Beerstorming with Charlotte Brontë in New York

Beerstorming with Charlotte Brontë in New York is a work documenting Mary Taylor’s friendship with Charlotte Brontë by one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s most innovative multi-award-winning writers. The project was funded by Creative New Zealand.

Rachel Fenton set out to New York from Aotearoa via Chicago to research one of Yorkshire and Aotearoa’s most overlooked significant writers but found herself - a working-class woman with dyscalculia - uncovering much more.

Written over five intensive cold days in New York’s libraries but spanning the author’s native Yorkshire and New Zealand, from the mid-nineteenth century to the first days of Donald Trump’s Presidency, Beerstorming with Charlotte Brontë in New York is ultimately about the triumph of friendship over distance.

There’s a wonderfully meta quality to the way you layer library life with Charlotte, with your own home, with the strangeness of New York, and the act of researching itself. There’s an alien feeling to the poems in your book, a process for the narrator of trying to get to grips with cold weather, homesickness, and an unfathomable city. But there’s friendship, too, with a woman called Charlotte. Beautiful, atmospheric work

- Nuala O’Connor, poet and author of Nora (Harper Collins) and Seaborne (New Island)

Rachel Fenton’s Charlotte Brontë is the best friend anyone could want: someone who is there, who doesn’t judge and understands the drive to write and love of books. She’s a sounding board, someone you can run seemingly-daft ideas past and get useful replies. Someone to share a beer with. The poems explore the nature of friendships, how we make family when our actual relatives aren’t available (for whatever reason) and the need to communicate and share stories to make sense of our worlds. The poems are engaging and hold their charm.

- Emma Lee, The Significance of a Dress (Arachne Press)