Notes Made While Falling (Goldsmiths Press)

Ashworth, Jenn

ISBN 10: 1912685191 / ISBN 13: 9781912685196

Published by Goldsmiths Press, 2019

About this Item

Seller Inventory # 26379689736

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Notes Made While Falling (Goldsmiths Press)
• Publisher: Goldsmiths Press
• Publication Date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1912685191
• ISBN 13: 9781912685196
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

A genre-bending meditation on sickness, spirituality, creativity, and the redemptive powers of writing.

Notes Made While Falling is both a genre-bending memoir and a cultural study of traumatized and sickened selves in fiction and film. It offers a fresh, visceral, and idiosyncratic perspective on creativity, spirituality, illness, and the limits of fiction itself. At its heart is a story of a disastrously traumatic childbirth, its long aftermath, and the out-of-time roots of both trauma and creativity in an extraordinary childhood.

Moving from fairgrounds to Agatha Christie, from literary festivals to neuroscience and the Bible, from Chernobyl to King Lear, Ashworth takes us on a fantastic journey through familiar landscapes transformed through unexpected encounters and comic combinations. The everyday provides the ground for the macabre and the absurd, as the narration twists and stretches time. Hovering on the edge of madness, writing, it seems, might keep us sane—or might just allow us to keep on living.

In Notes Made While Falling, Ashworth calls for a redefinition of the creative work of thinking, writing, teaching, and being, and she underlines the necessity of a fearlessly compassionate and empathic attention to vulnerability and fragility.

About the Author

Jenn Ashworth is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and author of the novels A Kind of Intimacy, Cold Light, The Friday Gospels, and Fell. She is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English Literature and Creative Writing at Lancaster University.