OUTSIDE THE BOX – interdisciplinary research seminar series
Autumn Programme 2021
Tuesday, 5th October – AUTHENTICITY & CREATIVITY
There’s a reason people don’t swim in dresses – Sally Tissington
Sally Tissington mixes performance art and creative writing in order to energise her writing and art practice (imagework, and arts-based autoethnography) through taking greater creative risk. The risk-taking involves stopping self-censoring and instead acting on all ideas that arise from the unconscious, making these ideas visible as a piece of art. She then uses the art pieces as inspiration for her creative writing.
Sally Tissington is a writer and artist with a published novel and many short stories. She has worked at the universities of Warwick and Coventry teaching creative writing and writing for wellbeing. Recently she has worked with Headway, the brain injury charity, designing and delivering an art and creative writing for wellbeing course. Website – makingstrange.me
The Evergreen Tree of Diabolical Knowledge: researching a historical novel – Kevan Manwaring
In researching a dual narrative novel, set in both the mid-18th Century, and the Nineties, Kevan Manwaring drew upon historical research and autobiographical experiences of living in the city of Bath for 14 years. Bringing to life figures from Hanoverian Bath, was coupled with the ethical and aesthetic challenges of fictionalising memories from twenty years ago. Bound to a specific location, writing the novel involved researching circulating libraries, architecture, secret societies, folklore, and local history. Autofiction collides with the counterfactual, blurring notions of authenticity and fictionality.
Kevan Manwaring is the Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Arts University Bournemouth. He is the editor of Heavy Weather: tempestuous tales of stranger climes from The British Library; Ballad Tales: traditional British ballads retold; and author of the prize-winning novel, Black Box, adapted into an audio drama by Alternative Stories and Fake Realities. He is a contributor to New Writing, Writing in Practice, Axon, TEXT, Revenant, and Gothic Nature. He blogs and tweets as the Bardic Academic.
Tuesday, 9th November – ECOPOETICS & FEMINISM
Poetry / Landscape: ecopoetry as restorative act – Helen Moore
In examining and decolonising notions of landscape, I show how my ecopoetry is an interdisciplinary practice with its roots in animistic European traditions. Drawing on poems inspired by landscapes in Australia, the north of Scotland, Somerset and Dorset, I show how my work is socially and ecologically engaged and has an activist intention, which aims to highlight and restore ecological and cultural dimensions that Western industrialised societies, in particular my own (white British), have marginalised/erased. It is poetry as restorative act. A signpost towards regenerative cultures, where we value the Earth, and particularly the land/bioregion we inhabit, as our community.
Helen Moore is an award-winning British ecopoet with three collections, Hedge Fund, And Other Living Margins (2012), ECOZOA (2015), acclaimed as ‘a milestone in the journey of ecopoetics’, and The Mother Country (2019) exploring British colonial history. Helen has shared her work on international stages, including India, Australia and Italy. She offers an online mentoring programme, Wild Ways to Writing, which guides people on a creative writing journey into deeper Nature connection. Her work is supported by Arts Council England, and she is currently collaborating on a cross arts-science project responding to pollution in Poole Bay and its river-systems. www.helenmoorepoet.com
A Girdle Round the Earth – Mary-Jane Holmes
‘The future of feminisms is in the transnational and the transnational is made through translation’ Olga Castro states. Within this transcultural context, through a deep engagement with poetic form and formal transference I hope to extend the possibilities of language beyond essentialist constructions of genre, race and sexuality while finding expression for a new set of experiences.
My creative project experiments with poetic devices ‘borrowed’ from a medieval Iberian strophic fixed form called the Muwashshaha; devices such as diglossia, interweaving several languages together, codeswitching, voice appropriation and contrafacture, as well as translating the Muwashshaha into an English version of itself with the potential of opening a discursive, transnational space for female poets seeking to express themselves on their own terms.
Mary-Jane Holmes is currently studying for a PhD funded by the AHRC in poetry and translation at Newcastle University. Mary-Jane’s poetry collection Heliotrope with Matches and Magnifying Glass is published by Pindrop Press. Her award-winning pamphlet Dihedral is published by Live Canon Press her novella Don’t Tell the Bees, is published by Ad Hoc Fiction and a new Flash fiction chapbook is published by V.Press on September 6th.
Tuesday, 7th December – GEOPOETICS, DANCE, & MOVING IMAGE PRACTICE
Circling and Circling (again) – Ceri Morgan and Anna Macdonald
This presentation reflects on Circling – an interdisciplinary, collaborative and participatory project on persistent pain. Bringing together geopoetics, dance and moving-image practice, we devised prompts/scores for participant workshops, with the aim of fostering different ways of thinking about and experiencing pain. The project led to six new films (Anna Macdonald), along with writing and images by participants. The artworks can be viewed in an online artefact, Circling (again): http://www.circlingartproject.co.uk/. Collectively, they offer a sense of the way pain can affect everyday journeys, and change people’s senses of scale and perspective.
Professor of Place-writing and Geohumanities, Ceri Morgan works on geopoetics as a participatory practice, leading workshops or ‘happenings’ on a variety of themes, including mining, food, and deindustrialisation. Anna Macdonald is a dance and moving image artist, based at Central St Martins Art School (UAL), who specialises in participatory and interdisciplinary arts practice.
All events will be on Zoom 6pm-8pm. To register contact Dr Kevan Manwaring, Arts University Bournemouth: kmanwaring@aub.ac.uk