Narrative Experiments

Spend this Saturday afternoon exploring the influences and legacies of the experimental women writers Christine Brooke-Rose, Anna Kavan, Ann Quin, and Muriel Spark.

Narrative Experiments, Saturday 25th August, 2pm to 4pm

‘To be an “Experimental Woman Writer”. Three words. Three difficulties.’

– Christine Brooke-Rose, ‘Illiterations’.

This event marks the online publication (MAP) of a new piece of work by Hannah Van Hove which is rooted in her experiences of navigating the archives of these experimental women writers. It will include readings and performances by Sarah Bernstein, Jess Orr, Hannah Van Hove and Rebecca Wilcox, as well as a roundtable discussion on the lives and works of these four authors.

Part of the Muriel Spark 100 programme, this project is funded by Creative Scotland and supported by the National Library of Scotland and MAP Magazine.

Sarah Bernstein is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, Edinburgh, where she is working on a project called ‘Difficult Women & the Common Good’. Her writing has appeared in places like Adjacent Pineapple, tender, Contemporary Women’s Writing and Lemon Hound, and her first book, Now Comes the Lightning, was published in Canada by Pedlar Press in 2015. She has just finished a manuscript for a novel, The Coming Bad Days.

Jess Orr is a third year PhD student at the University of St Andrews, completing a thesis on the contemporary Scottish author Ali Smith. She also works as an arts administrator and educator in a variety of settings and facilitates reading and writing groups for the charity Open Book. She is currently finishing up an internship as Reader in Residence at the Glasgow Women’s Library, which has involved, amongst other projects, helping to set up the first festival of Scottish women’s writing, Open the Door.

Hannah Van Hove is a writer and researcher from Brussels who lives and works in Glasgow. She completed a PhD on the fiction of Anna Kavan, Alexander Trocchi and Ann Quin in 2017 and is currently starting a new research project on the work of post-war experimental women writers. She has published articles and reviews on British avant-garde fiction in various academic publications as well as some translations of Flemish modernist Paul van Ostaijen’s poetry. Some of her poems have appeared in Adjacent Pineapple and Gutter.

Rebecca Wilcox is an artist living in Glasgow. She works with writing, sound and video and sometimes with their manifestations as performance and installation. Recently she’s made exhibitions and performances for Radiophrenia (Glasgow), Snehta (Athens) and Cooper Gallery (with OaPaO, Dundee). She has published work with Tate, Good Press, Hour Editions and F.R. David. Along with Sarah Rose and Scott Rogers she organises tenletters, a space in Glasgow exploring expanded forms of publication.

Part of a project funded by Creative Scotland and supported by the National Library of Scotland and MAP Magazine.

Booking

This event is open to all and is free to attend. Please book below (you will be taken through the shopping cart but no charge will be made) or you can call us on 0141 550 2267. If you have booked a place and are no longer able to attend please let us know so that we can make your place available to someone else.