Due to unforeseen circumstances we will be postponing this event until later in the year. If you would like to receive notice of the new date please email heritageadmin@theus.org.uk to register your interest.
Writer and teacher Sally Bayley will lead an intimate creative workshop for up to 10 participants on the experience and knowledge of loss.
The workshop will be built around the conversation poem, Home Burial, by American poet Robert Frost, that dramatises feelings between a mother and a father, a man and a woman, as they move around their personal tragedy of losing a young child. The poem takes place inside a house that looks out into a garden/graveyard.
The aim of the workshop is to help participants use poetry, dramatic voice and movement - choreography and gesture - to explore the shifting terrain of memory, loss and rituals of commemoration.
Part One of the workshop will open up the poem to the participants as a dramatic experience. Sally will lead a discussion the experience of the poem as it is heard and voiced and ask each participant to come with two lines they particularly attach to.
Part Two of the workshop will involve participants creating their own miniature voice piece to a lost loved one or someone they miss. For this part of the workshop participants will work independently for 10-15 mins and will then share their lines if they wish.
This event is part of a digital series focusing on different aspects of death hosted by the House of Life at Willesden Jewish Cemetery, encouraging more people to talk about death, as part of life.
Biography
Sally Bayley
Sally Bayley is currently a Lecturer in English at Hertford College, Oxford. From 2018 - 2020 she was a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Oxford Brookes University. Her publications include a study of the American home, Home on the Horizon: America’s Search for Space (Peter Lang, 2010) and a study of the diary as an art form, The Private Life of the Diary: from Pepys to Tweets (Unbound, 2016). She is now completing a series of three books which explore a child’s escape into literature as a form of retreat in the face of difficult social circumstances. The first, Girl with Dove: a Life Built by Books (William Collins, 2018) was Radio 4’s Book of the Week in January 2019, and a Spectator Book of the Year (2018). The second illustrated part, No Boys Play Here (William Collins, 2021) was published January 2021, and tells the story of the same young girl in search of a lost father and uncle through Shakespeare’s characters.
Sally Bayley
