FABRICA GALLERY SPECIAL

The Incommensurable: War and Writing with Judith Kazantzis.

Working with The Incommensurable Banner, the extraordinary photographic exhibition being held this autumn at Fabrica Gallery as part of the 2008 Brighton Photo Biennial, this creative writing workshop will engage with some troubling visual material and raise some challenging concepts.  The workshop will be led by Judith Kazantzis, whose sensual and surreal work as poet and fiction writer, as well as artist, has been threaded for thirty years with an anti-war ethic. 

The workshop will start by looking at a number of media, photography, film, song, fiction, poetry: all of which have been channels of anti-war protest.  Judith will explore different methods of protest writing, showing how word and seen image can charge each other, and historically how they have met in a response to war, both past and present.  She will use the visual material as a springboard, leading to a conversation about responses, both concept and emotional reactions; following, there will be plenty of space to use these rich resources to create your own war writing.

About the Workshop Leader

Judith Kazantzis has published ten collections of poetry including her Selected Poems , plus a novel, Of Love And Terror, concerned with racist war in Guatemala.  Her latest collection is Just After Midnight (Enitharmon 2004).  In 2005-6 she was Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Sussex University. In 2007 she received the prestigious Cholmondeley Award for achievement with a body of poetry. Judith Kazantzis has read her poetry at many festivals, recently at Stratford and King’s Lynn, and she has given many poetry and writing workshops including for The South and Sussex University CCE. 

As well as her novel, her protest poetry has ranged from the 1914-18 war to Vietnam, the Falklands, Greenham Common and Thatcher’s Cruise Missiles, then later poems about Bosnian refugees, Kosovo, Israel’s long war against Palestine, and the ongoing Bush and Blair/Brown Wars for control of the Middle East and its oil. She wrote  the long introduction to Virago’s classic anthology of women’s war poetry Scars Upon My Heart. She is also a printmaker and featured in Lewes Artwave 2008. For examples of poems, review comments on her books, also examples of her art, and for her ongoing blog see www.judithkazantzis.com