Inspired by the extensive archive material surrounding Paul Nash’s life and work, we will explore and create landscapes – real and imagined, ancient and modern – through our writing. Drifting through the Paul Nash exhibition and Tate’s extensive archival holdings we will use Nash’s photographs, letters, papers and more as a launch pad to investigate new strategies for writing about landscape, memory and myth.
Course participants will work as a group and individually on new poetry, prose, letters and textual fragments. Writing will include pieces in class and a longer-range project with an opportunity for participants to present their work-in-progress at the course’s end.
Justin Hopper is an American writer based in the UK. Recent audio-poetry works exploring archives include commissions by Spill Festival and Estuary Festival, and the poetry CD, I Made Some Low Inquiries. His book about the mystical South Downs, The Old Weird Albion, is due from Penned In The Margins in 2017.