Notes Made While Falling
Published on 12. November 2019
Book
Hardback
200 pages
978-1-912685-19-6 (ISBN)
Description
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.
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.
Reviews / Votes
Ashworth in particular is almost frantic to find a kind of container that isn't chronological but captures instead the fluctuating, flickering, needle-jumping, train-derailing nature of the traumatic. She experiments with broken and braided narratives, modes for conveying the present tense of distress, the way it ruptures time.-Olivia Laing, Guardian Sometimes you read a book so unusual, so defying of genre, that it's hard to know what to write about it. Something that is experimental with language and format without ever losing its tethering to the ground. All I can say is that Notes Made While Falling (2019) is special, and reading was an extraordinary experience.
-Stuckinabook.com Ashworth cuts through time and place, exploring the roots and fallout of earlier trauma and an ongoing battle to shape her bloody birth story into fiction.
-Bookanista I've zero appetite for traditional non-fiction these days, the balanced, authoritative kind that aspires to inform and entertain. The writers I want to devote brain time to take personal risks and push at the edges of thought and experience while embracing incompleteness, skew, wryness and wit. So it's thrilling that books such as Jenn Ashworth's Notes Made While Falling (Goldsmiths Press) - an intelligent hybrid of memoir and criticism that explores afresh how we might process trauma - exist in the world.
-NEW STATESMAN Ashworth's research is painstaking in the truest sense of the word. It is exhaustive, scouring and interrogative. She draws deeply from critical theory and examines writers experimenting with genre and form while pushing the boundaries herself.
-The List
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Cambridge
United Kingdom
Target group
US School Grade: College Graduate Student and over
Product notice
Cloth over boards
Illustrations
1 b&w illus.; 2 Illustrations
Dimensions
Height: 203 mm
Width: 134 mm
Thickness: 25 mm
Weight
283 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-912685-19-6 (9781912685196)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Jenn Ashworth
Notes Made While Falling
Book
10/2020
Goldsmiths, University of London
€19.00
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