Bad Feelings

Staying With Trouble I’ve recently been at the TaPRA conference (Theatre and Performance Research Association). I was in the working group ‘Bodies and Performance’ for the conference, and the focus of the working group was to consider negative affects, after the work of the theorist Sianne Ngai.   The call for papers for this working group …

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Invisible Hands

…hack the stories apart, Hilary Mantel In 1860 a silk weaver’s workshop in Lyon was bewitched. Missiles rained from its walls. The silk weaver’s wife was ill in bed (the workshop was also their home). It was frightening. You must understand how frightening it was.In this poem there is a mystery and a mystery solved.I …

IHR Public History Seminar, London, 9th October

You can read more about this upcoming talk below: e2809cwhat-can-creative-historiese28099-do-updatedDownload

Online Reading Group

Followers of the blog may be interested in the online reading group #StoryPast, which is holding a discussion of Sarah Knott's recent book Mother: An Unconventional History on September 12th at 1pm (GMT) on Twitter (at the hashtag #StoryPast). You can read my response to the book on the #StoryPast blog here: ...if these are …

Poets write the past: interview

One of my questions on the Creative Histories of Witchcraft project is: How do poets write the past? My question led me to re-read the pamphlet ‘Eva & George: Sketches in Pen and Brush’ by Abegail Morley.  Morley’s biographical poem sequence is set in Weimar Germany and tells the story of satirical artist George Grosz …

Crap Magic

Ask any of my friends and family who have young children: I love nothing better than demonstrating my one and only magic trick. I think it's a good trick, because the props and situation required - a fork, a napkin, a mealtime - are based on a situation where kids are always bored. Everyone else …

The Thing Is…

Detail of 'Corn Maiden', c. 1890, Pitt Rivers Museum, no. 1890.21.2Photo: Poppy Corbett 2019 Do not think it up laboriously, as if you were working out mental arithmetic. Just look at it, touch it, smell it, listen to it, turn yourself into it. When you do this, the words look after themselves, like magic.Ted Hughes, …