Try To Be Better is a multi-disciplinary engagement with the idiosyncratic creative practice of W. S. Graham, foregrounding experiment and process. Contemporary writers and artists respond to prompts Graham left in notebooks and letters to create original poetry, illustration, sculpture, painting, scholarship and more.

Featuring: Astrid Alben, Nuar Alsadir, Marianne Røthe Arnesen, Edwina Attlee, Tom Betteridge, Rachael Boast, Nancy Campbell, Thomas A. Clark, Holly Corfield Carr, Lauren Doughty, Bobby Dowler, Aisha Farr, Natalie Ferris, Isabel Galleymore, Callie Gardner, Christopher P. Green, Oliver Griffin, Will Harris, Lesley Harrison, Daisy Lafarge, Zigmunds Lapsa, Maureen N. McLane, Lucy Mercer, Aimée Parrott, Natalie Pollard, Paloma Proudfoot, Denise Riley, Ben Sanderson, Denise Saul, Lucy Stein, Amy & Oliver Thomas-Irvine, Nick Thurston and Donya Todd.

“Where and how does a body of work live? In its published, most public and most stable forms? Or somehow also in its drafts, its notebooks, in all the partial and unrealized projects still-to-come? And what can we do – what could or what should we be doing? – as readers struck, moved, provoked by these materials, to keep them alive? I read Try To Be Better, following the work of W.S. Graham, as the most vitalizing set of responses to these questions – as an open invitation to think variously with and through the responsibilities of responsive reading. I will keep this celebratory, out-ward facing collection at my elbow as I work. I will teach (myself) from it, trying hard to be better in my own way.” – Kate Briggs, author of This Little Art

“Try To Be Better is a wonderfully various collection of responses to Graham’s work. It’s exactly the kind of conversation, full of taut silences, vivid tangential thoughts and sudden confluences of awareness, that Graham aimed for. Try To Be Better is a unique and very timely project. It enters territory that is inaccessible to purely academic study, ‘releasing’ Graham’s poetry for a new phase of life in a new generation. It proposes a model for alternative forms of literary critique and response that it would be good to see more widely adopted.” – Michael Bird