Laura Wright: Creative Practice Research Forum
Hearing voices and creating voices in civil war life writing
Speaker: Laura Wright, Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow
This presentation considers the difficulties and creative possibilities of working with life writing by women who not only record their lives in prose and poetry but who must express experiences that seem, to those around them, unbelievable. Sarah Wight and Anna Trapnel, both Particular Baptist women living through a time of civil war, experienced auditory and visual hallucinations (or, in their terms, visions from God), and tried to fix those experiences on paper, despite great scepticism. This presentation considers not only the role of life writing as a creative practice in the seventeenth century but also how a critical approach to life writing can benefit from creative approaches. It turns to recent examples of academic writing that build a sensory world in what might be considered a non-fiction style and considers the risks and rewards of approaching early modern life writing as a deliberately creative kind of prose, as well as a ‘true’ record of events.
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Next Presentations:
Wednesday 2nd April: Angel Cohn Castle, Lecturer in Fine Art
Wednesday 7th May: Julia Heslop, NUAcT Fellow: Cities and Place