This page collates my creative and academic writing. For web content, publishing, and professional writing, please see: editorial.
Jump to: Academic | Creative writing | Student journalism
Academic
Within the field of English Literature, my focus is on environmental literature, environmental humanities, and ecocriticism. This was first sparked while studying my BA English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Warwick, and followed up on during my MA English Literature at the University of Bristol. In my MA dissertation titled ‘Realists of a larger reality’: imagination, slow violence, and care in climate crisis storytelling, I examined the psychological barriers to taking action against the climate crisis in Anglo-American culture, exploring how storytelling can demonstrate longer forms of care and how Indigenous worldviews are essential to promoting these essential acts of attention and nurture for the more-than-human-world.
Other essays at MA level include:
– Restoring ‘The Lost Words’: how new nature writing can redress the loss of children’s language for nature and subsequent attention deficit
– Bridging the ‘abyss of understanding’: consolidating the cultural inheritances of Romantic and Georgic perceptions of the Lake District through the literary works of James Rebanks
– “All that mud and muddle”: the ‘muddy Gothic’ of blurred boundaries, margins, and hybridity in Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent
– Migraine and its metaphors: representing migraine aura in poetry
– Reassessing the reputation of Nahum Tate in relation to Tate’s ‘Song for St. Cecilia’s Day1685’ and Restoration ideas of adaptation and imitation
Creative writing
As a graduate of English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Warwick (2016-19), I studied within the Warwick Writing Programme, studying poetry and ecopoetics with David Morley, fiction with Caroline Lea and Tim Leach, and place-based writing with Sarah Moss. In my final year, I produced a fiction Personal Writing Project under the supervision of Will Eaves.
With a focus on our relationship to environment and place, my writing interests include landscape, water, biodiversity, environmental degradation, women in mountaineering, experiences of the female body, science fiction, fantasy, speculative fiction, and magical realism.
Poetry
My poetry has been published in Re-side Magazine (‘Period.’ in Issue 4: Bodies) and Kamena Magazine (‘Pooley Bridge’ and ‘Greyscale’).
To hear some of my poetry performed, listen to Episode 9 of Unlatched Podcast in which I perform an old poem, ‘Clemenau’, or listen to my Waterlogged Poetry series.
(Listen to Episode 9: 2020 reflections directly on Spotify).
Waterlogged Poetry: a series of poetry films
Back in 2018, I set off into the Lake District to record a series of site specific poetry films at rivers, tarns and becks. Avoiding the classic lakes, I chose places that I remembered from my childhood in Cumbria. I wanted to explore local and personal history in relation to the physical landscape, and show the relationship between water and Cumbria. The poems were written at the site and edited alongside the footage afterwards. All three poems are available on YouTube.
This poem explores Blea Water, a tarn at the far end of Haweswater. Like many Cumbrian days, there was plenty of cloud and drizzle. I didn’t see anyone on my walk up from Mardale Head or while recording at the tarn, which added to the atmosphere of the poem and the sense that ghosts could be marching through the mist on High Street.
Writing for theatre: Reactivists Theatre Company
In 2018, I was one of five writers for the Reactivists Theatre Company. Guided by director Helen Morley and producer Leanne Ward, the company produced a highly collaborative show titled ‘As It Happened (Contemporaneous Notes’, which was performed at the 2018 Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
(From the Reactivists Theatre Company’s website): Reactivists are an emerging theatre company based at Warwick University. We aim to make work that is inclusive, alert, provocative and committed to testing theatre’s capacity to be politically productive and engage meaningfully with contemporary social and political issues.
Since 1st January 2018, five female-identifying writers’ have worked collaboratively, writing weekly responses to the socio-political events of the year. So far, they’ve responded to issues as disparate and wide-ranging as the decline of Carillon, the Syria missile crisis and Lyn Gardner’s lost contract with the Guardian.
These responses are now collated and staged in dialogue, association and juxtaposition to ask urgent questions of society in 2018, of theatre’s capacity to be politically effective, and of our own capacity to respond.
To read my written interview about the writing process, please visit the Reactivists website: Interview – Amy Hodkin
Student journalism
Alongside developing my academic and creative writing, I wrote for the University of Warwick’s student newspaper, The Boar. Below are two articles as a sample of my work:
Amy Hodkin 