Written LandscapeAn Inter-disciplinary Symposium for Writers

and ScholarsSupported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council

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Saturday 7th July and Sunday 8th July 2007, Queen’s Building, University of Exeter,

Exeter Campus.

Programme and Abstracts

www.uec.ac.uk/conferences/understandinglandscape

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Written LandscapeAn Inter-disciplinary Symposium for Writers

and ScholarsSupported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council

Saturday 7th July and Sunday 8th July 2007, Queen’s Building, University of Exeter,

Exeter Campus.

7th July09.00-9.45

Registration and Tea/Coffee

9.45-10.00

Opening Remarks Catherine BraceAdeline Johns-Putra

10.00-11.00

Writers’ and scholars’ break-out groups

Workshop facilitators:Catherine BraceAdeline Johns-PutraPauline Liu-Devereux Sarah Oswald Paul Sharman

11.00-11.15

Tea/Coffee

11.15-12.00

Writers’ and scholars’ break-out groups continue

12.00-1.30

Lunch

1.30-2.30 Exeter Special Collection archives workshop (group 1)

Mass Observation writing workshop (group 2)

Jessica Gardner(University of Exeter)

Amanda Claremont and Andrew Church(University of Brighton)

2.30-3.00 Tea/coffee3.00-4.00 Mass Observation writing

workshop (group 1)Amanda Claremont and Andrew Church(University of Brighton)

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Exeter Special Collection archives workshop (group 2) Jessica Gardner

(University of Exeter)4.00-4.30 Tea/coffee4.30-5.30 ‘Imagination, Landscape and

Fiction: A Writer’s Perspective’Sue Edginton(Goldsmith’s College)

6.30 Dinner – Mardon Hall

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8th July

08.30-9.00 Tea/Coffee9.00-9.45 Paper

1‘Writing the Environment in Fiction and Non-fiction’

Andrea Mason (Pacific Lutheran University)

9.45-10.30 Paper 2

‘Writing the Landscape of the Home Garden’

Mark Bhatti and Paul Stenner (University of Brighton)

10.30-10.45

Tea/coffee

10.45-11.30

Paper 3

‘Escaping to Barsetshire: Writing the Therapeutic Landscape’

Geraldine Perriam (University of Glasgow)

11.30-12.15

Paper 4

‘Auto-ethnography as a Pedagogic Tool in Environmental Psychology’

Susana Alves (Edinburgh College of Art) and Gleice Elali (Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte)

12.15-1.15 Lunch1.15-2.00 Paper

5‘ “She Do the River in Different Voices”: Lyric Democracies in Alice Oswald’s Dart’

Kym Martindale (University College Falmouth)

2.00-2.45 Paper 6

‘Landscape as Writing: Virginia Woolf’

George Selmer (Anglia Ruskin University)

2.45-3.00 Tea/coffee3.00-3.45 Paper

7‘42.30N’ Herbert Wilson

Gottfried (Cornell University)

3.45-4.30 Paper 8

‘Landlines: Direct Connect’

Jolie B. Kaytes (Washington State University)

4.30 Close

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‘Imagination, Landscape and Fiction: A Writer’s Perspective’Sue Edginton (Goldsmith’s College)

My theme is the relationship between imagination, landscape and identity in writing fiction.

Material

My source material will be drawn from my work on a novel, which I am still writing and which is set on a remote Shetland Island.

Approach

My approach to the paper will reflect the way that I write by revealing the relationship as I tell the story of creating the fiction and direct the paper towards the drawing some conclusions from my experience of the process.

The Territory of the Novel

The theme of the novel is exile. Exile is explored as being from roots in place and community but also as being from the self. The Isle of the novel has been celebrated in the past as the Garden of the Isles because of its green dales, its fertility, the quality of its ponies, but in the latter decades of the last century the children are leaving for education, work. And they are not returning. The Island has lost status even within its own group of Isles.

Among the eighty or so people living on the Isle the main character, Solly, has only the status of being reviled. He is a recluse within his boxbed in the crofthouse where he lives with his brothers. Those who revile him only encounter him through myth and gossip. We learn about him through his various writings.

The Territory of the Paper

The novel explores why this character is in self-imposed exile; how he seeks to discover his identity; (and why other characters are haunted by him). As part of his search Solly has read ‘The Song of Songs’. Identifying through his name and yearning for love he writes his own version, Solly’s Song. This discrete ten-page excerpt will be the basis of my paper. It will enable me to illustrate the process of the imagination’s response to landscape in written form, as part of a character’s passionate search for a sense of self and connection to others.

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I will draw on both the research and imaginative processes involved in writing this piece; the structure and imagery of the underlying layer of the original Song of Songs (King James version); and show the links between the exploration of profound sexual love and the search for self-love through the imagery of landscape.

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‘Writing the Environment in Fiction and Non-fiction’Andrea Mason (Pacific Lutheran University)

My training is in creative writing, and I have taught environmental writing and environmental literature. Much of my writing centers around landscape, both my (fictional) characters’ relationship to it and my own (nonfictional) relationship to it. I am currently working on a nonfiction manuscript about my own journey from the east coast of the United States, where I grew up, to my current home in the western United States. It combines experiences with the external world and its landscape with my changing internal landscape. I also have spent more than a month in the Everglades National Park in Florida researching the ecology of the Everglades for a fictional piece that was my graduate thesis.

I propose talking about how my writing is connected to environment, and how examining my connection to different kinds of environment has, over time, changed my connection to environment. In the piece of fiction I will read an excerpt of, concurrent and mutually exclusive themes include the inevitability of the jungle to reclaim a civilization and the inevitability of ecological destruction. I am interested in the way humans (my characters and their culture) create ways to experience the natural environment that are anything but natural. For example, boardwalks and the visitor’s center in the Everglades are supposed to solidify the visitor’s connection to the environment, but my most visceral experiences in the Everglades were slogging, or walking though water with only a walking stick, and being feasted on by mosquitoes at dusk.

In my nonfiction manuscript, I confront romantic fantasies about myself as a fearless westerner, and I wonder how much my desire to experience the geographic and socioeconomic other has to do with both my enthusiasm and reluctance for adventure of all kinds. Is living in a cave in Spain just as adventurous as wanting to raft down a whitewater river? The writer begins to see that her personal journey is as much about geography as it is about selfhood.

I plan to link my own experience of writing about internal and external landscape to the difficulty I have had teaching nature writing. Students want to write about the external landscape, but often, they don’t know how to make the story more than just description. How can creative nonfiction about the environment have meaning, depth, and texture, and yet avoid being didactic, precious, or bland?

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‘Writing the Landscape of the Home Garden’Mark Bhatti and Paul Stenner (University of Brighton)

We are currently undertaking an AHRC funded research project entitled “Writing the everyday landscape of everyday life: lay narratives of the home garden”. Whilst much professional writing has been devoted to gardens and gardening, very little is known about the perspectives of ‘ordinary’ (lay) people themselves. The project examines how ordinary men and women write about the everyday landscape of the garden within the context of their own lives. To this end we are using existing qualitative data deposited at the Mass Observation Archive (MOA) based at the University of Sussex. Since 1981 a panel of lay volunteers has regularly contributed written responses to a series of Directives or prompts issued by MOA. A number of Directives have directly and indirectly addressed the theme of the garden and gardening. The ‘Garden and Gardening’ Directive issued in 1998 generated one of the largest numbers of responses for many years. Respondents were asked to write about their garden memories from childhood, plants/flowers that are ‘special’ to them, their garden knowledge, and their gardening habits. The Archive thus contains a unique set of lay narratives on the everyday landscape of the home garden. The proposed paper will address some of the methodological issues raised by the use of MOA data in this context. How should we understand the ‘mass’ writing process engendered by the MOA? Can we make statements about ‘psychological’ or psychosocial issues such as ‘identity’, ‘memory’, ‘experience’ and ‘emotion’ on the basis of MOA data? On what basis can ‘telling cases’ be selected for detailed scrutiny?

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Escaping to Barsetshire: Writing the therapeutic landscapeGeraldine Perriam (University of Glasgow)

Much of geography’s focus on therapeutic landscapes has been on places of healing and the effects of the landscape experience. In this paper, I address the notion of writing as a therapeutic experience in terms of the author’s relationship with her/his created, imagined landscape. There is a connection between fictional depictions of landscape and authors that arises from a range of circumstances in the life of the author. Autobiography and fiction intersect in a number of ways, one of which is the siting of fiction in particular landscapes. These landscapes can relate to authors’ conceptualising of nation, home and ethnicity as well as more personal narratives of self.

This paper argues for the complexity of writing landscapes, focusing on three women writers of the interwar years of the 20th Century and the therapeutic value of their fictional landscapes in personal terms:

Vera Brittain: landscape as catharsis in The Dark TideAngela Thirkell: landscape as escape in the Barsetshire novelsDorothy L.Sayers: landscape as retreat to childhood in The Nine Tailors

The focus on this period and these women emerges from my aim to explore landscape and gendered narratives of self, post-Great War. The mobility and life experiences of each of the women contributed to the ways in which they conceived the writing of landscape. Their conceptions went beyond the structural or narrative demands of their writing. For each of the writers, the landscapes of their fiction were deeply personal and in each case therapeutic.

Through an exploration of these three interpretations of therapeutic landscapes, I make the case for linking the personal geography of the author with the wider geography of the novel. An examination of the autobiographical and fictional texts of each of the writers will illustrate the development of a complex intertwining of self and the search for healing in the writing of fiction.

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Auto-ethnography as a Pedagogic Tool in Environmental PsychologySusana M. Alves (OPENspace Research Centre, Edinburgh College of Art) and Gleice Elali (Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte)

I report and comment on my experience as a lecturer in Environmental Psychology in Brazil to show the usefulness of auto-ethnography as a pedagogic tool. Most of the concepts studied in Environmental Psychology, such as “affordances” and “place attachment” are of a relational or transactional nature. That is, they refer both to environmental and individual aspects. Based on a pragmatic approach to teaching Environmental Psychology, I propose combining traditional ways of lecturing with workshops wherein auto-ethnography plays an important part. Auto-ethnography in this way combines written and visual (i.e. photographs, sketching, films) forms of expression and allows for a “situated” understanding of rather abstract concepts. As argued, auto-ethnography considers one’s position in the environment which requires filtering the perception process by immersion in a specific cultural group. It allows therefore a critical and personal view of one’s surrounding to be developed. This is because when writing about their relationship with their environments, people are concretely representing the social world; they explore personal experiences within the wider cultural setting and consider the emotional dimensions involved in this relationship. Affordances, for example, represent an important concept in this field. It implies complementarity between humans (and other animals) and the environment. It conceptualizes the relationship between the perceived and actual properties of the environment primarily in relation to properties that determine how the environment could be used. One way of understanding it is by running a series of experiments where the person explores what the environment has to afford, facilitate or hinder, in terms of her capabilities and cultural background. This can be done, for instance, by selecting a cultural group in terms of access to different kinds of transport. Accessibility which is directly tied to socio-economic status is a main factor affecting people’s relationship with the environment. One initial exercise I proposed to my students was to explore their neighbourhoods by means of different transport systems—buses, cars, bicycles, or by foot and to write an auto-ethnography on environmental affordances considering how the form of locomotion shaped their experience. This generated rich material to discuss Gibson’s concept of affordance. I present this material and discuss further how evocative writing can be regarded as an important pedagogic tool in Environmental Psychology.

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‘She do the river in different voices’: Lyric Democracies in Alice Oswald’s DartKym Martindale (University College Falmouth)

The opening line of Alice Oswald’s Dart asks, ‘Who’s this moving alive over the moor?’. The response follows: ‘An old man seeking and finding a difficulty.’ The image and its attendant question/s recall Romanticism’s claims, not only on the ‘natural’ environment but also on its people as functions, devices and symbols in the poet’s ordering of (his) experience. In the Wordsworthian lyric for example, the presence of ‘I’ is insistent, as if that ‘I’ authorised the landscape and its inhabitants into being. Oswald unsettles this authority from the outset. This paper will argue that Oswald’s Dart ‘relinquishes’ lyric authority to the landscape itself. In so doing, Dart offers not only a democratic mode of nature writing, but also a pastoral that is openly engaged with its present and its future, rather than a mythical past.

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‘Landscape as Writing: Virginia Woolf’George Selmer (Anglia Ruskin University) It is inescapable that the physical environment imprints itself into every act of writing: even when it is not directly the subject or the object of that writing.  We see this most obviously, for example, in Hazlitt's observation that Coleridge 'liked to compose in walking over uneven ground', compared to Wordsworth’s preference for 'walking up and down a straight gravel walk... where the continuity of his verse' could not be interrupted, or in the fact that Virginia Woolf found it almost impossible to write in the quiet of Richmond, requiring the hustle and bustle of the city landscape to drive her writing process.  Analysing that imprint, tracing the relationship between the landscape, the written word and the subject that writes, has proven problematic to generations of critics.   This paper starts from the premise that writing is a material practice from beginning to end and that any understanding of the relationship between landscape, writing and identity must acknowledge this. Accounts of the relationship between landscape, writing and writer which resort to the traditional opposition of the material and the ideal are unable to properly provide the answers to our questions surrounding the interaction of the writer with the world around them and the writing they produce. I will insist that we can only attempt an answer to these questions by fully recognising the performativity, temporality and materiality of writing, the writer and the world around them.  My argument is grounded in the conviction that creative writers have as much to contribute to this process as, for example, philosophers such as Jacques Derrida, simply by continuing the process of writing.  This is based on an understanding that the implication of Derrida's work is that the only way to answer any question about writing is to write and to keep writing (writing, in Derrida's extended sense of the word is, to a certain extent, simply what happens).  Therefore, the only way to approach an answer about the relationship between the material environment and writing (which is itself a material event that produces a material result, however short/long lived) is to keep writing about it.  Through Derrida's notion of arche-writing we might consider the possibility that the landscape itself is a species of writing, even before the writer writes about it.  It is equally important to recognise that writing is not something that exists apart from the physical world.  To illustrate this argument, the paper offers a reading of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse (1929), focusing on the narrative strand concerned with Lily Briscoe and her painting.  This reading shows that through Lily and her painting, Woolf (perhaps pre-empting Derrida) offers us a new understanding of the process of writing and its relation to the physical environment, the past and the future.

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42.30NHerbert Gottfried (Cornell University)

What follows is less a scholarly paper proposal and more an offer to present an actual written landscape project. For two years photographer Frank Gohlke and I developed a landscape project in the state of Massachusetts based on a line of latitude across the entire state. We published a portion of the project in the American photography magazine Blindspot #31 (Fall 2005). I am proposing to present another selection of images and poems at the symposium. The next paragraph is the introduction.

Lines of latitude rarely impinge on our everyday experience. Most of us recognize them as a set of east-west lines on map, coordinated with lines of longitude to create a spatial system useful in ascertaining locations. The lines have a history of application in cartography, and an equally rich record in the affairs of societies preoccupied with discovery, enterprise, empire, war, and the occasional human folly. Today, a line of latitude or lognitude can be seen as a tool with which to engage a cultural landscape and its environmental systems. 42.30N and the Massachusetts Landscape is that kind of project--a collaboration between a photographer and a poet to recreate a line across a state. One minute of latitude is a mile wide on the ground, thus 42.30N is 1 mile by 155 miles of landscape, from Marblehead Neck on the east to Berry Mountain on the west. We drove, walked, and even paddled Massachusetts using a hand-held GPS to locate the latitude. Once in the line, we explored that mile, responding independently to what we found. Our intent was to make the abstraction real by juxtaposing the image and the poem across the land.

I have just reconstituted a piece of the project as a video. Playing it takes about eighteen minutes, with voice over images, starting east and ending west. This month you may listen to it and look at it yourselves. Please go to:

http://67.59.147.224/username: herbpassword: latitude

The video experience tries to replicate the layered reality of landscape, in this case with two artistic-aesthetic media as another layer.

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Landlines: Direct ConnectJolie B. Kaytes (Washington State University)

In everyday conversation, landlines refer to telephone lines that are associated with a particular location. Landlines have addresses. They allow for situated communication. Landlines also describe the physical markings in landscapes–across scales and contexts–that link one point to another: the ridge, rail, river, road, wall, walkway, hedgerow, horizon. Landlines, too, can be construed as the layered stories of the ground that are held beneath earth’s surface, imaged across canvas, or drawn out in strings of text. Fully engaging with landlines mean critically considering context, the immediacy of the senses and experience, as well as that which is intangible.

The paper "Landlines: Direct Connect" examines how exploring landlines through writing can facilitate a direct connect to the conditions that inform how landscapes are conceived, shaped, and projected. Specifically, the paper looks at poems, called GeoTropes, that are inspired by keywords in geomorphology. Geomorphology is the study of the evolution and configuration of landforms: the study of the ground. The use of the scientific language of the ground to communicate how humans experience the ground is a means for understanding how people inhabit and are inhabited by landscape processes.

The poems pertain to circumstance or moments or events or emotions or ideas or memory. They are descriptions of processes, of people in landscapes, of landscapes without people, of people among other people. All of the poems use geomorphic activity metaphorically to express and interpret everyday encounters. The poems translate 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. In so doing, they become an expressive instrument for discovering and revealing landlines and voicing the direct connects among people, place, artifact, and natural process.

The paper will address the poems' relevance especially as it pertains to the discourse of landscape architecture.

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