I hope you enjoy it. Lace up your boots, join my past self and my current self, my afterthoughts, on a stroll through the Groene Hart.

In the words of Bob Dylan in ‘My Back Pages’ —

“I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.’

Het Hem — The Couch

Essay 1

A devilish grin, a suburban carpark

“Essayist and poet Charlie Jermyn makes a do-it-yourself pilgrimage through museum, muck, rain, wind and pub to visit Jan Steen’s old haunts"

Essay 2

The distant bungee jumper, a dangling herring

“Charlie Jermyn was on a mission to discover the history of the North Sea resort town of Scheveningen. The essay tracks Charlie’s disorientating pilgrimage through a haze of mystical sea creatures, marshland, beached whales, kibbling, hungry gulls, and bungee jumpers.”

Essay 3

A neon palindrome, lessons from the crouching man

“As subject matter, artists have forever been drawn to the apocalypse. Creation and destruction are at opposite poles of a spectrum, yet they reverberate off one another; one only exists if the other does, too. Something comes from nothing, nothing becomes something — and the role of art, as time goes on, is to dangle somewhere in the space between. As viewers, what lessons must we take from the works of Hieronymous Bosch and Antony Gormley?”

Onomatopee ‘The Vendor’ - Published prose called ‘Balkbrug and Dogwood’

More Poetry is Needed

[Stranded FM]

I am a monthly resident at Stranded FM Utrecht with my show 'More Poetry is Needed'

Listen back to all the shows, all kinds of everything in poetry and music.

Each show I take a poet or poets part of a certain movement and discuss their cultural impact and imprint on a place in time: Music, poetry and personal reflections.

The show name is based on an artwork by Jeremy Deller (picture above), commissioned as part of a Dylan Thomas 100 project [Pictured] More Poetry is Needed is plastered on a wide wall at the back end of Swansea's Quadrant Shopping Centre. A reminder to commercial shoppers and the lines of parked cars: everybody and everywhere could do with more poetry.