Minding the Gap: Exploring imaginal realms and the poetic image in the alchemical process of writing trauma with Sophie Craven (Schumacher College, Dartington)
A BSA Auto/Biography Study Group Event
13 November 2024 (17.00-18.00)
Online
About the Event
Minding the Gap: Exploring imaginal realms and the poetic image in the alchemical process of writing trauma with Sophie Craven (Schumacher College, Dartington)
Abstract
In this seminar, I will reflect on my experience writing a semi-fictionalised life narrative for my MA Poetics of Imagination dissertation at Schumacher College/Dartington School of Arts. I set out in this work to explore what might happen if I troubled the boundaries between the psychological and mythological (and individual vs collective) aspects of the sexual violence I experienced in my teens and early twenties. I was interested in developing a poetics of rupture and repair that could question and play with the idea of ‘healing’ and ‘wholeness’ in a world that is already polluted, already fractured and ‘always already infected’ [Alaimo 2010; Neimanis 2017]. I wanted to place a troubled and violated body within the context of a troubled and violated world [Maté and Maté 2022]–if only to see what happens when we do. For this seminar, however, I use the dual notions of ‘poetic image’ [Bachelard 1958; Hilman 1992] and ‘imaginal realm’ [Bourgeault 2020; Ibn al-Arabi in Chittick 2008] to reflect on the actual alchemical process of writing such a piece – drifting as I did between fiction and fact, memory and imagination, the rational and the magical or otherworldly. I look at memory gaps as imaginal realms, and the embodied process of alchemising post-traumatic flashbacks into poetic images. This in order to resist the psychological negation and individual pathologisation of post-traumatic experience (disorder, dissociation, derealisation) and rather to open up these experiences to the possibility of being deeply historicised and mythologised other worlds to and from which we travel, and within which we may find certain ‘luminous or dark gifts’ [Oswald 2024: pers. Comms.] to bring home.
Registration
- Auto/biography Study Group Member/BSA Member: FREE
- Non-Member: £10
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