Introduction to ‘resourcing work in lean times & setting your creative compass’ – workshop, interview & performance with Julie Irigaray & alice hiller

alice hiller: It’s a huge pleasure to welcome you all to this Voicing Our Silences workshop with Julie Irigaray and I.  At the time of recording, in  December 2021, were were both aware that we have all been through a tough couple of years, with no clear or rapid path back to the world we knew pre-Covid. Julie and I therefore decided to base our event around resourcing work in lean times.  In the video that follows, we share share ideas about how to nurture creativity without the opportunities and freedoms many of us once took for granted. If anything is difficult for you, the Mind website is a really good place for links and support lines.  We each perform two short sets of poems, and talk about how they came into being, specifically focusing on the resources we used, whether it was books, online research, or memories of travel.  We also set a writing exercise each, which will help open new directions within your work. We finish with questions from the audience. Because this Voicing Our Silences was recorded in the run up to the winter solstice, we structured our poems around the idea of rising up from darkness into the light.  For both of us, as for all of you who are members of the Voicing Our Silences community, one of the brightest, and most constant sources of light, through the pandemic, has been our collective solidarity and mutual creative support and we wanted to honour it within this recording.

Normally, I would pause the recording at the prompt stops, and cut the audience participation, to trim the length of the workshop. This time, however, we wanted to create an immersive experience for everyone who joined us, and give the feeling of how the Voicing our Silences collective operates as a place of mutual creative nurture and adventure. I’ve therefore noted the times ahead of the link to the video, in case you wanted to go straight to one section. The workshop performance is auto-captioned for accessibility.

Please note, you will need a piece of paper and something to write with for each prompt.

0.00 alice hiller introduces
4.00 Julie Irigaray set 1: ‘The Basque Whaler’, ‘Six War Letters’, ‘Kreig’
12.00 alice hiller set 1 : ‘bains de mer’, ‘pistil’ [see below for text], ‘three small shrines’, ‘in the vineyard’, ‘circular’, ‘joujou’, ‘libation’
21.20 Julie & alice discussion 1 including use of medical notes in poems
39.32 alice hiller prompt : setting your creative compass
1.05.50 julie irigaray set 2 : ‘Red Card’, ‘Divine Seraphine’, ‘Via Domitia’
1.12.30 alice hiller set 2 : ‘the holly tree’, ‘vesuvius’, ‘benediction’, ‘o goddess isis’
1.20 Julie & alice discussion:
1.35 Julie Irigaray prompt turbo-charging your creative explorations
final questions from Voicing Our Silences collective

Video Resourcing your work in lean times: Julie Irigaray and alice hiller

Julie Irigaray

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Julie Irigaray is based in London, and was born and raised in the south-west of France, at the crossroads of three cultures: French, Basque and Spanish.  She has studied for degrees in Paris, Dublin and London.  She began writing poetry in French and moved to English.  Her work includes news features, reviews and travel writing, and has been published in the UK, the US, Ireland, Canada, Mexico and South Korea. Her poems have won many prizes and respond to her interest in languages, identity and multicultural backgrounds. She is motivated by the works of artists who engage with these themes, and  passionate about history, a recurrent subject of her writing. Her debut Whalers Witches and Gauchos debut is available here.

alice hiller

alice hiller is a writer from London and Dieppe. She is the author of The T-Shirt Book (Ebury Press), and holds a PhD from UCL. Her journalism has been published in the Observer supplement and her reviews in The Poetry Review, Poetry London, The TLS, Magma, Literary Imagination and Essays in Criticism. She was the founding Reviews Editor of harana poetry and interviews poets in depth about ‘saying the difficult thing’ on her alicehiller blog. Her poems have appeared in Poetry London, Stand, The Cambridge Literary Review, Magma, tentacular, one hand clapping, perverse and elsewhere.

Whalers Witches and Gauchos

Whalers, Witches and Gauchos explores narratives of displacement, the way we navigate between countries and cultures, and how where we come from makes us who we are.  Using her Basque ancestors as a point of reference – these same whalers, witches and gauchos who travelled to the other side of the world or were persecuted – Irigaray conjures up her memories of living in the Basque Country, France, Ireland, Italy and the UK. This pamphlet depicts what it is to migrate between places and languages seeking homes that can both sustain us and allow us to grow.

bird of winter

Short-listed for the 2021 Forwards’ Prize for best first collection, alice hiller’s debut collection, bird of winter, performs an act of witness and restitution. Working with her childhood and adolescent medical notes, bird of winter creates a redemptive language to speak the darkness of being sexually abused by a family member. Through the excavated histories of Pompeii and Herculaneum, these poems additionally document the grooming that prepares a child for sexual abuse, and the vulnerability which remains afterwards. Calling up the landscapes and relationships which sustained her, as well as the injury she experienced, Hiller reflects the nature and impact of a crime to which millions around the world are subjected – and asks how we may find our ways towards healing.