Hello everyone! It’s been a busy couple of months for me with various work trips and catching up with friends- and it’s been a while since I’ve updated my blog! So what have I been up to?
On July 3rd I was delighted to be invited by my colleague Mary Flannery to be a guest speaker in her ‘How to Write a Book’ series as part of her Page by Page newsletter. (If you’re a graduate student or early career academic and you’re not already signed up to receive the newsletter, do so, it’s enormously helpful!)
We were talking about ‘How to Write Your First Book’ as an academic (Mary’s write-up of the event is here) and that’s a topic that I have a lot of thoughts on!
If you’ve followed my blogposts for grad students and ECRs (full list available here), you may have read my long post on writing my own monograph, The Church as Sacred Space in Middle English Literature and Culture, which finally came out in 2018 after a very long journey from finishing my DPhil (PhD) in Oxford in 2007! Do pop over and read my post and Mary’s write-up, and feel free to get in touch if you’d like to chat or ask any questions. (And I’m very happy to share my book proposal if that would be useful to anyone!).
My key piece of advice in the end is from this post-it note on my home office noticeboard- HOLD YOUR NERVE! I promise that you have absolutely got this- you are the expert and you should have confidence in your abilities, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise!
In June, I also wrote a new blogpost for my advice series: this one was on ‘How to Write a PhD Proposal’ and you can find it here. I hope it will be helpful! (If any grads/ECRs following the blog have ideas for other posts that I could write, please do let me know! The current selection is available here).
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This month has also been a great month for poetry news! As many of you know, I’m currently writing a poetry collection inspired by the women of Beowulf and this month I was delighted to have one of the poems published in a wonderful journal called Wet Grain. Huge thanks to guest editor Sylee Gore and main editor Patrick Romero McCafferty for choosing my poem for Grendel’s Mother, ‘Meresong’, for publication in the latest issue (which you can purchase here! The whole issue is absolutely stunning and it’s beautifully produced!).
My mysterious little poem is voiced by Grendel’s Mother’s mere (I’m very interested in giving voice to other kinds of consciousnesses in my collection!). The mere sings about her dream of drowning queens as company for Grendel’s Mother in her isolation (- rather sinister, I know!). I’ve written elsewhere about the ways in which Grendel’s Mother is linked to the other queens in Beowulf through her shared experience of female grief for her lost son, and one day I was fishing out all the green algae in my pond and this poem just came to me! I borrowed a lovely compound here from the Old English poem The Wanderer: sele dreorig or ‘hall-sad’ (to be exiled from one’s hall in Old English poetry is the very definition of sadness!).
One of the lovely things about Wet Grain as a publication is that there is a notes section where poets comment on each other’s work! I was delighted to comment upon an extraordinary poem by Patrick James Errington and I was thrilled to bits with the comment below from the brilliant Jamie Cameron.
The other exciting thing about the publication is that there was a launch at Fusion Arts in Oxford on July 5th and I was invited to read alongside four other incredible poets in the issue. It was the first time I’d read to a non-medievalist audience so it was a really lovely opportunity to share my work and hear the audience’s feedback. It was a wonderful evening!
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This month also saw the publication of my first poem about Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich! The fantastic Sarah Law, poet and editor at Amethyst Press, has put together a wonderful anthology to celebrate the 650th anniversary of Julian of Norwich’s visions and I was delighted to have my poem ‘Anchorhold Voices’ included in the anthology!
My poem was written for the New Visions of Julian of Norwich conference in Oxford last year and was part of my creative-critical paper exploring Margery and Julian’s meeting in Norwich in 1413 when they experienced much ‘holy dalyawns [a kind of intimate conversation] … be comownyng [communing] in the lofe of owyr Lord Jhesu Christ many days that thei were togedyr’ (ch18, The Book of Margery Kempe). It’s amazing to think that our most important women writers and mystics met each other and spent time together!
In my poem, both Margery (‘this creature’ as she calls herself in her Book) and Julian speak together and God joins in the conversation too (stanza three is a quotation from Margery’s Book when God asks her why she is afraid when she’s travelling because he is as mighty on the sea as on land, and he asks her to suffer patiently and have trust in his mercy). I use Margery’s image of the ‘lityl hecke’ [little ship] to think about Julian in the anchorhold as a safe harbour in a storm (the medieval guide for anchoresses called Ancrene Wisse imagines the enclosed religious woman as an anchor holding the ship of the church steadfast in the storms of the world).
I’ll be returning to this work very soon for a journal article and I’ll be writing more poems inspired by Margery Kempe so keep your eyes peeled! (And do check out the anthology, it’s full of wonderful work and is available in hard copy and on kindle).
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My final piece of news is that I’m delighted to be performing some of my Beowulf poems at the TOEBI conference in Birmingham in September!
I’m really looking forward to sharing my poems with a specialist academic audience (and deciding which poems to focus on… Grendel’s Mother for sure but maybe Queen Wealhtheow will get a star turn this time!)
Thanks for reading and I hope you all have a great summer!
Dr Laura Varnam 