Women Walking

Panelists

Anna Chilvers (chair)

Anna is particularly interested in the links between writing, walking and the landscape, and in 2015 received a grant from the Arts Council to walk the five hundred miles from St Abbs in Scotland to Ely in Cambridgeshire as research for her 2020 novel, East Coast Road. When she’s not sitting at her desk working on her latest novel or gazing out of the window, she’s often out  walking in the West Yorkshire countryside, getting inspiration from the land and the movement of her body and the air in her lungs.

Julia Bennett

Julia is a sociologist at the University of Chester researching belonging, community and place. She has published a diary of this lockdown project in Journal of Narrative Politics 7(2) and written flash fiction from another lockdown project using participants’ diary entries. She has also written creative non-fiction about place published online in Elsewhere: A Journal of Place.

Mary Pearson

Mary is a final stage PhD researcher in the Department of Art, Design and Architecture at Plymouth University. She uses photography as a primary methodology to explore the representation of place within both physical borders and the landscapes of memory. 

She has an MA in Photography and the Land from Plymouth University and has lectured in photography.

Sonia Overall

Sonia Overall is a writer, psychogeographer and writing tutor living in East Kent. Her published writing includes novels, poetry, short stories, academic articles and features, many of which touch on psychogeography, spirit of place and aspects of the weird. Her books include the poetry collection The Art of Walking, the walking-writing manual walk write (repeat), and the hybrid memoir Heavy Time. Her novel Eden is scheduled for release with Weatherglass in July 2022.  Sonia is a member of the Walking Artists Network and founder and curator of Women Who Walk, a network for walking academics and creatives. Her walking projects include themed public and performative walks, temporary labyrinths and the lockdown walking project on Twitter, #DistanceDrift. She is currently a Senior Lecturer at Canterbury Christ Church University, where she runs the MA in Creative Writing. 

Abstracts

Lockdown Scrapbook

In 2020, Julia used daily lockdown walks as a way of engaging more closely with the place where she lives. She took photographs and grouped them into themes: space/place, everyday life, time and change. She would like to share some of the stories these walks inspired.

Mapping by Walking

Hinterland is an investigation of walking the parish boundary at the start of each meteorological season and becoming attuned with the seasonality of the landscape. Through her personal histories, Mary weaves stories and creates images considering the interconnectedness of place, time, and memory – offering reflections of the self and the land.

Boxed Walking Festival

Drawing on the playful approach of Fluxus Event scores, the Boxed Walking Festival is a compendium of walking possibilities, invitations and provocations designed to foster creative walking. Select a score from the box, take it for a walk, and devise your own score for future Boxed Walking Festival participants.