Life Narratives/Academia

Life Narratives is an umbrella term for all sorts: diaries, ephemera, texts, shopping lists, scripts, notes …. It’s a theme, subject, and approach to writing that I’ve always been interested in, even before I knew it had a name.

In my academic work I teach and often write about the ephemera of life. Current projects/forthcoming chapters, essays, papers, etc include:

• The ‘nature’, birdwatching notes and journalism of WH Hudson and Richard Jefferies who tramped around the South Downs creating interesting genre-blurring pieces that explored illness, spirituality, nature and place. (Forthcoming, Cambridge University Press.)

• Francesca Woodman’s photography mapped alongside her life writing/ephemera and literary interests.

• Female English ornithologist/artists who made significant contributions to landscape and place writing (particularly in the South Downs), but have remained unacknowledged.

I intermittently send out a newsletter and run writing workshops about life writing, place, and memoir.