POETRY & IMAGE: A DAY SYMPOSIUM
The Department of English Literature wishes to apply for funding from the Friends of the University of Reading to mount a one-day workshop around Creative Writing on 30 June 2022 at the Museum of English Rural Life.
This outreach event will bring together university staff, postgraduate students, local journal editors, community writers and artists, including those associated with the Reading-based Two Rivers Press and the Poets’ Cafe. The event will be widely advertised in the town and surrounding area. The symposium will also serve to disseminate information about the new MA in Creative Writing launched by the Department of English Literature, which will admit its first cohort in September 2023.
The theme for the day will be Poetry & Image. It has been chosen as a broadly suggestive topic that can bring together writers and artists, printers, and designers, and cover all the various ways in which these art-forms may interact. The event has been designed to feature the work of current MERL poet-in-residence Toby Martinez de las Rivas. The symposium will combine open discussion after short position papers, and include readings from various writers, including Toby, and some of our current graduate students completing PhDs in poetry. The event will provide a platform to showcase the wide-reaching creative work currently being done at the University of Reading and reach out to interested parties and institutions with a view to developing a future programme of interaction.
The symposium is a first step towards rebuilding cross-community relations around creativity which had previously been achieved through the Reading Poetry and Literature Festivals (2013-2016) and day symposia mounted from 2017-2019 with ourselves, the University of Canberra, and Oxford Brookes University. This momentum was naturally interrupted by the pandemic, and after a two-year interval we are determined to re-establish our links with the community as a first step in bringing together local and international writers once more in Reading. At the same time, with the launch of our new MA in Creative Writing, it has become vital to link again to the writing community in our area.
We request funding of £325 to stage the event. This is accounted for as £150 for the hire of the MERL Conference Room and Seminar Room, and £175 for drinks and sandwiches for some thirty participants across the day.
Professor Steven Matthews s.matthews@reading.ac.uk
Professor Peter Robinson p.robinson@reading.ac.uk