Leaving The Line: Images & Words of War & Wondering

Today, Nov 11th, is Armistice Day, and in commemoration I'm delighted to unveil Leaving The Line, the electronic version of the fruits of the WW1 arts collaboration I've been working on for the past year with military historian Jeremy Banning for the Bristol Festival of Ideas. What do you think? I've never really collaborated with anyone before - and Jeremy had never done any creative writing before!

I'm really proud of the set of 12 postcards we've created, with images (some by us) and each with a 100-word short story or poem, 8 written by me and 4 by Jeremy. Between us, we decided to focus on Bristol, on women during the war, on Jewish soldiers, and more generally on giving voice to the voiceless.  The above is one of the 12, we were rather taken with that Flanders cow!

Do leave us some comments on the particular postcard's blog post! The cards are just being printed and won't be for sale, we'll be giving them away, mostly in Bristol since we don't have the budget to send them far...

My Recent Trip to the WW1 Battlefields of the Somme and Arras

My friend and fellow writer Vanessa Gebbie recently invited me to join her and a few other friends - mostly writers too - on a weekend trip to the World War 1 battlefields in France, along the Western Front. This isn't something I ever thought I'd want to do. But it was an immensely powerful experience, something I don't think I've even begun to process. We were guided by Jeremy Banning, an immensely talented military historian who has written an excellent and detailed blog on our trip here. Vanessa has blogged about her thoughts here, with wonderful pictures, and poet Caroline Davies wrote several blog posts about our trip here. I can't add to that yet so I invite you to read their blogs. Sorry for the cop-out. I am hoping life will slow down soon and I will have time to blog properly.