Digressions: On Essaying in the U.K.

by Elizabeth Reeder (Editor), Carol Mavor, Jacques Testard

EP 80.

These conversations grew out of a curiosity about the possibilities of the hybridity of the essay and from a shared interest in how the essay and essay-publishing are working in the U.K. In this Listening Tour, relative strangers utilize the opportunity of an unexpected conversation to attempt to capture the fleeting, often excessive and heightened movement of essays – considering a wide range of topics, from triptychs and pretention to Barthes and post-partum art. Here essayists, editors and publishers think out loud about form and context and try to handle this slippery, digressive, cunning, non-genre genre.

Excerpt:

I was thinking about experimentalism in the novel somehow being a permission-giver for other forms. Think of some greats like Alice Oswald’s Memorial or Christopher Logue’s War Music and how if they weren’t about war, they wouldn’t be as effective. It’s the subject that coats the pill of experimentalism.

39 pages, ebook

First published December 3, 2016

About the author

Elizabeth K Reeder writes novels, essays, and stories. She also writes for the radio. Her first novel, Ramshackle was shortlisted for a number of awards including a Saltire Literary award (2013). Her second novel, Fremont, a story of ill-starred fairytale romance is full of prejudice and desire, garnered great reviews, and re-jigs notions of home, identity and citizenship. An Archive of Happiness, a novel, will be published by Penned in the Margins in September 2020. microbursts, a collection of lyric and intermedial essays about the places between life and death, memoir and poetry - a collaborative work between herself and the artist Amanda Thomson - will be published in spring 2021 as part of Prototype’s interdisciplinary strand. Her interest in the essay (in particular in experimental, hybrid forms) has developed from a desire to write so that language, form and structure embed knowledge in a way that can be ‘read’ like poetry and art with a high level of complexity and intentional ambiguity. She holds a doctorate in English Literature/Creative Writing and is a senior lecturer Creative Writing at University of Glasgow. She organises and is invited to run workshops, seminars and talks on a range of subjects, including her own books and processes; the essay; exuberant creative failure; giving and receiving feedback, and on subjects she explores in her texts such as: illness, grief, Chicago and its architecture, archives (especially difficult, elusive archives), family, narrative structure and many others. In 2019-20 she co-runs Arts Lab Lab on Reading and writing Death and Dying with Dr Naomi Richards and Amy Shea. She is a MacDowell Fellow. twitter: @ekreeder / instagram: @ekreeder26