317 research outputs found
Competitions: A Chapter in Your Story
No full text'Fresh from the publication of her debut novel, author Philippa Holloway shares her thoughts on how writing competitions helped her get there.
Then, now, forever? Researching and writing nuclear landscapes for The Half-Life of Snails
No full textIn a room at the back of the building she finds rows of rusting bunk beds, a floor scattered with dead-eyed dolls and faded clothes. Frozen in time, the websites say, but there is evidence of time passing everywhere: the moulding material, the curling paint, the dried leaves heaped in the corners of the room.-Holloway, 2022 Since the 1986 Chornobyl disaster, the Exclusion Zone has become a tourist site, offering the chance to see a landscape, villages and cities 'frozen in time'. As research for my novel, The Half-life of Snails, I engaged in embodied and psychogeographic research in Chornobyl's Exclusion Zone to explore perceptions of landscapes that act as palimpsests of nuclearity. These are spaces in which time is a recurrent tension, where past events still impact the emotions and behaviours of communities, policy makers and individuals, and where future use of land is marked in centuries-long half-lives. The individual human, too, is a palimpsest, made up of their own unique and layered experiences of place and culture, of interactions and ideas. And we exist in the Nuclear Anthropocene-a moment timestamped by the detonation of the first atomic bomb and the resulting presence of man-made isotopes in the ground (and by extension the bodies of those living there) (Lewis & Maslin, 2015; Miller, 2016)-and therefore bring conceptual perceptions and experiences of nuclearity into interactions with these landscapes. This chapter explores how I negotiate these tensions of time and place, experience and concept, both through my research and creative practice, and in the novel, to show how layers of time-past, present and speculative futures-affect our relationship with landscape and the nuclear industry and can be explored in literature. It touches on the philosophies of landscape and time perception explored by scholars such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Henri Bergson, to contextualise and explain my autoethnographic and phenomenological research practice, and how I recognise the temporal issues at play in this subject and address them within both my creative practice and the final text of the novel.</p
Borders
No full textNotes of Solidarity is a new daily series of mini-essays, poems, and reflections on the Russian war on Ukraine by some of Wales’s leading literary figures. Here, novelist Philippa Holloway, whose debut work, Half-life of Snails, draws upon her psychogeographic research in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, examines her experiences between Ukraine and Ynys Mon
Introduction
No full textImagine this: you are sitting in your study, glance flitting like a dragonfly from the laptop screen to the view of fields and trees beyond the window. It's hot, early summer and already the first heatwave has hit, leaving your skin sticky and head fuzzy. The word Anthropocene is an ever-present echo in your mind-the syllables rising and falling over and over like a siren ... A word for an epoch in which humanity's indelible mark has been left in the geological strata of our planet, and whose exact start is still contested, but whose end feels ever more immanent with reports of ecological tipping points, and targets unmet. You've recently survived a pandemic (we do not use these words lightly, you lost people, we all did), and last year saw record temperatures in the UK and parts of Europe and the Americas consumed by wildfires. Already this week, the average global temperature record has been broken twice, with predictions that it will be broken again and again over the coming months. As children, you sat in front of small TVs and watched BBC's Newsround tell you about holes in the ozone layer, animal extinction, polar ice caps melting, oil-slicked birds. You caught your parents watching footage of the Chornobyl disaster and whispering fears to one another, have witnessed the Great Acceleration rush forward in your lifetime, and know of vast floating islands of discarded plastics in the oceans, floods covering one-third of Pakistan, and now long-terms risk to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant as well as global impact through crop loss after the attacks, a few weeks ago, on the Nova Kakhovka dam in Ukraine.</p
10 Questions with Attorney, & Writer Philippa Davies
No full textInterview with attorney, writer, and St. Andrew High School for Girls graduate Philippa Davies, author of Travel Light: Memories of a Covenant Journey which was published on February 11th, 2011
Untethered
No full textThe debut short story collection from the RSL Ondaatje-award longlisted author of The Half-life of Snails. Dead birds fall from the sky, an octopus lies stranded on a beach, and a lost shoe becomes a public shrine ... Untethered, Philippa Holloway’s first collection of short stories, provides an unflinching glimpse of daily life interrupted by unexpected events. Small intrusions into familiar spaces reveal nothing is as it seems. Sometimes it demands a change of viewpoint, sometimes a cutting loose to find freedom.From conflicted parental expectations to unwanted visitors, from discovering tiny human teeth in the garden to a brief encounter with a murderer over the kitchen table, these precise, realist tales scrutinise families and lovers, colleagues and strangers with a keen emotional depth and sharp observation. Each one is a vivid snapshot exposing the fragile ties that hold people together.Here we see how pigeons become terrible portents, dining tables become autopsy benches and confessionals, and a family is forced out of their home with just minutes to pack
Walking in Imaginary Shoes: Psychogeographic Approaches for Fiction Writing
No full textThe term “psychogeography” was coined by the philosopher and founder of Situationism Guy Debord as “the precise study of the effects of the environment, consciously organised or not, on the behaviour and/or emotions of individuals” (Debord, 1955: 8) in the mid-1900s, and the practices arising from it were then primarily concerned with defamiliarizing and critiquing urban spaces. Specific actions of psychogeographic practice related to writing, especially consciously engaging with a landscape and writing about its effects on the self, are more commonly associated with non-fiction texts, however, the conscious practice of creating “situations” and studying emotional/behavioural responses can be adapted and incorporated into fiction writing research and practice. This article examines the ways in which adopting a metacognitive psychogeographic methodology can provide content, form, theme and meaning in fiction specifically, with reference to practices used when writing The Half-life of Snails (Holloway, forthcoming 2022) as part of my doctoral research. It explains the challenges of using psychogeographic research to inform fictive character development, and examines the complex creative processes involved in adopting such methodologies. Finally, it encourages the fiction writer to slip on a pair of imaginary shoes and enjoy embodied research in the landscape
Walking in Imaginary Shoes:Psychogeographic Approaches for Fiction Writing
No full textThe term “psychogeography” was coined by the philosopher and founder of Situationism Guy Debord as “the precise study of the effects of the environment, consciously organised or not, on the behaviour and/or emotions of individuals” (Debord, 1955: 8) in the mid-1900s, and the practices arising from it were then primarily concerned with defamiliarizing and critiquing urban spaces. Specific actions of psychogeographic practice related to writing, especially consciously engaging with a landscape and writing about its effects on the self, are more commonly associated with non-fiction texts, however, the conscious practice of creating “situations” and studying emotional/behavioural responses can be adapted and incorporated into fiction writing research and practice. This article examines the ways in which adopting a metacognitive psychogeographic methodology can provide content, form, theme and meaning in fiction specifically, with reference to practices used when writing The Half-life of Snails (Holloway, forthcoming 2022) as part of my doctoral research. It explains the challenges of using psychogeographic research to inform fictive character development, and examines the complex creative processes involved in adopting such methodologies. Finally, it encourages the fiction writer to slip on a pair of imaginary shoes and enjoy embodied research in the landscape
Walking in Imaginary Shoes:Psychogeographic Approaches for Fiction Writing
No full textThe term “psychogeography” was coined by the philosopher and founder of Situationism Guy Debord as “the precise study of the effects of the environment, consciously organised or not, on the behaviour and/or emotions of individuals” (Debord, 1955: 8) in the mid-1900s, and the practices arising from it were then primarily concerned with defamiliarizing and critiquing urban spaces. Specific actions of psychogeographic practice related to writing, especially consciously engaging with a landscape and writing about its effects on the self, are more commonly associated with non-fiction texts, however, the conscious practice of creating “situations” and studying emotional/behavioural responses can be adapted and incorporated into fiction writing research and practice. This article examines the ways in which adopting a metacognitive psychogeographic methodology can provide content, form, theme and meaning in fiction specifically, with reference to practices used when writing The Half-life of Snails (Holloway, forthcoming 2022) as part of my doctoral research. It explains the challenges of using psychogeographic research to inform fictive character development, and examines the complex creative processes involved in adopting such methodologies. Finally, it encourages the fiction writer to slip on a pair of imaginary shoes and enjoy embodied research in the landscape
Lexical verbs in a medical case-report wordlist
No full textClinical case reports or clinical cases (CRs) are, perhaps, the most widely
read text type in medicine, since they contain a detailed description of the patient’s
medical history and symptoms and thus furnish ample teaching material for
physicians-in-training. For non-native speakers of English in medicine, autonomous
learning is often restricted because of a lack of medical lexicon, poor academic
vocabulary, and weak lexical verb use. Here, we present the results of an investigation
of lexical verbs: their distribution, classification, and contextual use in the
different sections of the genre CRs. We suggest that lexical verbs with contextual
use should be included in medical dictionaries to aid vocabulary development for all
levels of English language competence. We found that relational and reporting
verbs predominate in CRs and are used to describe and contextualize author
observations. Stative verbs are generally found to describe patient data, while
change of state verbs generally refers to patient response to therapy. Contextual
analysis suggests that lexical verbs categories might be related to the moves of this
genre, useful for teaching the structure of medical publications. We give some
applications of this investigation to dictionary building and in integrating corpora in
teaching and eventually in testing activities
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