Listed in alphabetical order by speaker’s (or chair’s) name (with panel). For day, time and order of papers, please see the Programme.
Natasha Bell (she/her) (Chair, Keynote) is an author and practice-based postgraduate researcher at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her novel Maybe the World Will End So We Won’t Have To and accompanying critical research examines the practice and ethics of the search for the writing self through autofiction. Her previous novels, This Nowhere Place and His Perfect Wife, are published by Penguin. She co-convenes the Auto / Bio / Fiction seminar series with Lucia Boldrini (Goldsmiths) and Lucia Claudia Fiorella (University of Udine, Italy).
Anna Borgarello (she/her) (Chair, P4) is a PhD candidate in the Department of Italian and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University. Previously, she studied at the Scuola Normale Superiore and at the University of Pisa, where she graduated with an MA thesis on Fratelli d’Italia by Alberto Arbasino. She is currently working on her PhD dissertation, entitled Bifocal Narratives. The Self and the Other in Contemporary Literature. The dissertation investigates 21st century Italian, French and Anglo-American texts which display a two-foci structure and focus on the relation between an autobiographical or autofictional narrator and another actual individual, thus avoiding a clear-cut division between autobiographical / autofictional and biographical / biofictional writing. She is the author of two articles: “Hemingway e Fenoglio, oltre il dopoguerra” (Italianistica, 2014) and “Un romanzo lungo trent’anni. Fratelli d’Italia di Alberto Arbasino tra modernismo e postmoderno” (Allegoria, 2018).
KIMBERLY CAMPANELLO – AUTOFICTION’S ESSENTIAL MATERIAL (P4)
‘In other words, the point of autofiction is not to portray a person’s existing subjectivity for all time, but to recognize that subjectivity is elusive and hence to place the subject of narrative endlessly in question.’ – Hywel Dix, Introduction to Autofictions in English
‘I also questioned the tradition of the solitary voice of the poet – often male, a white male, who embodied the wisdom of the society, and who spoke for, on behalf of and to his society and culture. In a voice of authority. Although he might be marginalized and he often was, his words were valued – he had a role to play even as an outcast and had the authority to do so.’ – M. Nourbese Philip, ‘Interview with an Empire’ from Blank: Essays and Interview
I will read from and discuss my short work of autofiction ‘Essential Material’ (forthcoming in Tolka), which brings together the hottest day on record, The English Patient, the current (as of 12 March 2023) Prime Minister’s wife quibbling over a bill, the so-called Confessional poets, exploding cars, artisan ice cream, sudden illness and death, chronic illness and struggle, Jubilee bunting, writing notebooks, and the possible location of Elizabethan martyr Saint Margaret Clitherow’s bones – she was pressed to death when pregnant for harbouring priests. Taking Susan Melrose’s practice-led research coinage ‘expert-intuitive processing’ as a framework, I will explore what the ‘essential material’ of autofiction yields in my practice, considering that I am best known for writing poetry that disavows, or at the very least troubles, the lyric mode and its impulses. I will examine the attractive peculiarities of autofictional prose strategies that I find most useful and locate them in relation to criticism on autofiction and poetics, respectively. I will consider my processes for writing ‘Essential Materials’ and my long poem ‘Moving Nowhere Here’ (Granta, Jan 2023) in order to compare the ways I address my experience of chronic illness and disability in autofiction and poetry. I will suggest that my teenage reading of French autofiction alongside a wide range of global poetries that understand and treat the lyric variously have made a particular ‘expert-intuitive processing’ possible in my practice.
Kimberly Campanello (she/her)’s most recent projects are MOTHERBABYHOME, a 796-page visual poetry-object and reader’s edition book (zimZalla, 2019), and sorry that you were not moved (2022), an interactive digital poetry publication produced in collaboration with Christodoulos Makris and Fallow Media. She is an inaugural Markievicz Award winner from Ireland’s Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht and the Arts Council, and she represented the UK in Munich at Klang Farben Text: Visual Poetry for the 21st Century, a festival organised by the British Council, the National Poetry Library, and Lyrik Kabinett. New poems and autofiction have appeared or are forthcoming in Granta, Poetry Review, Cambridge Literary Review, The White Review, London Magazine, and Tolka. She is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Leeds.
Laura Cernat (she/they) (Chair, P1) is an FWO (Flemish Research Foundation) postdoctoral researcher at KU Leuven, Belgium, who obtained her PhD in 2022 with a thesis on the portrayal of canonical authors in biofiction. She has contributed to the volumes Virginia Woolf and Heritage (2017), Theory in the “Post” Era (2021), and Imagining Gender in Biographical Fiction (2022), has published in the journals Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly and Partial Answers, and has guest-edited a forthcoming issue of American Book Review on autofiction and autotheory. In September 2021 she organized the hybrid bilingual conference Biofiction as World Literature.
AMIE CORRY – A READING FROM PUBLIC FEELINGS, A WORK IN PROGRESS (P2)
I will be reading from my autofictional work Public Feelings. The text is fragmentary in nature, structured around a series of tableaux that explore sexuality, kin and issues pertaining to fertility (as well as the fertility ‘industry’).
Public Feelings considers the quest for the ‘good life’ as expounded by theorist Lauren Berlant: what this constitutes and what we sacrifice in the race to achieve it. To quote Berlant: ‘Fantasy is the means by which people hoard idealising theories and tableaux about how they and the world “add up to something”.’
The text is rooted in personal experience. My intention, however, is to employ intertextuality, fiction and criticism to create a work nonlinear in approach and queer in sensibility. I am conscious of the disparities present in the mainstream publishing of autofiction, which has been dominated by voices speaking from positions of privilege. My question remains, is this story deserving of space and how might a project written from the self acknowledge its own deficiencies?
Amie Corry (she/they) is a London-based writer and editor. Corry writes regularly on visual art for titles including Art Monthly, Times Literary Supplement, Studio International and Burlington Contemporary and has contributed to numerous exhibition catalogues and monographs. In 2019, Corry co-founded an annual literature and ideas festival, Primadonna, which aims to redress the traditional make-up of book festivals, giving prominence to people of colour, LGBTQI+, working class people and disabled people. In 2013, she co-produced a pioneering audit of gender equality in the art world. Corry is currently completing an MA in Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths. They are working on a short story collection as well as the autofiction project.
JAMES DAVIS – ‘LET US IMAGINE A SCHOLAR’: PARIS: A POEM, A MISREADING (P4)
This paper will combine the act of creative writing with literary criticism to create a post-critical reflection on Hope Mirrlees’s modernist epic Paris: A Poem. In taking this interdisciplinary approach, new possibilities of the poem are revealed, questioning the act of literary criticism and its presumption of impartiality.
To put all this another way, it is time for a form of criticism which is literary in its own right, as only thus can we really uncover the ‘true’ critic, the frail human who makes mistakes, misreads, gets distracted, and indeed may not be trusted.
The paper imagines a scholar, one James Daviss writing in the late 1930s and undertaking a doctoral thesis, focusing on Paris, at Cambridge. As the thesis develops, however, it becomes apparent that an abhorrent misreading is taking place. Instead of reading Paris, as academics often do, as a love letter between Jane Harrison and the poet, James sees the poem as a confessional. This poetical disclosure centres around the life of his father, Fred Daviss, a successful English actor, who, it is revealed, split from the scholars’ mother acrimoniously in Paris during the spring of 1919, just as Pariswas written.
This paper weaves literary criticism with my own biographical lineage, as Fred is a distant relative of mine, and a wild act of reading which questions the relationships between the real and fictional. The revelation of the subjective narrator that heralded the modernist period finds itself within literary criticism.
James Davis (he/him) is a PhD candidate in English Literature and Associate Lecturer at Lancaster University. His research centres on modernism and post-criticism, using creative methods to explore new approaches to modernism while questioning the very act of literary criticism. He is also a founder and co-editor of Errant, a journal dedicated to post-criticism which also hosts seminars and symposia, most recently featuring Professor Sandeep Parmar (Liverpool), Dr Mathelinda Nabugodi (Cambridge) and Professor Simon Palfrey (Oxford).
CLARE HARVEY – CO-AUTHORING WITH FORGOTTEN VOICES: USING REMIX WRITING TO EXPLORE THE PROBLEMATISED BOUNDARY BETWEEN HISTORICAL ‘TRUTH’ AND FICTION (P1)
Whilst sampling in music has been an acknowledged practice for several decades, and its visual art equivalent, collage, has been embraced by the art establishment for a century or more, the literary equivalent, remix writing, has been derided, downplayed, or simply ignored as mere plagiarism by the mainstream publishing industry. But could this approach to writing provide not just a creative catalyst for authors, but also a more ethical way of representing past lives in fiction?
As a traditionally published author, I found myself beginning to experiment with including the voices of real people in my work (their actual words, drawn from memoirs, letters, or oral histories) and this led to my current research, which explores the impact – creatively, legally, and ethically – of using remix methods (so-called ‘uncreative writing’ – Goldsmith, 2011) to generate historical fiction.
In this paper I will use my own practice research – physically cutting and pasting from an existing WW2 memoir to create a new novella – as an example of how remix writing can be a creative tool for historical fiction authors. I will suggest that using a single memoir as a source is tantamount to co-authorship, and discuss whether this method of implicit co-authorship can further claim to provide a more ethical representation of past lives in historical fiction and biofiction.
Clare Harvey (she/her) is the author of four historical fiction novels (Simon & Schuster UK), runs writing workshops and mentors emerging writers in the East Midlands, and is on the editorial team at Jericho Writers. She is currently a first-year PhD researcher at Coventry University’s Centre for Postdigital Cultures (part of the Institute for Creative Cultures).
FRANCHESCA LIAUW – POSTMEMORY AND THE PRETENDERS (P3)
For the past three years, I’ve been writing a memoir chronicling my grandparents’ experiences during the Second World War. The Pretenders follows three generations of my family, from my grandparents’ experiences during the Japanese Occupation of Indonesia to my father’s childhood amongst the rubber plantations in Pontianak, to my upbringing in modern-day Singapore. While the memoir looks at depression and the failings of material wealth, it also explores how a family struggles to live up to and accept the success of their forefathers. The most persistent theme throughout is the concept of postmemory, a term coined by Marianne Hirsch in 1992. Postmemory describes the experience of those who grew up surrounded by narratives of trauma that preceded their birth. By being raised with this knowledge of suffering, they are haunted by events that they cannot understand.
I will share a section of The Pretenders and discuss how I, and writers such as Alice Pung and Ocean Vuong, employ specific tools in dealing with the ethical conundrums that arise when recording a family’s memories through memoir.
Franchesca Liauw (she/her) graduated from Brunel University with a PhD in creative writing. She also has an MA in creative writing from the University of Kent and a BFA from Tufts University. She’s been published in a few magazines, such as Mslexia, and was shortlisted for the Future Worlds Prize in 2021.
JARRED MCGINNIS – ALCHEMIZING THE SELF FOR FICTION (KEYNOTE)
After reading from his critically acclaimed novel, The Coward, Jarred McGinnis will be in conversation with Natasha Bell.
From the back cover of The Coward:
Question: What’s worse than being in a wheelchair?
Answer: Being a fuck-up in a wheelchair.
After a car accident Jarred discovers he’ll never walk again. Confined to a ‘giant roller-skate’, he finds himself with neither money nor job. Worse still, he’s forced to live back home with the father he hasn’t spoken to in ten years.
Add in a shoplifting habit, an addiction to painkillers and the fact that total strangers now treat him like he’s an idiot, it’s a recipe for self-destruction. How can he stop himself careering out of control?
As he tries to piece his life together again, he looks back over his past – the tragedy that blasted his family apart, why he ran away, the damage he’s caused himself and others – and starts to wonder whether, maybe, things don’t always have to stay broken after all.
The Coward is about hurt and forgiveness. It’s about how the world treats disabled people. And it’s about how we write and rewrite the stories we tell ourselves about our lives – and try to find a happy ending.
Jarred McGinnis (he/him) was chosen by the Guardian as one of the UK’s ten best emerging writers. His debut novel The Coward was selected for BBC 2’s Between the Covers, BBC Radio 2’s Book Club and listed for the Barbellion Prize. The French edition won the First Novel Prize and was selected for the prestigious Femina prize. He is the winner of the 2023 Eccles Centre & Hay Festival Writer’s Award.
KAREN PACKWOOD – LANDSCAPES OF BELONGING: REPRESENTING POST-ABUSE IDENTITY RECLAMATION (P3)
How do you write the unspeakable? This praxis-led thesis is an auto-fictional avant-garde memoir, written as a psychogeographic derive from the perspective of la flâneuse, which critically explores post-abuse identity in regard to narrative form. Building on W.G. Sebald’s poetics of displacement it focuses on exile, loss, memory, belonging and identity. The primary abuse experienced by the protagonist is maternal covert narcissistic behaviour disorder; a brutal de-humanising shadowland in which the abuser excels in the art of shunning, shaming and silencing. Exploring l’écriture feminine and the ‘women writing themselves’ theories of Cixous, stylistic techniques such as white space, erasure and unconventional positioning of the text are used to experiment with the capacity for the literary space to convey the complex internal processes undertaken by the protagonist to ensure psychic survival. Is this possible? What ethical dilemmas does the form and creative writing process pose for author, protagonist and page?
This presentation will consist of a ten-minute reading of creative writing and a ten-minute writing workshop.
Karen Packwood (she/her) is a second year PhD Creative Writing scholar at the University of Nottingham. Her thesis, Landscapes of Belonging: Representing Post-abuse Identity Reclamation, critically examines post-abuse identity in regard to narrative form, structure and genre. Karen is specifically interested in ethics, style and the capacity of the page to convey that which is unspeakable.
HELEN PLEASANCE – AT THE THRESHOLD: THE UNCANNY MEETING POINT OF THE SHORT STORY AND FAMILY MEMOIR (P1)
This paper will discuss my short story ‘At the Threshold’, which is about the thresholds of two houses and experiments with the threshold between short uncanny fiction and family memoir. It began with two photographs. The first was a 1962 snapshot of my mum in the doorway of a new house, which was to become our family home. The second was of another new house, a few miles away, from a local newspaper story in October 1965. The body of a murdered young man has just been discovered in this house. Earlier murders will be uncovered and children’s bodies found on the Yorkshire moors; crimes that will enter culture as the Moors murders and haunt the British popular imagination for the rest of the century.
My intention was to write family memoir to intervene in this haunting. My dad was a probation officer in Manchester. Myra Hindley’s brother-in-law, David Smith, was one of his clients. Smith had witnessed the murder in the house. His phone call sent the police in search of the body. But suspicion continued to be cast on his role in the murders. My dad supported Smith as he struggled to cope with this.
The aim of my memoir was to unsettle the popular myth of the Moors murders and engage with it from a hitherto historically invisible position. But the memoir form did not work fully to evoke the haunting historical story that I wanted to tell. I turned to the uncanny and ghostly potential of the short story to realise my aims.
Helen Pleasance (she/her) is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at York St John University. Her writing is concerned with the interplay of personal pasts and cultural contexts, and definitely ‘worrying the boundaries between truth and fiction’. Recent publications include editing and contributing to Music, Memory and Memoir (Bloomsbury, 2019), Purple Reign (Erbacce, 2019) and Venue Stories (Equinox, forthcoming 2023).
KEREN POLIAH – METHOD WRITING AND BIOFICTION (P1)
This hybrid instructional and creative presentation will focus on method writing, which involves the dynamics of active ventriloquism when writing another self. Method writing is a performative approach for the writer to engage in biofiction and embody the character in order to portray their experiences more authentically.
I will give examples of my own practice as I write a roman-à-clef, a novel about real people, overlaid with a façade of fiction primarily to keep the confidentiality of my participants-protagonists. My novel is on the witchcraft (occult experiences) of thirteen active participants from my home country, Mauritius. In order to create a space for my participants to be heard and for the self to be authentically portrayed, I use decolonial approaches in writing, the ethos of Deep Listening, and multilingual writing.
I will be reading excerpts of the chapter ‘drink the cup I drink’, which is about Path, a man in his late twenties who lost both parents to madness, alcohol and occult practices. From an early age, he witnessed his parents relying on witchcraft to solve every issue. His mother gave birth to a daughter, and passed away weeks later in a drunken state at her concubine’s house, with the baby crying on the floor. While Path recounts his experiences with animal sacrifice, ghosts, and Pitr Paksha, I will unfold the rituals that led me to write his story.
Keren Poliah (she/her) is in her final year of a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Salford. She graduated from the University of Northampton with ‘The Moon is a Thief’ published in Red Kite 2018-2020. Her thesis, Words from World Watchers: experiences with the occult in Mauritius (forthcoming 2024), resists conventional Anglo-centric PhDs and creates a space for the subaltern to be heard through research. Her interests include indigenous research methods, marginalised subjects, anti-gambling harms, and decolonising research. She has an Equality, Diversity, Inclusion (EDI) role to decolonise the PhD at the University of Salford Doctoral School. Twitter-@KerenPoliah
JON PAUL ROBERTS – A READING OF ‘ON BLUE’ FROM FOR YOU, HOME IS A CEMETERY (A WORK-IN-PROGRESS) (P3)
The recording of lives long deemed unworthy has been at the heart of memoir and autofictional practice for decades. For You, Home is a Cemetery inhabits a queer perspective on this long-standing approach, telling the story of my grandma’s stroke in 2018, and her history as a working-class woman from Liverpool whose life was woefully under-recorded. Told through the lens of our relationship—as a surrogate mother and son—the text explores the complexities of intergenerational familial relationships, queerness within that familial structure, and the idea of home for two people who felt they no longer had one.
‘On Blue’, which sits at the centre of this larger work-in-progress, is a lyrical exploration of sickness and age, and the connections between physical and mental pain. It uses the work of Derek Jarman and Emily Brontë to reflect on these themes whilst connecting with the work of theorists and writers such as Maggie Nelson, Rebecca Solnit, Anne Carson, and others.
In the vein of Annie Ernaux’s ‘autosociobographie’, the text seeks to place my grandma’s story within a wider sociological context; using fragmented sections of autofictional writing, in which the speaker’s ‘you’ manages the effects brought on by a stroke. The observational speaker considers the medial jargon, the effects of illness on the body and mind, as well as the approach of an inevitable death.
The work blends elements of autofiction, autotheory, and creative non-fiction with the poetic in service of hybridity as a means of disappearing the boundaries between genres.
Jon Paul Roberts (he/they) is a writer and postgraduate researcher at Liverpool John Moores University. They received their undergraduate degree from LJMU and hold an MA in Creative and Life Writing from Goldsmiths, University of London. Their practice-led research focuses on genre and form by exploring autofictional hybrid narratives in film and literature. Their journalism, essays, poetry, and fiction have appeared in the Lifejacket anthology, Another North, Brightest Young Things, The Glass Hive, The Doe, The Spool, Metro UK, Hinterland, and Huff Post. Their column ‘How Film Changed Me’, which ran from 2020 to 2022, used film and TV to understand millennial life, and was published every first and third Sunday of the month. In 2017, they won Spread the Word’s inaugural Life Writing Prize for their essay ‘1955-2012’. In 2020, they were shortlisted for the Write Now programme by Penguin Random House.
MICHELLE RYAN – AUTOFICTION/AUTOPATHOGRAPHY AND THE SHORT STORY CYCLE (P2)
I am currently working on a short story cycle, Blue Breast, in which I explore the interconnection between the short story form and health (breast cancer). Set against the idyllic backdrop of the Loire Valley, France, Blue Breast unveils the dark recesses of illness and family dysfunction in a mode of mystical grace. This short story “cycle” is composed of thirteen intertwined stories (told from varying points of view and temporal positions) that capture key moments in the life of an American university professor in France who learns she has breast cancer as she prepares to exit the confines of an emotionally abusive marriage. It’s a collection about bodies, landscapes, magical awakenings, creativity, trauma and intergenerational wounds. As a whole, Blue Breast follows in the path of Angela Carter’s “Flesh and the Mirror”, but it proposes a slightly different engagement with intimate, often magical realist, modes of performative autobiography and affective intimacy. In this presentation I will read examples from the collection and explore how networks of images can build between stories throughout the reading process.
Michelle Ryan (she/her) is Maître de Conférences (Senior Lecturer) at the Université d’Angers, France where she co-directs the “Short Fiction and Short Forms” section of the CIRPaLL research group and oversees the European Network for Short Fiction Research. Her research focus is the short stories of contemporary women writers (Angela Carter, Rikki Ducornet, Ali Smith, Sarah Hall), with a special emphasis on intermediality, authorship, reading pragmatics and gender. Ms. Ryan’s research has been published in various collections and journals such as Marvels and Tales, Journal of the Short Story in English, Etudes Britanniques Contemporaines, and Short Fiction in Theory and Practice. She is also the former editor of Journal of the Short Story in English. Her current interests include research-creation approaches to autobiographical fiction. Her story “I am a Tree” won second prize in the Lucent Dreaming 2022 short story contest. This story will be published alongside a second story, “My Body, My Self: A Bathtub Meditation” in a forthcoming Lucent Dreaming sponsored anthology about hope.
MELISSA WAN – INDECENT EXPOSURES: REVEALING OUR SELVES IN AUTO-FICTION/-ETHNOGRAPHY (P2)
‘To write means having one’s voice disrupted, taken over, rendered by another.’ – Peter Garratt
This paper asks how imitating the styles of other writers through creative methods such as pastiche and parody might give us a ‘way in’ to accessing and presenting the multiple sides of a self, in particular the different selves that emerge as a result of illness and bodily instability.
How can we use gaps in fiction – such as the absence of disabled bodies, or the line-break which stands in for sex and mirrors the cinematic convention of panning away from the couple in bed – as ludic provocations, writing in what was rendered absent as though it was always there and thereby rebalancing available narratives?
Indecent Exposures attempts to redress the ‘profoundly political act’ that cordons off sex and disability as “private matters” and extends Hannah Arendt’s view that storytelling is a mode of purposeful action which enables us to narrate, make sense of and communicate significant life events. It will be presented in two parts: 10 minutes on my practice-led research and the final 10 for a reading of my auto-ethnographic short story ‘Calf’.
Melissa Wan (she/her) is a writer and first-year doctoral student in the School of English at the University of Leeds. Her practice-led PhD explores textual erasure in relation to the writing of sex and to the absence of disabled bodies in fiction and is funded by the AHRC through the White Rose College of the Arts & Humanities.
