Moving Mountains
Writing Nature through Illness and Disability
WithLouise Kenward, Alice Tarbuck, Alec Finlay and Jane Hartshorn
At: Online-only
On:23rd October 2023, 6:30pm - 7:30pm
We're so pleased to be hosting the online launch of Moving Mountains: Writing Nature through Illness and Disability, a first-of-its-kind anthology of nature writing by authors living with chronic illness and physical disability.
We'll be joined remotely by editor Louise Kenward, who will be in conversation with several of the anthology's contributing writers: Alice Tarbuck, Alec Finlay and Jane Hartshorn.
Livestream vouchers are valid until the day after the event and can be redeemed on our website against the cost of Moving Mountains. Please note that only one voucher can be redeemed per book.
About Moving Mountains:
Through twenty-five pieces, the writers of Moving Mountains offer a vision of nature that encompasses the close up, the microscopic, and the vast.
From a single falling raindrop to the enormity of the north wind, this is nature experienced wholly and acutely, written from the perspective of disabled and chronically ill authors.
Moving Mountains is not about overcoming or conquering, but about living with and connecting, shifting the reader’s attention to the things easily overlooked by those who move through the world untroubled by the body that carries them.
Edited by Louise Kenward, with a foreword by Samantha Walton.
Contributors: Isobel Anderson, Kerri Andrews, Polly Atkin, Khairani Barokka, Victoria Bennett, Feline Charpentier, Cat Chong, Eli Clare, Dawn Cole, Lorna Crabbe, Kate Davis, Carol Donaldson, Alec Finlay, Jamie Hale, Jane Hartshorn, Hannah Hodgson, Sally Huband, Rowan Jaines, Dillon Jaxx, Louise Kenward, Abi Palmer, Louisa Adjoa Parker, Alice Tarbuck, Nic Wilson
Participants:
Louise Kenward Author
Louise Kenward is a writer, artist and psychologist. Working for the NHS for much of her career she set up ZebraPsych in 2020 with the aim to raise awareness and understanding of energy limiting chronic illness. Previously Writer-in-Residence at Rye Harbour Nature Reserve with Sussex Wildlife Trust (2021-2022), she has been widely published, including in anthologies Women On Nature (2021) and But You Don’t Look Sick (2021), as well as The Clearing, BMJ, The Polyphony, The Unwritten, and The Bookseller. In 2020 she co-produced Disturbing The Body (Boudicca Press) before setting up Moving Mountains with the aim of bringing together writers and readers who live with illness and disability and a love of the more-than-human world around us. Her essay commissioned for Landscapes for Recovery (‘The Ocean as Mirror’) was broadcast on BBC Radio 3 at the end of 2022. Kenward is currently undertaking a practice led PhD with the Centre for Place Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University and is preparing her first full-length book A Trail of Breadcrumbs.
Alice Tarbuck Author
Dr Alice Tarbuck is a writer and academic based in Scotland. Winning the Scottish Book Trust New Writer’s Award for poetry in 2019, her first poetry pamphlet Grid was published by Sad Press in 2018 and her first book A Spell In The Wild: a year (and six centuries) of magic was published by Two Roads (Hachette) in 2021. Her work has been published widely, and she has appeared at StAnza, Belfast Literary Festival, Literary Dundee, and the Scottish PEN International Women’s Day Symposium.
Alec Finlay Author
Alec Finlay is a Scottish artist and poet whose work crosses over a range of media and forms. Finlay was awarded the 2020 Cholmondeley award for services to poetry. Recent publications include the Scottish Design Award best publication winner a far-off land (2018); gathering published by Hauser & Wirth (2018); th' fleety wud (2017), minnmouth (2017), ebban an’ flowan (2015), and Global Oracle (2014). Sweeney’s Bothy, on the isle of Eigg, was co-conceived with the Bothy Project; it still hosts artist residencies.
Jane Hartshorn Author
Jane Hartshorn is a poet and PhD candidate at the University of Kent, writing about the lived experience of chronic illness. Her pamphlets include Tract (Litmus Publishing, 2017) and In The Sick Hour (Takeaway Press, 2020). Hartshorn’s work has been published by Boudicca Press, Dostoyevsky Wannabe, Lucy Writers and SPAM, and she is an editor at Ache Press.