Here are two videos from the Unpublished Tour launch event, held at Millom Palladium on 27 November, 2021. In the first, David Cooper introduces Irene Rogan, who gives a presentation on the development of Unpublished Tour and her own contributions and works, of which there is more detail here.
David Cooper is a writer and academic who is preoccupied with creative and/or critical writing about place. His literary-critical research began with a PhD at Lancaster University entitled ‘Staying Put: Norman Nicholson and the Poetics of Place and Space’. He has since published widely in the interdisciplinary field of literary geographies with his many essays exploring such topics as the relationship between literature and cartography, the notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the town of Millom as a site of post-industrial tourism.
He is currently writing a book on the ‘immersiveness’ of contemporary place writing and is co-editing The Routledge Handbook of Literary Geographies.
‘The Duddon Estuary: the Myriad Lines of its Relations’ was commissioned by Unpublished Tour.
Wallace Heim (artist and writer):
I’m interested in how a monologue by a fictional character can be a kind of writing about a place, writing that is somewhere between a first-person essay, spoken word, a narrative and sensed observation. Writing fictional voices is a way to experiment with ideas and emotions, to try them out.
This is a writing that needs to be performed, realised in the human voice sounding into another human ear. Unpublished Tour has given me the chance to experiment with two monologues about an area of compelling and puzzling beauty in Cumbria. A man speaks to the estuary seas. A woman speaks about Black Combe. Both speak about the uncertainties of the future.
These monologues are works-in-progress. They were performed live as rehearsed readings at the Unpublished Tour event in Millom, November 2021.
See more info here about these pieces and the actors Kevin McNally and Marianne Walsh.