Once upon a StAnza… Stories and narrative have long had an important role to play in our making sense of what it means to be human  and to live in our communities and environment, and in negotiating how this might alternatively look. StAnza, Scotland’s International Poetry Festival, 2022 (7-14 March) will focus on ‘Stories like starting points’, exploring the opportunities and the pitfalls of stories, ranging over narrative poetry, prose poetry, re-writing old stories and imagining new ones, reportage, process / chance narratives, myth /epic.

The festival brings together a superb line-up and I feel so excited to be part of the journey on Saturday 12 March at 2pm. Will be performing and discussing the ethics of writing about difficult narratives with Alice Hillier and Annemarie ni Chuirrean.

ERASURES will take place live at the Byre Theatre Auditorium, Sat. 12 March 2022, 2pm-3.30pm, and will also be broadcasted online via zoom.

For information, details and tickets to the live event at the Byre Theatre Auditorium, please access the link: ERASURES: What we cannot say and how we say it. (The Byre Theatre)

For information, details and tickets to the online event, on zoom, please access the link: ERASURES: What we cannot say and how we say it (online).

The discussion will focus on emotive and difficult themes, and will explore the techniques and approaches when finding words for things that can’t easily be said. Through use of hand-erasure techniques in bird of winter, Alice Hiller discovers transient holding places for the darkness of being groomed and sexually abused in childhood. Maria Stadnicka’s Buried Gods Metal Prophets is a poetic documentary exploring the lived experiences of children in care during the Romanian communist dictatorship which ended in 1989. Annemarie ni Chuirrean will join from Ireland via Zoom to read from and speak about The Poison Glen, a collection at whose heart sits the story of the stolen or missing child, including work responding to a long-gone Foundling Hospital in Dublin and bearing witness to family loss and cultures of silence in Ireland.

Erasures: what we cannot say and how we say it

Thank you, StAnza 2022!