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.
– 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 Fran Allfrey, Strandlines assistant editor, English Dept alumna and Teaching Assistant
Strandlines is a life-writing and community history project, which takes the form of a website and linked Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram accounts. The project was set up by Professor Clare Brant, with a board of editors made up of colleagues inside and beyond King’s. I joined as Assistant Editor in spring 2019. With the new term just starting, Clare and I thought now was a good time to reflect on where Strandlines has been, and where it may go next! Continue reading Strandlines: lives on the Strand, past, present and creative
by Sarah Mir
Sarah is a 21-year-old soon-to-be English Literature graduate from King’s College London who has an avid interest in writing/editorial work.
A common epithet to describe the coronavirus has been “the invisible enemy”. Not only does the use of the chosen adjective, ‘invisible’, hint at the nature of a biological threat, but it also perpetuates an understanding of the virus as an abstraction, this other-worldly description questions its reality. Continue reading Class of 2020: Graduating From a Distance
