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Ryan Stephen Thornton

Poet, Writer, Performance maker, historian.
Queer/Bisexual - he/him

Pisces☼ Leo☾ Cancer↑

Born in Leeds, dragged up in Doncaster, & currently living & studying in York. (I think that makes me born & bred & dripping, quite frankly!)

I read a lot of books*. I read a lot about history. I read a lot about queer history. Somewhere between the two I find York’s queer history. And I make performance work out of that. I work out where people have walked, lived, loved, & fucked.

My Practice-led PhD in Theatre & Performance started with a big red wig, and having evolved on an almost weekly basis since then, it’s since developed through a re-framing of Sontag’s Notes on Camp to apply to a theory of “queer energy”, under a chapter titled “Reading Queerness”. Other times, it might also be performing ghosts, dark tourism, poems about Icarus, or the poetics of failure. Other chapters include “Writing Queerness” & “Walking The Archive”.

My current project, building on having created an archive of queer presence in York, centres around responding to queer sites & objects with the writing & recording of poetry, “the ghosts” of the queer past, historical context, & ways of creating moments of queerness in the present day. The intention is to produce a queer walking tour led by audio narratives & a series of queer world-making tasks.

My writing often incorporates history, ghost stories, the gothic, comedy, wordplay, queerness, otherness, & witty euphemisms. My poetry has been published, or is forthcoming, in Impostor Journal, Hearth & Coffin, Coffin Bell Journal, Cape Magazine, coalition works, StepAway Magazine & Powders Press.

I have worked as a Casual Academic at York St. John University since 2019, giving lectures on a Performance Theory module, including lectures on Augusto Boal & the poetics of failure. I have also supervised third-year undergraduate students completing their dissertations on the subjects of writing, directing, and queer performance, and their final independent performances.

Nowt So Queer is the research output under which all of my creative writing & performance work around my PhD lives. It is the culmination of all my many avenues of research, creative exploration, & my artistic practice.

My PhD is due to be completed in 2027, (so roughly the halfway point between now & the pending apocalypse.) This is partly why my research focuses on the performing & re-writing of “history”, while the potential for queer futurity chapter will become increasingly shorter as the world falls down around what’s left of York worth taking a walking tour around.

My aesthetic is that of the classic chaotic bisexual. Parts vampire, pirate, steampunk, children’s TV presenter, dark academia, & a lot of velvet, brocade, & corduroy. I suppose it all culminates in the niche of Chaotic Academia, hence my blog title of Poet Chaotique.

*I buy a lot of books.