‘Written Landscape: A Symposium for Scholars and Writers’
This symposium was held at the University of Exeter’s Streatham Campus in Exeter. The aim of this second symposium was to bring together academics and the writers with whom we had worked in our writers’ events. Several writers from the Truro Writer’s Group and the Writing Centre attended, as did a representative from the Fire River Poets in Somerset.
The morning of the first day was organised around small group discussions. Each group contained a mixture of academics and writers who discussed a series of themes that resonated with the broad themes and research questions of the project:
· Creative processes, e.g. Where does inspiration come from? Does inspiration come from the landscape and place that you find yourself in or the opportunity to reflect and contemplate in a quite place? Does the notebook become the source of information and inspiration later on in the writing process? What literary forms does your writing take? Do some forms require more drafting or ‘processing’ than others?
· Influence of landscape and place, e.g. Is place and setting important to the plot or characters or action of a piece of writing? How is place invoked? How does a place work its way into your writing? Do you have a preconceived notion of place before you come to write about it? If so, where does this come from? Do you find yourself inadvertently writing in a particular style or drawing on popular motifs or metaphors in your writing (e.g. Cornwall as a wild place).
· Auto-ethnography, e.g. How do aspects of yourself or your life experience enter your writing? Do you sometimes write accounts which deal with some aspect of your own life but which are fictionalised? Have you ever tried to write about writing?
· Methodology, e.g. What methods are effective in understanding more about how writers write, the influence of landscape and place and the creative process? How do we understand the process by which established or canonical writers write? What can practising creative writers teach us about this process?
Each small group was led by a facilitator. After the workshop discussions, the group came back together to share their ideas and thoughts. This produced a lively debate on the nature of inspiration vis-à-vis landscape. This discussion was intriguing for the geographers present as these issues had not been fully thought through in that discipline. There was also a debate about the socially constructed nature of landscape which explored the notion that our view of landscape is not natural, elemental or organic but a product of social milieu and context. Although this was an argument familiar to geographers, academics from other disciplines felt that this discussion gave them significant new insights. The debate moved onto the purpose or role of the notebook as a means of somehow capturing the moment of inspiration in the landscape, with responses ranging from a negative view of notebooks was that they act as a lightening conductor, stripping the ‘flash’ of inspiration of its power, to those who noted that notebooks helped fallible memories to work! There was some recognition and concern that language is a very limiting mode of expression. Some writers argued that language keeps writers separate from the essential essence of what is seen and felt. This seems to affirm our interest in focusing on the joint importance of both the text and the writing process.
Finally, the morning’s discussion turned to methodology and to the question of how academics could usefully research writers and their practices. It was suggested that a sustained and longitudinal engagement between academics and writers would yield a better understanding of the nuances, complexities and contradictions of the writing process. However, the writers argued that they might not welcome such scrutiny, because if the creative process is laid bare, the mystique of it would be lost and they might not be able to capture it again.
The symposium also included two afternoon activities on the first day. The first was a visit to the University of Exeter Special Collections to view manuscript material from writers associated with the Southwest, including Daphne du Maurier, Arthur Caddick, Frances Bellerby, Charles Causeley, and Ted Hughes. The viewing was facilitated by the Head of Special Collections, Dr. Jessica Gardner. It allowed for discussion into the creative process behind established writers and well-known texts. One highlight was the first page of du Maurier’s notebook in which she drafted her best-known novel, Rebecca, which provoked observations on the way in which famous opening lines may occur much later in the drafting process and not at the initial moment of inspiration.
The second was a workshop hosted by researchers from Brighton University as part of the AHRC-funded project on ‘Writing the everyday landscape of the home garden’, which is also part of the Landscape and Environment programme. This was constructed as a Mass Observation workshop, with each participant producing a piece of writing in response to the Mass Observation directive on writing about gardens. A discussion followed about the nature of the Mass Observation project and the group also discussed the kind of gardens that are produced by the exercise – public, private, domestic. The writing exercise highlighted the selective qualities of writing, most clearly visible in the writing about childhood but also evident in writing about contemporary activities. Being directed to write about the garden seemed to draw out some useful observations on the development of memory and its role in the creative process.
The symposium included a range of papers from various disciplines, including geography, literary studies, landscape architecture, and environmental psychology, as well as from scholars who also identified as creative writers. For example, Sue Edginton (Goldsmith’s College) spoke about her own novel set on a remote Shetland Island. Edginton explored both the research and imaginative processes involved in writing this piece and the search for self-love through the imagery of landscape. Other creative writer/scholars included Andrea Mason (Pacific Lutheran University) and Jolie Kaytes (Washington State University), Mason read from her unpublished novel and reflected on how her writing is connected to environment, and how examining her connection to different kinds of environment has, over time, changed her connection to environment. Kaytes provided a fascinating discussion interspersed with readings of her own poetry, called ‘geotropes’ because they have been inspired by keywords in geomorphology, and which combine scientific terminology with lyrical description, thus translating the vocabulary of science into the vocabulary of lived moments and the spatial, temporal, physical, cultural, sensory, and perceptual landscapes in which those moments are lived. The day ended with Herbert Gottfried’s presentation of his landscape and poetry project, based on a line of latitude across the entire state of Massachusetts. Gottfried, Professor Emeritus at Cornell University, collaborated with photographer Frank Gohlke. They drove, walked, and even paddled Massachusetts using a hand-held GPS to locate the latitude. Once in the line, they explored that mile, responding independently to what was found, with the intent of making the abstraction real by juxtaposing the image and the poem across the land. The result was a selection of images and poems juxtaposed with each other. Gottfried’s performance, with its magical lyrics and simple, beautiful images, was a fitting end to the symposium, reiterating the emphases on creative process, auto-ethnography, and interdisciplinarity.