Website: www.acknowledgedland.com

Acknowledged Land is a new website set up to cover the literary scene in Northumberland. Literature North East spoke to the site's editor, Paul Batchelor

What is the site and where did the idea come from?
Acknowledged Land is a webzine for writers who live in Northumberland. Our aim is to acknowledge living, working writers, and also indicate some of the area's literary traditions: the name of the site is a reference to a line from Basil Bunting's Northumbrian epic Briggflatts. Acknowledged Land also lists forthcoming literary events in the region. We also run features on writers of prose or poetry.

What's in the first issue?
In the first issue you'll find interviews and commissioned poems by two very different poets: Peter Bennet and Bill Griffiths. Bill edited A Dictionary of North East Dialect (an enlarged edition was published last year) and Peter's recently published Goblin Lawn: Selected Poems, was chosen as a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

You can read poetry from Heather Young and Pippa Little and a short story by Rosalind Kerven, and listen to music and poetry commissioned by New Writing North in memory of Andrew Waterhouse. Sean O'Brien reviews Linda France's latest book, The Toast of the Kit-Cat Club, a Life of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and Ena Frank reviews Philip Robinson's debut novel, That We Might Never Meet Again.

Other features include an extract from Ann Coburn's recent novel for children, Glint, and a piece about her experience as a writer-in-residence at Seven Stories. Then there is our map of Literary Northumberland: simply click a place on the map and you'll find poems about specific places in Northumberland (for example, Philip Larkin's Show Saturday was inspired by the Bellingham Show), alongside poems by the some of the area's literary predecessors - from AC Swinburne to the Border Ballads.

There seem to be a huge number of writers who have made their home in the region, why is that?
Northumberland does indeed have a large community of writers: too many to fit them all in a single issue of Acknowledged Land! There are many practical reasons for being a writer here: few areas in the country have such a support network for writers, from New Writing North's ongoing promotion of writers, to the annual Northern Writer's Awards, to the many small presses in the region.

There are historical reasons as well. On the site, you'll find an essay by Poppy Holden on the border reivers, which draws parallels between Northumberland's rich folk tradition and its violent past as the disputed land between England and Scotland. For whatever reason, the impulse to create art (certainly the impulse to create poetry) seems to be attracted to such borders: the borders between people, between wake and sleep, between law and lawlessness, between the past and the present...

How did you select the poems on the map?
Most of the poems on the map celebrate a particular place in Northumberland. These poems are not necessarily by a Northumberland poet: for example, we include Seamus Heaney's poem Seeing the Sick because it is partly set in Hexham. Others were written by Northumbrian poets we wanted to commemorate, such as Jospeh Skipsey. In the case of Skipsey, we chose a few poems and posted them where they seemed most fitting, such as Morpeth (where Skipsey's first collection was published). At the moment, all the poems on the map have been previously published, and we aren't looking for reader's submissions for this part of the site...

Are you looking for submissions elsewhere for the site?
Yes: in May we will post a call for submissions on the website.

And when are we going to see the next issue?
We are hoping to produce three issues per year. Issue Two should go online in August. You will notice I say 'should'...