carthorse
orchestra
an online gathering
TRAUMA
7:30pm Saturday January 16th
A shindig to mark the launch of Trauma, a new anthology of writing about art and mental health, with essays that range from the personal to the political, from the raw to the reflective, exploring topics such as grief, insomnia, anxiety, schizophrenia, meditation, abusive relationships, work, and the connection between madness and creativity.
Trauma is edited by Thom Cuell and Sam Mills, co-founders of indie publishers Dodo Ink, who will curate the evening.
There's no charge for taking part, so please make a donation, no matter how large, to The Trussell Trust. They organise food banks.
Programme
1 Sam Mills and Thom Cuell in conversation
2 Monique Roffey: The Fish Bowl
3 Susanna Crossman: The Clown
4 Venetia Welby: The Art of Lost Sleep
5 Through the Window written and performed by
Sujveet, Kirin and Rajvinda Sibia, Pat Chard,
David English, Sandra Wallace, Hugh Sturrock and
Mr & Mrs Mansi
Choreography Louise Klarnett
Words (written with participants) by Lucinda Jarrett
Music written by Cevanna Horrocks-Hopayian, using
participant recordings
Soloist Melanie Pappenheim
Produced by Rosetta Life
Supported by Arts Council England and the Mayor of
London
Interval
7 Azad Ashim Sharma: Narcopoetics
8 Marina Benjamin: Soma
9 David Lynch on Transcendental Meditation
10 Christiana Spens: Inheritance / cover discussion
11 Neil Griffiths: Madness As Such
Stablemates
Marina Benjamin is a writer and editor working across the non-fiction landscape, taking in journalism, essay-writing, family history and memoir. She has written five books: Living at the End of the World (1998), Rocket Dreams (2003), Last Days in Babylon (2007) and The Middlepause (2016). Her latest memoir Insomnia (2018) is an unsettling account of a deeply troubling state of lack and longing. She has edited two books of women’s history, Science & Sensibility (1991) and A Question of Identity (1993), and contributed essays to The Medical Enlightenment of the Eighteenth Century (1990), Cultural Babbage (1996) and Zero Gravity (2005). www.marina-benjamin.com
Rhiannon L Cosslett is a columnist, feature writer and editor for the Guardian newspaper. In 2012 she co-founded The Vagenda, a feminist blog which was published in book form by Vintage. She has appeared in Elle, Stylist, New Statesman, The Independent and Time. I have extensive radio experience, having appeared on Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour and the Today programme, amongst many others. Her first novel, The Tyranny of Lost Things, was published by Sandstone Press in 2018.
Susanna Crossman is an award-winning Anglo-French fiction writer and essayist. She has recent/upcoming work in Trauma (Dodo Ink, 2020), Neue Rundschau, (S. Fischer, 2019), (translated into German), We’ll Never Have Paris, (Repeater Books, 2019), The Creative Review, 3:AM Journal, The Lonely Crowd, Berfrois and more. Co-author of the French book, L'Hôpital Le Dessous des Cartes (LEH, 2015), she regularly collaborates on international hybrid arts projects. Her debut novel Dark Island will be published in 2021. For more: @crossmansusanna http://susanna-crossman.squarespace.com/
Thom Cuell is a senior editor at the literary journal Minor Literature[s]. Their writing has appeared in anthologies including We’ll Never Have Paris (Repeater Books) and Manchester (Dostoyevsky Wannabe). They live in Manchester.
Neil Griffiths is the author of three novels: Betrayal in Naples, winner of the Authors’ Club First Novel Award 2005, Saving Caravaggio, shortlisted for the Costa Best Novel of the Year 2007, both published by Penguin, and in 2018, As a God Might Be, published by Dodo Ink. In 2017, he founded the Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses. He is a director of Weatherglass Books. He lives in London.
Cevanna Horrocks-Hopayian is a British composer, singer, and harper. She is considered one of today's leading emerging composers
Lucinda Jarrett is a writer, independent dance artist, and performance maker who co-founded Rosetta Life in 1997. She currently leads a 3 year creative intervention in the stroke community, Stroke Odysseys: www.strokeodysseys.org She also leads Dream a Difference www.dreamadifference.art - a poetry and song-making project building awareness of social justice and peace across ten countries where children are living with conflict.
David Lynch is an American film director.
Sam Mills is the author of The Fragments of my Father, a memoir about being a carer that was recently published by Fourth Estate. She has also written various novels, including The Quiddity of Will Self. She is the co-founder of indie press Dodo Ink and was a judge for the 2020 Republic of Consciousness Prize. Her next non-fiction title, Chauvo-Feminism, will be published by the Indigo Press. She lives in London with her father and cat.
Melanie Pappenheim is a singer, musician and performer.
Monique Roffey is an award-winning Trinidadian-born British writer of novels, essays, a memoir and literary journalism. Her latest novel, The Mermaid of Black Conch won the 2020 Costa Novel Award. Her novels have been translated into five languages and shortlisted for several major awards and, in 2013, Archipelago won the OCM BOCAS Award for Caribbean Literature. Her essays have appeared in The New York Review of Books, Boundless magazine, The Independent, Wasafiri, and Caribbean Quarterly. She is a founding member of XRWritersRebel, and an advocate for emerging writers in Trinidad, founding St James Writers Room in 2014. She is currently Lecturer on the MFA/MA in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University and a tutor at the Norwich Writers Centre.
Azad Ashim Sharma is is the director of the87press and the author of Against the Frame (Barque Press, 2017). He is currently studying for his MA Creative and Critical Writing at Birkbeck and has a collection of poetry entitled Boiled Owls forthcoming. His poems have also been published recently by Stand Magazine, the Asian American Writers Workshop and Gutter Magazine.
Christiana Spens is a writer, academic and artist. She is the author of Shooting Hipsters: Rethinking Dissent in the Age of PR (Repeater Books, 2017) and The Portrayal and Punishment of Terrorists in Western Media (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), several novels and a graphic novel. Her academic work looks at terrorism, ritual, visuality and neo-Orientalism. She has written for The Irish Times, Byline Times, Art Quarterly, Elephant Magazine, Prospect Magazine, Studio International and The Quietus on art, literature and politics.
Venetia Welby is a writer and journalist who lives in London. Her second novel Dreamtime will be published by Quartet in April: the tale of an American woman who travels to Okinawa amid global climate meltdown in search of her father. Venetia’s debut novel Mother of Darkness, a requiem for lost Soho, came out in 2017 and her essays and short fiction have appeared in The London Magazine, Review 31 and anthologies Garden Among Fires and Trauma, among others. www.venetiawelby.com