Writing Cultures Group

14 March 2024, 12-1pm

"Forty years ago, I created a formula that altered atomic relative distance. I learned how to change the distance between atoms" — Hank Pym.

Fictional characters and imaginary worlds "…have long been on a quest to articulate an alternative vision of life, love, and labor and to put such a vision into practice" (Halberstam, 2011: 2). Last summer, I thought how Marvel's ‘fictional' quantum theories in their story-arcs of Ant-Man and The Wasp may offer other ways of thinking about racism (Ventour-Griffiths, 2023). The subatomic particles that make these characters possible (Pym Particles) – tinier than atoms – shrink the distance between atoms, while increasing density and strength. What if we thought about the impact of everyday racism in this way?

However, papers that use seemingly ‘childish' endeavours, like comic book media, in serious ways risk being ridiculed. Yet, ‘seriousness' in academia tends to be double talk for ‘academic rigour' – also observable through what bell hooks described in, imperialist, capitalist, white supremacist patriarchal culture. Being seen as silly is also what allows trendsetters to think against the grain of normative knowledge production. And though I engage with fields like Critical Race and Whiteness Studies, it was not they who encouraged me to seriously engage with comic media – the eccentric creative world did!

Through the fictional language of ‘quantum' from the Marvel lore, we may use Ant-Man and Wasp to think about the impact of ‘racial microaggressions' on human bodies. What psychiatrist Chester Pierce (1970) coined as ‘microaggression', moves beyond surface worlds. Fictional quantum realties (not quantum physics) may offer real implications in contemporary anti-racism work and the language used to articulate our pain. This paper works to develop Pierce's language via racism / whiteness as subatomic – where make-believe worlds, not just ‘pure facts', are also vital to the human experience.

13 January 2022

Adam Baron is a multi-award winning, best-selling author. His crime novels have been dramatised by BBC Radio 4 and were followed by his highly praised literary novel, Blackheath. Now writing for children, his novels have been translated across Europe. Boy Underwater was Waterstones Book of the Month, The Sunday Times Book of the Month, and one of the Guardian's Books of the Year. In 2022, he will publish two novels, both with HarperCollins (Some Sunny Day and Oscar's Weekend).

In this first talk, you will be treated to a viewing of a brilliant short film, the identity of which will be revealed on the day. Adam will analyse it, unpacking the numerous narrative elements that make it work. He will talk about the ways in which he uses these narrative elements in his own work. The session will be informative, creative, and fun.

21 January 2022

In this session, I will read an extract from a creative-non-fiction/essay hybrid I wrote for the book From Band-Aids to Scalpels: Motherhood Experiences in/of Medicine, published earlier this year. My piece looks at a complex intersection between multiple, simultaneous and out-of-step experiences of para-ability across two interconnected people, myself and my son.

Through a combination of creative life-writing and more traditional essay structure, my piece is performative of the complex dynamics of a specific parent-child relationship. It is structured around anecdotes that draw out particularly heightened moments of awareness around the effects of para-ability on my experience of motherhood. These include my son's minor surgery and one tiny step in the lengthy process towards his autism diagnosis. Both these moments are, for me, deeply affected by my own experience of living with chronic illness and its impact on temporality, trust, and care.

Around these anecdotes I discuss the limits of medical narratives to reflect, or even acknowledge, the unwieldy intricacy of such experiences and I call for a reflection on the alternatives that might serve us better. I argue for life-writing as one possible, powerful, alternative.

28 January 2022

A lecturer in illustration and animation, John used his recent research in the Archives residency at London College of Communication to produce an autobiographical comic book in which he adopted the styles of other artists to express and process aspects of living with multiple sclerosis.

The publication is now held in the Wellcome Collection, the UK's leading institution exploring the connections between art and health, and was named as "Best One-Shot" in the 2020 Broken Frontier awards.

John has continued to publish new autobiographical comics drawing on the archival research conducted during the residency, as well as broadening the scope of his work in comics that explore the contribution graphic medicine can make to disability studies and public health discourse.

2 February 2022

Joanne Limburg has published two collections of poetry with Bloodaxe Books: Feminismo, which was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, and Paraphernalia, a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. She has written one collection for children, Bookside Down, which was shortlisted for the CLPE Poetry Prize and Highly Commended.

Her latest poetry collection is the pamphlet The Autistic Alice, also published by Bloodaxe. Her non-poetry book The Woman Who Thought Too Much, a memoir about OCD, anxiety and poetry, is published by Atlantic Books and her debut novel, A Want of Kindness, was published in July 2015. A second memoir, Small Pieces: A Book of Lamentations, appeared in July 2017.

Joanne recently completed a PhD in Creative Writing at Kingston University. She lectures at De Montfort University in Leicester.

4 March 2022

Theories of the transglossic (Shaw and Upstone 2021) identify a planetary consciousness at work in contemporary literature that is centred upon a concerted aim to advance models of empathy simultaneously both between human subjects and between humans and non-humans.

In this paper, I take an auto-theoretical approach in order to consider how this unfolds in creative practice. Situating my own sensitivity as a neurodivergence in relation to Richard Powers's Bewilderment, I consider how the concept serves as provocation for radical connection.

Through its highly sensitive child protagonist, I suggest, Powers shows that our aims to create a planetary community can only be met through a revisioning of questions of feeling, sensory stimulation, and autonomy.

The ultimate consequences of such thinking deeply question the contemporary emphasis on rights and individualism, not only as a critique of neoliberalism but also as a challenge to what emerges as a disconcertingly similar discourse from those who position themselves as progressive.

18 March 2022

How is the ‘I' of the individual materialised through fatigue, pain, sex, and the interactions with others? This presentation will consider the ways in which shared emotional pasts manifest differently in the two sisters in Dunmore's novel.

The orientation of the reader to the unreliable narrator, and the clandestine sexual acts taking place in the garden of her sister's house in the days after her nephew's traumatic birth serve to destabilise any sense of certainty about illness and its relationship to the body in the novel.

I argue that the inherent sexuality of the sisters is materialised by the link between their mental wellness and their pain. I am interested in a new materialist interpretation of the way pain looks in the novel – especially in terms of the ‘invisibility' of chronic and traumatic pain.