Sleeping Letters - Marie-Elsa Bragg in conversation with Claire Williamson
Event Information
About this event
In her remarkable memoir, Sleeping Letters, Marie-Elsa Bragg offers a meditation on loss, healing and faith, looking back to the childhood moment when her mother took her own life. Using a mixture of prose and poetry, and written partly as a series of unsent letters to both her mother and father, Sleeping Letters is a way of connecting to past family, an attempt to reconcile with loss, as well as a radical exploration of Marie-Elsa’s own faith. Edmund de Waal describes the book as ‘beautiful’ and ‘a remarkable, cadenced recollection of how grief lives in the body. It is poetry as a kind of dance.’
Marie-Elsa will read from her book and be in conversation with poet and writer, Claire Williamson. Claire has also experienced bereavement through suicide and is researching the ‘grief novel’. They will explore how writing can sustain us after loss and what it means to create art from personal experience. There will be opportunities for questions.
Marie-Elsa Roche Bragg is half French, half Cumbrian and was brought up in London. Her novel ‘Towards Mellbreak’ was published by Chatto & Windus in 2017 and ‘Sleeping Letters’ in 2018. She writes for Radio 4, Church Times, Tablet and other papers. She is a Priest in the diocese of London and a Duty Chaplain of Westminster Abbey. https://marie-elsabragg.com/
Claire Williamson is a prize-winning author and former Director of Studies in therapeutic writing at Metanoia Institute. Her most recent collection is ‘Visiting the Minotaur’ from Seren in 2018. She is working on a doctorate on writing the grief novel at Cardiff University. http://www.clairewilliamson.co.uk/
Organiser The Poetry Practice Ltd
Organiser of Sleeping Letters - Marie-Elsa Bragg in conversation with Claire Williamson
The Poetry Practice Ltd organises training, offers consultancy and organises events in the area of writing for health and wellbeing.
Founder, Victoria Field was described in Poetry Review as a pioneer in this work in the UK. She has a background in psychology and cultural management, is a former Director of Survivors Poetry, former Chair of Lapidus International and is a qualified Mentor-Supervisor for the International Federation for Biblio-Poetry Therapy. Together with Anne Taylor, she co-directs two popular online courses for the Professional Writing Academy which have been completed by hundreds of students from over thirty countries. She has worked in many community, social care and educational settings using poetry and literature to promote wellbeing.
She has co-edited three books on therapeutic writing and her own poetry has been published by Waterloo Press, Francis Boutle Publishers and appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including Best British Poetry. She also writes drama and fiction and her work has been produced in Truro and Canterbury and featured on BBC Radio 3 and 4. She and her husband, musician and cosmologist, Eduard Heyning collaborate on performances, especially in sacred spaces.
She is currently researching transformative writing and the pilgrim identity at Canterbury Christ Church University.
