REMEMBRANCE, RESISTANCE AND WRITING
with Neil Bartlett, Vanessa Gebbie
and Writer in Residence Clare Best
Tues 11 Nov 2014, 6.30-8.30 pm,
Boardroom (M2), Grand Parade, BN2 0JY
All welcome – entry free – refreshments
In this momentous centenary year of the outbreak of World War One, join us for an evening of discussion and readings on the theme of remembrance and writing. How has the cultural phenomenon of remembrance developed over the decades? What are we to make of the extraordinary response to the recent online project Letter to an Unknown Soldier, which attracted contributions from nearly 22,000 members of the public in just 37 days? To what use should we put the vast archives of collective and individual memories of war? What is the point of remembering and how can writers bear witness to the trauma of others?
Neil Bartlett has had a thirty-odd-year career as one of this country’s most creative and committed gay writers and theatre-directors, working everywhere from the Lyric Hammersmith to the Drill Hall,from the Royal Shakespeare Company to the Royal Vauxhall Tavern. His most recent books are the anthology Queer Voices and his acclaimed new novel The Disappearance Boy, published by Bloomsbury in summer 2014. With novelist Kate Pullinger, he recently created the online project Letter to an Unknown Soldier.
Vanessa Gebbieis the author of one novel, two short fiction collections and a poetry pamphlet. She is also contributing editor of Short Circuit, Guide to the Art of the Short Story. She is currently collaborating on a collection of poems inspired by Great War memorials, to be published by Cinnamon Press in July 2016. She lives in Sussex.
Clare Best is one of two Writers in Residence at Brighton University this year, alongside Sara Clifford. Clare’s first full collection of poetry, Excisions, was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize in 2012. She has recently completed a prose memoir and is collaborating with the painter Mary Anne Aytoun-Ellis on a project supported by South Downs National Park, exploring hidden and mysterious bodies of water cross the South of England.