By Louise Usher
During my creative writing MA, we were given a writing prompt, encouraging us to take a seat in a coffee shop and write what we could hear. The piece that followed from my mind gave me reason to believe that sounds are subjective. Not only am I hearing impaired, since my mastoidectomy in the year 2000, but an active imagination saw me writing stories within the coffee shop sounds.
By Graham Fifoot (editor)
At 22 Kingsway, a life-sized Virginia Woolf wax work is exhibited inside a room of her own in the foyer of the Virginia Woolf King’s College London building. Eleanor Crook’s wax work creation is dressed in clothing modelled after the dress, shawl and hat that Woolf famously wore in a 1923 photograph taken by Lady Ottoline Morell.
As their tenure draws to a close, Katie Arthur and Harriet Thompson reflect on their time working together as editors of the King’s English Blog.
HT: It’s funny looking back on the time when we took over as editors in January 2019; I get that strange simultaneous feeling of it being very recent, but also a quite a while ago. A lot has happened since then! We were both in our first year studying for a PhD in the English Department at King’s and it was an exciting opportunity to be able to curate and commission such a wide range of writing from staff and students. Over two years later, I still have quite a lot of writing to do before I submit my PhD thesis. But having the blog to focus on alongside everything else has been a really nice (and productive) distraction. I didn’t imagine that we’d be spending practically a whole year inside, running the blog from our bedrooms on opposite sides of London. I think the last time we saw each other in person was in January 2020? That is so weird! I do miss the community and energy that comes with working inside the university buildings.
KA: Two years ago! I know what you mean about that odd simultaneous feeling of temporal contraction and dilation – I feel like there must be a word for it somewhere, in some language. Perhaps we should commission a blog on it! The blog has certainly been an anchor, both pre-Covid and now. Working with the department to publish publicly is really exciting, it has definitely helped me engage with the work happening here at King’s in a more thorough and thoughtful way than I might otherwise have given myself time to do. Though it was more fun conducted in the physical presence of the department as you say and it is a shame to have lost the sense of community that so often is linked to space. The blog also serves as a space of connection for the department. You did a wonderful round-up of all the work we had shared around the new year that received a very touching response from the department. Do you think that the functions of the blog have changed as our needs have moved online in the pandemic? It has always been interesting that the blog reaches out to and beyond the department but, perhaps now more than ever, it is also a meeting point of sorts when we cannot do in person.
Continue reading Community and Connection: Editors in Conversation
– TRACY SEELEY
There is perhaps no greater comfort nor reward granted by reading than resonance. It is an indescribable liberation to have our feelings corroborated; to sift through the works of writers centuries past and happen upon an unassuming strand of words that instantly articulates the inarticulable, that echoes an acute emotion lying dormant within. These discoveries serve as whispers through time, as a consoling hand-squeeze in the ether. In my first year studying on the Strand, Virginia Woolf’s 1930 essay Street Haunting: A London Adventure offered me this solace.
Continue reading Alienation on the Strand; Solitude in Street Haunting
By Camilla Einem
This article is part of The LION Series from the Freshers’ Magazine Takeover. Each post this week features a snippet from an article in The LION Magazine 2020/21 Issue 1.
The LION magazine is written by third-year King’s students, all of whom have recently completed their BA English degrees.
The magazine helps first-year students in the English Department transition into university life.
This post is by Camilla, a Norwegian who is passionate about travel, languages, and writing and who recently graduated from King’s College London with a BA degree in English.
Continue reading The LION Series 2: The International Guide to London
