Hinterland Issue 16 Launch Event
A look back to last week's launch event and panel discussion with Hinterland's editors.
Last Wednesday, we launched the latest issue of Hinterland with an evening of readings and a panel discussion on writing place, hosted in the spectacular surroundings of Earlham Hall at the University of East Anglia.
Issue 16 contributors Jean McNeil and Elizabeth Lewis Williams were joined by members of UEA’s creative writing faculty Jos Smith and Tessa McWatt as they read excerpts of their creative non-fiction work (including a preview of McWatt’s forthcoming memoir The Snag: a Mother, a Forest and Wild Grief). The event also marked the publication date of McNeil’s book Latitudes: Encounters with a Changing Planet, which tracks the author’s life-long experience of reckoning with an epoch of heat and an age of dramatic ecological loss.
In a stimulating panel session moderated by Hinterland co-editors Andrew Kenrick and Yin F Lim, the four authors discussed how writing about place can shape our stories, exploring the challenges of writing our landscape as the world changes. Engaging with questions from the audience, the authors considered the importance of feeling in place writing, describing place as a zone of encounter and how we connect to a place through picking up its frequency. There was also lively debate about whether or not one can experience and write about a place without travelling there, and how tapping on the imagination as well as borrowing other people’s memories could lead to unexpected journeys of the mind.
Hinterland Issue 16 is available to order via our webstore.
I was too late to get tickets for this. It sounds like a terrific event.