Oxford’s Woodstock Bookshop will be hosting its first in-store poetry event on 20 November, when MSt tutor Jamie McKendrick will be joined by Jennie Feldman to give readings from their most recent collections. Jamie will be reading from Anomaly (Faber & Faber) and The Years (Arc Publications) while Jennie will read from No Cherry Time (Arc Publications).
Entry is free, the event starts at 18:30 and tickets must be booked here.
MSt Course Director, Dr Clare Morgan, will be reading from her new short story collection Scar Tissue at the Chapter Arts Centre in Cardiff, at 7pm on Thursday 10 November.
This event is free, but registration is essential, here.
Scar Tissue offers a fresh perspective on the nature of individual existence in all its transient vulnerability. As we travel from Wales and the Marches to places as far away as India, Paris, New England, Scandinavia and Spain, these lyrical, evocative, and searching stories unflinchingly explore the darker and more challenging aspects of emotional, sexual and familial relationships, while simultaneously celebrating the joys of being alive in an unfathomable world. Scar Tissue is published alongside a re-print of Clare’s first collection An Affair of the Heart.
MSt tutor Jenny Lewis’s Gilgamesh Retold (Carcanet Classics, 2018) was heralded on publication as being, ‘innovative, graceful, erudite and utterly unputdownable,’ and selected as a book of the year by publications including New Statesman, London Review of Books and The New Yorker.
Gilgamesh Retold has recently been dramatised and will be performed as a verse play in Oxford on Thursday 24 November 2022, 19:30 at St Edmund Hall, alongside The Tyring House, by Lynn Thornton. Tickets available here or at the door.
In a new short story collection published by Seren on 22 September, MSt Director Clare Morgan offers a fresh perspective on the nature of individual existence in all its transient vulnerability.
Scar Tissue ranges broadly in geographic scope. From deep country on the Welsh borders to the metropolitan precinct of London; from the forests of Scandinavia to neatly clapboarded New England; from a Spanish finca to Dulles airport; and from the steamy environs of Mumbai to the cooler spaces of a medieval farmhouse in Snowdonia – all these disparate realms intersect with the perennial human need to belong and the impossibility of doing so.
Seren have, at the same time, republished Morgan’s earlier collection, An Affair of the Heart, in which men and women reckon the worth of relationships past and present, from steamy New Orleans to urbane Paris, from metropolitan Chelsea to the industrial valleys and rural hinterlands of Wales.
In these lyrical, evocative and searching stories, Clare Morgan unflinchingly explores the darker and more challenging aspects of emotional, sexual and familial relationships, while simultaneously celebrating the joys of being alive in an unfathomable world.
More information here.
John Murray has snapped up a “dark, subversive and surprising” book from MSt alum Christine Anne Foley.
Jocasta Hamilton, publisher, acquired UK and Commonwealth rights to Bodies at auction from Sara O’Keefe at Aevitas. It will publish in summer 2023.
Hamilton said: “Bodies is urgent and brilliant on the terrifyingly thin lines between love and desire, vulnerability and power, safety and violence, acceptance and rage. It’s a novel of our times and Christine is a brilliant new voice.”
More information here.
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In her new book, Dr Anna Beer investigates the lives and achievements of eight women writers, uncovering a startling and unconventional history of literature.
Eve Bites Back places the female contemporaries of Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton centre stage in the history of literature in English, uncovering stories of dangerous liaisons and daring adventures. From Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, Aemilia Lanyer and Anne Bradstreet, to Aphra Behn, Mary Wortley Montagu, Jane Austen and Mary Elizabeth Braddon, these are the women who dared to write.
More information here.
Songs We Learn from Trees: Translation workshop and reading 5 May 2022
All are welcome to join the Translation Exchange and translator Chris Beckett, to work together translating an Amharic poem into English. *No knowledge of Amharic is necessary to join in!*
The translation workshop is at 16:30 – register here. It will be followed at 18:30 with readings by Ethiopian poets and a drinks reception, for which you can register here.
Though the pandemic has posed many challenges for students, it has also bred virtual community building leading to innovative ideas and creative ventures.
One such virtual project brought to life by MSt student Anna Seidel and alumna Caroline King is The Napkin Poetry Review: a unique platform advocating for interdsciplinary convergence, polymathic thinking and the power of poetic language in communicating these ideals. In just over a year, their project has grown into a community attracting c.2,000 online readers and destination for consultation and artistic collaboration surrounding poetry and its science as well as how to break down barriers between academic disciplines.
This past summer, co-founders Anna Seidel and Caroline King were asked to develop an artistic installation and poetic design concept to be presented globally for Louis Vuitton as part of their “visionaries” initiative to celebrate the 200th birthday of Mr. Vuitton himself.
Beyond the unique visual design of the journal, the pair also pursue questions around the science and power of poetry as a mental framework and thinking tool. This exploration has been fueled by conversations with scientists, artists, and innovators like Amanda Gorman, Dana Gioia, Dr. Marcelo Gleiser, Dr. Eugene Wassiliwisky, and Alexi Lubomirski to learn more about how they’ve studied poetry and incorporated it into their daily lives.
If you are a cross-disciplinary academic, visual artist, poet or cultural organization and want to exchange, you can reach The Napkin Poetry Review at: napkinpoetryreview@gmail.com
Snow Widows mines never-before-seen archive material to reconstruct the lives of five women – wives, mothers and sisters of the men participating in Robert Falcon Scott’s polar expedition – MSt alumna Katherine MacInnes offers a fresh and utterly different perspective on the race to the South Pole.
Sara Wheeler in The Spectator writes that MacInnes, ‘has produced an elegant, densely textured work, like a tapestry … Snow Widows is a welcome contribution to polar studies and to the popular new genre examining the women left behind. They were only left behind in a geographical sense, after all; their inner lives were as richly complicated – as well as perhaps as unknowable – as those of their frozen-bearded menfolk.
More information here.
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