Writing with Ghosts

A seminar given as part of the North Sea Poets ‘Writing With …’ second series in 2025.

In this session I discussed various ways that as poets we might engage with texts, artifacts and images from archives or family memorabilia. Are we giving a voice that was suppressed, that finally is being given room? Or is this an extended means of self-expression, of appropriation – another legitimisation of our own worldview? We have to have our answers ready.

This photo is of a Romanian Shepard photographed at Ellis Island in 1906. Photograph: New York Public Library/Augustus Sherman, colourised by Matt Loughrey. Irish Times online, Sun Feb 26 2017

Published by lesleyharrisonpoetry

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Lesley Harrison lives and works on the Angus coast. In her writing, she explores how it is to live at the southern, temperate edge of a much colder northern world. She has held writing residencies in Greenland, Iceland and Svalbard. Drawing from archives, folk myth and cultural memory as well as her own explorations and experience, her poetry and prose make real our negotiation with, and our constant striving to give meaning and scale to, this unstable and ultimately unknowable space. She is a member of the North Sea Poets collective - northseapoets.com.

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