10.15 – 10.45      

Tea and coffee

10.45 – 11.00  

Introduction and welcome - Derek Neale

11.00 – 11.40

Helen Mort: A Line about the Sky – Exploring place in memoir, poetry, and fiction.  Helen’s memoir A Line Above the Sky explores mountain literature and environments, examining the paradox of being a mountaineering mother: always feeling in the wrong place. Are writers also people who continually feel ‘out of place’? Can we use this as a strength in creative-critical evocations of landscape? Helen’s talk will draw on her background as a poet and fiction writer in pursuit of answers (and further questions).

11.40 -  12.20

First panel  - Chaired by Nicola Watson

Ed Hogan: Work/Place - In contemporary short fiction, depictions of work often provide a deep insight into the social and geographical aspects of particular places - both real and imagined. This link between place and work might encourage fiction writers to engage with other disciplines (economics, human geography) and other methods, such as participant observation, and the workers' enquiry. The presentation will feature short fiction addressing these themes and concerns.

Elizabeth Dearnley: The secret diary of Bloomsbury - Since October 2017, the streets, squares and gardens of Bloomsbury have hosted a series of hidden diaries, tucked inside bird boxes for passers-by to find. Originally put in place by Dr Elizabeth Dearnley and Dr Michael Eades (Goldsmiths, University of London) for the 2017 Bloomsbury Festival, over the years the diaries have collected thousands of entries, building up a multi-voiced portrait of the area through thousands of everyday messages, narratives and memoirs left by an ebbing and flowing community of anonymous authors. In this reflection on the project, Elizabeth will share some of the stories collected in their pages. She will also explore ways in which the diaries have acted as a piece of infrastructure tuned to gathering the lore of Bloomsbury, drawing on ideas about narratives of place and urban folklore.

12.20 – 12.30

Break

12.30 – 13.10

Second panel – Chaired by Siobhan Campbell

Sarah Bower: The Rural Uncanny and the Physics of Death: Orford Ness as an Inspiration for Fiction - This mysterious, unstable stretch of the Suffolk coast has been home to a nuclear testing facility, secret radio eavesdropping posts and, if legend is to be believed, a merman who came ashore. What is the special imaginative appeal of this unique place?

Jessica Mookherjee: Poetry as Place and Inner Landscapes: how those journeys shape our work - Poetry can be a psychogeography of how we inhabit a place, how those places inhabit us - our inner landscapes are a fusion between outer and inner places. In both her new works, Notes from a Shipwreck and Desire Lines, Jessica travels landscapes that become fused with myth and history but she will discuss how those landscapes are also creations of all of the stories about them. She will  talk about the use of the sea and coast and how that shapes us and our language, and also how a city can become the 'poem of us'. 

13.10 – 14.00

Lunch

14.00 -  15.00

Philip Seargeant and Sarah Butler: Anarchists and vampires - a virtual walking tour of King's Cross writerly heritage - This session presents a 'virtual  walking tour', facilitated by Philip and Sarah, of the King's Cross area (just north of the conference venue), looking at how place inspired some of the most enduring cultural myths and intellectual trends in global culture. It will combine an audio-visual 'tour' of the area with a writing workshop exploring ways to use the ideas and images from the tour as prompts for your own writing about place. 

See the three films from this session:

Film 1       Film 2      Film 3

15.00 – 15.15

Break

15.15 – 16.00

Third panel – Chaired by Joanne Reardon

Melissa Bailey: The conventional settler narrative is a fabricated myth -  Melissa will be discussing the reality of how the British settlers depended upon exploitation and the wiping out of people and cultures to establish their colony of Australia: themes she is exploring in her novel.

Anne Caldwell:  Alice and the North: Prose poetry as an exploration of place – Anne will discuss the intertwining of character and place in her collection of prose poetry, Alice and the North (Valley Press, 2020). She will go on to talk about why prose poetry is suited to an exploration of place, and how the genre has shaped her current work which is informed by an examination of the themes of home, climate crisis and wonder for the natural world.

16.00 – 16.30

Plenary and closing remarks, chaired by Derek Neale and Nicola Watson, with panel chairs and contributors