Why Raveller?

Raveller is a ‘Janus word’: one that means both itself and its opposite. To ‘ravel’ is to unpick, to untangle. But it also means to entangle, or to weave back together.

Our current historical moment is sometimes called ‘The Great Unraveling’: a time when so much of the fabric that holds us, and society, together threatens to fall apart. At this time, as writers and humans, we are called upon to look in many directions. We acknowledge this careless, deliberate, heartbreaking destruction. We seek to unpick the knots of how it happened. We bear witness to the countless lifelines still being cut each day – and our own unravelling in the face of them.

But ‘Raveller’ also reflects our hope of going beyond just critique and comprehension. Of weaving unexpected connections between words, ideas, people. Of creating something new from these scraps of loss. And of following the spools of thread, hopeful still that they might lead us out of this labyrinth.  

Unpick ‘Raveller’ a little more, and you will find many of the other strands of our manifesto. Joy is there (revel), as is discovery (revelation) and a touch of the wild (rabble, rebel).