Traditionally, geographers have been interested in landscape but have not been very successful in understanding how people create a sense of place and attachment to landscape through literature.  When literary scholars, on the other hand, study literature and landscape, they tend to do this in abstract or purely theoretical terms.  They also focus on published novelists and poets and have not traditionally paid attention to ordinary, real people who express their identities in part through writing about themselves and their everyday lives. 

In this series of workshops, geographers and literary scholars are brought together to find common ground and open up new ways of understanding landscape that draw on and combine their disciplinary strengths and address their different weaknesses.  We will host a series of events, beginning with a two day symposium for geographers, literary scholars and others from related disciplines (e.g. cultural studies).  This will prepare the ground for three writers’ events in Cornwall which will be run for primary school children, young people (aged 16-19) and adults from writers’ groups, respectively.  The aim of these events is to get people thinking and writing about landscape and how landscape makes a difference to who they are and how they develop a connection with place.  Cornwall’s well established reputation for inspiring writers, artists and creative people makes it an ideal place in which to explore the meaning of landscape in everyday life.  These events will be filmed, with small groups interviewed using a minidisk recorder.

They will be followed up with another symposium, to discuss the writers’ events, at which excerpts from the film and audio recordings will be shown and examples of the creative writing presented.  Academics will be joined by some of the writers from the groups of young people and adults to share in the process of analysing the writers’ events.  Finally, an academic conference will sum up the broader implications for future work on landscape and literature.