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Online workshop engaging with critical questions relating to life-writing, memoir, travel, autobiography & experimental writing. The second of an ongoing series of online seminars with Davina Quinlivan.
Participants will receive access to the recording, 24 hours after the event and can playback for a month.
In the late 1800s, my two great grandfathers leave Ireland and Scotland with the East India Company. Then, two sons marry two Burmese daughters. These daughters are here with me now. They are holding maps in their hands, which they cannot read. Places they no longer recognise. They pass their language on to me, which I can only try to translate. I am repeating the words back to them, over the folds in time, in my Devon home. I’m trying to search for a word. It sounds like a broken geology inside of me, where Burmese rubies meet the red Devon soil, or perhaps it is just the word ‘broken’. I’m trying hard not to think it is that word. It sounds like the church bells from Stoke Canon tolling over the flat fields, and the cry of a tired child dragging a school bag near the front door. Sonorous chattering of wrappers from Chinese preserved plums and my mother’s hand’s draining rice over the sink. A glass of water on the edge of the table, a liquid syllable caught in my throat.
I have always been fascinated by maps. These objects are closely associated with imperialistic notions of place and identity, but they can also take the form of mind-maps, maps of the body, maps of emotion. How do we translate our understanding of place in order to make our own maps through language? We will think about a range of examples from creative non-fiction to poetry including the work of Carol Ann Duffy (‘The Map-Woman’), Maddie Mortimer (Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies), Noreen Masud (A Flat Place), the films of Jane Campion and Agnes Varda and the experimental writing of Dalia Neis.
This class is aimed at all levels of ability and it is truly designed to inspire creativity rather than to exclude.
While I encourage participants to bring along their own ideas, it might be useful to read some of the work that is available to download free, which you can find below.
- Black Sun by Julia Kristeva (the Introduction can be found here)
- On Dalia Neis, ‘Gals and Gales’
- Review of Maddie Mortimer’s Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies
- Maps of our Spectacular Bodies by Maddie Mortimer
- Agnes Varda and Tarot
- Granddaughter of the Octopus by Remy Ngamije
- Sarah Shin and Grace M. Cho on Mourning and Ghosts
Davina Quinlivan is a Lecturer in the Department of English and Creative Writing at The University of Exeter and Writer in Residence with Literature Works/Quay Words and the Royal Devon and Exeter Institution Spring 2023. Her memoir, Shalimar: A Story of Place and Migration (2022) was recently published with Little Toller Books and her creative non-fiction essays and short stories have appeared in The Willowherb Review, Litro, Arty, The Clearing, Caught by The River, and in collaboration with The Countryside Alliance and The Museum of English Rural Life.
Her work has featured as part of programmed, public events with The Wallace Collection, The Wellcome Trust, The Urban Tree Festival and The Serpentine Gallery. For several years, she has run the popular seminar series F: For Flânerie at The Freud Museum and is part of the founding teaching ensemble at The New School of the Anthropocene, alongside Marina Warner and Robert Macfarlane.
Shalimar was selected by Spiracle Audiobooks as one of stories which would launch their new indie-press focused platform in 2022. Prior to moving to Exeter, she taught for 12 years as a Senior Lecturer in The School of Art, Kingston University. She is currently working on a follow-up to Shalimar entitled Waterlines, on rivers and migration, trauma and healing, and a novel set between Cornwall and the Black Sea.
Members get 20% off with their Members discount code.
