I was delighted to receive a recent invitation from Anna Walker, senior arts and culture editor at The Conversation, to contribute to a review piece of the books on the shortlist for the International Booker Prize 2024. I am an admirer of the International Booker not only for its commitment to literature in translation, but also for its explicit recognition of the translator, who shares half the prize with the author. This year, the judging panel was chaired by Eleanor Wachtel, and included poet Natalie Diaz and artist William Kentridge.
I was asked to review Jente Posthuma’s What I’d Rather Not Think About, which was translated from the Dutch by Sarah Timmer Harvey. Readers of this blog will recognise my research interests reflected in the work, which documents the grief process of a younger twin following the suicide of her brother. Posthuma’s novel was published in the Netherlands in 2020 and was shortlisted for the European Union Prize for Literature in 2021. Her first novel, People Without Charisma, was published in 2016, also to wide critical acclaim.
Given its subject matter, What I’d Rather Not Think About is surprisingly readable, in part because of its tone. The narrator – known to us only as Two because she was the second born – reflects with wry humour on her situation. The book also reads as a series of interconnected flash fictions. It came as no surprise to read that Posthuma is a fan of American short story writer Lydia Davis: her prose echoes Davis’s precision, and Posthuma also shares Davis’s interest in probing questions of intimacy and distance. The brevity and concision of both writers focuses our attention on what is unsaid, as much as on what is expressed.
The winner of this year’s International Booker Prize will be revealed at a ceremony held in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, on Tuesday 21 May.
The article in The Conversation, which contains mini reviews of each of the shortlisted novels, can be accessed here.
Last week, I spoke on the phone to Alison Shindler about the Facing the Future Support Groups for those who have been bereaved by suicide. These online peer-support groups are run by the Samaritans, and Alison is a Facing the Future Facilitator and the Samaritans London Region Partnership Officer. We talked about the free support service that is available through Facing the Future for anyone who has been affected by suicide loss.
Alison began by explaining the origins of Facing the Future. The scheme started in 2011 and was prompted by the recognition that there was little specialist support available for those who had been bereaved by suicide. To address this gap, the central London branch of the Samaritans joined up with the Kensington and Chelsea branch of Cruse Bereavement Care to combine their expertise in suicide and bereavement counselling respectively. Face-to-face groups were set up, originally in London, and provision was then expanded to selected areas in the UK. Participants found the groups made a real difference to them in navigating their loss and helping them to feel less isolated.
Alison outlined that the support groups were moved online during the Covid-19 pandemic. Although this was originally in response to lockdown, it became evident that there was a value in continuing to meet online after the restrictions were lifted. It meant that those attending did not have to travel to the group (with the related costs in terms of time and expense) and it also helped participants to be in their own familiar space after the meeting had ended. The move online also meant that the support groups were available to anyone with access to the internet. In my book Relating Suicide, I reflected that suicide support is often focused in cities in the UK, and that an ongoing challenge is to build and sustain networks of care in rural, coastal, and island locations. The online network of support offered through the Facing the Future scheme is a good example of bereavement care rippling out from London to other areas of the UK, and then reaching beyond this to include more remote and isolated locations.
The support groups meet every week over a 6-week period. Groups are closed, to offer a safe space for participants in which trust can develop between the members. Each group has a facilitator but there is no agenda to the conversations, which are directed by the participants themselves. Facilitators are there to ensure that everyone has a chance to speak and to support anyone who becomes upset or distressed. In this way, the emphasis of the groups is firmly on peer support. I wrote in my book of the importance of lived experience to the understanding of suicide. Facing the Future offers a positive model of foregrounding the value of lived experience, in its central commitment to enabling those who have lost a loved one to suicide to offer support to one another.
I was interested to hear from Alison that no one bereaved by the same loss participates in the same group, so that group members can speak freely and feel they have their own space. Unlike some other suicide bereavement support organisations, Facing the Future does not organise groups according to the relationship of the bereaved with the person lost; support groups are not made up solely of parents or of siblings, for example. Equally, participants in groups might have been bereaved a few months earlier or decades before. Alison explained that this broke down the assumption that a similar type of bereavement or time period since the death might give a greater connection with someone, when connection with others’ experiences can come from many different aspects of the experience. Equally, the mixed constitution of the groups enables participants to hear experiences that are different from their own, which might increase their understanding of how suicide loss is affecting those around them. For example, a parent could learn from a sibling in the group how the suicide of their son or daughter might affect surviving brothers and sisters. Having lost my sister to suicide, I would certainly have found it helpful to hear not only from other siblings but also from parents and friends about how they experienced their loss.
Alison and I ended the conversation by reflecting that most people are related to suicide in some way, if not directly through the loss of a family member, then perhaps indirectly through the experiences of a friend or a colleague. I mentioned that whoever I have talked to about my own experience has had their own relation to suicide to tell. Yet it is still a topic that is hard to speak about. The supported safe spaces that schemes such as Facing the Future offer are vital in this context, enabling members of the group to share their experiences of loss and to learn from the perspectives of others.
You can learn more about Facing the Future, including how to register interest in joining a group, here.
Many thanks to Alison for speaking with me about Facing the Future and for sharing the important work that the Samaritans are doing to support those bereaved by suicide.
On 18 May 2023, I was delighted to contribute to a seminar series hosted by the Suicide Cultures team at Edinburgh University. The paper I gave was based on the third chapter of my recent book, Relating Suicide. I countered the understanding of suicide as a solitary act by tracing how it ripples out through a diverse range of bodies, institutions, and objects. Conceiving of suicide as inherently relational, I thought about the ways that its dispersion connects lives which are otherwise unrelated. I also thought about the ways in which the act of suicide relates human and non-human lives and agencies.
In my paper, I focused on Orlando von Einsiedel’s 2018 documentary Evelyn. This beautifully made film charts von Einsiedel and his family as they start to talk about his younger brother, Evelyn’s, death by suicide a number of years earlier. Evelyn’s family and close friends share their memories of him, and talk about the effect his death has had on them, as they walk in places that Evelyn had loved. In this way, place and landscape forms an important element of the film, as does the act of walking itself. The family speak to other people who have lost loved ones to suicide, meaning that their walks also map Evelyn’s death in relation to other deaths that they learn of along the route.
The care that the family shows for each other ripples out to other people in an expansive gesture that is also evident in the screenings of the film at cinemas around the UK. Each of the screenings, which are timed as afternoon matinees, has a family member present for the post-show discussion and audience members can also choose to go on a local walk with others who have been affected by suicide. When I first saw the film screened at the Tyneside Cinema in Newcastle, I was struck by the distance from which families had travelled to see the film and by the shared desire to share their experiences in the post-screening discussion. Borrowing the idea of ‘promiscuous care’ (The Care Collective, The Care Manifesto, 2020), I thought in the paper about the ways in which the film generates community and solidarity around suicide by harnessing the potential of the local, as well as pointing to the important role that networks of peer support can play in supporting those who have been affected by suicide loss.
Many thanks to Amy Chandler and the Suicide Cultures team for including me in their seminar series. The discussion after the talk raised important questions about the unsettling quality of the place where a loved one has died by suicide; how we define places as rural, urban, coastal, etc., in identifying them as sites of suicide; and the potential of creative responses to suicide for navigating the ongoing relation to the place where a loved one has died.
Yesterday, I went to see the North East Speak Their Name Suicide Memorial Quilt, which is currently being exhibited at Newcastle Cathedral. The Speak Their Name movement originated in Manchester and the first memorial quilt was made during the pandemic. The North East project was led by Tracey Beadle of the charity Quinn’s Retreat and Suzanne Howes, both of whom have lost children to suicide.
The quilt is made up of three panels with 120 squares in total. Working with suicide bereavement groups across Tyne and Wear, Teesside and County Durham, the project provided a supportive community for those bereaved by suicide to remember their loved ones by making their own square. Looking at the panels, it was evident how much care had gone into the design and making of each square, and they spoke powerfully to the lasting impact of suicide loss.
Some of the squares used photographs of loved ones to make portraits of them as they are remembered now. Kelly’s aunt used a photograph of her niece to create a cyanotype on the fabric, capturing the lovely young woman that she was.
Dyllon’s mother used a photograph of her son that was on his laptop and that he himself had drawn. Tracing over the image, she sewed in details to celebrate her son’s artistic nature and love of Goth.
Other squares focused on the person’s passions. Paul was remembered by his aunt through a nurse’s uniform and stethoscope, representing his ambition to be a nurse and his commitment to his studies through a life-threatening illness. The square also celebrates the qualities of compassion and care that drew Paul to nursing as a profession, and that characterised him as a person.
Samuel’s brother shared his passion for football and they often went to see Crystal Palace together. He used the shirt that his brother wore to the games to make his square, and sewed onto it his name and the age he was when he died. Samuel had worn the shirt to the FA Cup Final in 2018.
A number of the squares had quotations embroidered onto them. Graham’s son wrote onto his square the words of a song that his Dad used to sing to him every evening when he went to bed.
Mark’s son remembered the Moomins book that his Dad had given him, and which became a firm favourite. He embroidered onto his square an image and a quote from the book.
Naomi’s best friend turned to the poetry she has read as a source of comfort and connection since her death, and her chosen quotation from Emily Dickinson was a poem that she felt Naomi would have loved.
Graham’s daughter-in-law also looked to where she had found comfort and solace since his death. Her square represents Lochranza Castle on the Isle of Arran, where she and her husband had felt a strong connection with Graham through the beauty of nature. Sand gathered from Lochranza beach has been attached to the square to form the shape of Arran, together with a magpie to represent Graham’s love of Newcastle United.
These are only a few of the squares sewn into the panels; each of them gives a vivid and intimate portrait of a person who is loved and who was lost to suicide. The inscribing of the names speaks a loss that is socially difficult to communicate and often silenced. The squares also speak eloquently of creativity and community, balancing grief with hope.
The quilt will be on display in Newcastle Cathedral until 27 March 2024.
The podcast series Conversations about Arts, Humanities and Health, hosted by Dieter DeClercq and Ian Sabroe, is well loved by many who work in the medical and health humanities. The series, supported by the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust, develops meaningful dialogue and connection between the humanities and medicine. The conversations take place online, and scholars, health professionals and the public discuss how the arts and humanities can inform healthcare. The recording of the conversation is then published as a podcast, together with a reflective summary by Dieter and Ian.
Having enjoyed listening to many episodes, I was honoured to be invited as a guest on the third season of the podcast. I had already had the pleasure of working with Ian, who was a contributor to the Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities, and the care and thoughtfulness with which the conversation was conducted therefore came as no surprise. I met Ian, Dieter, and Jennifer Pien for a preliminary online chat about what areas Jenn and I would like to cover in the conversation, and about topics of common interest, and we agreed a loose series of questions, which would still allow space for the conversation to take its own direction on the day.
It was a pleasure to talk with Jenn about her work with medical professionals as well as her own creative practice. Our conversation focused on the role of writing and personal stories in the medical and health humanities. We explored the relation between the personal and the critical, and we thought about how bringing the personal perspective into academic work does not mean losing a critical voice. More broadly, we thought about the value of lived experience, the meaning of creativity, and the varied craft of writing.
Thank you to Dieter, Ian and Jenn for such a generous, and generative, conversation.
You can listen to the podcast, which is episode 23 of Ian and Dieter’s series, here.
In her poignant and powerful collection of poems, A Fine Yellow Dust, written in the year following her daughter’s suicide, Laura Apol includes the poem ‘Patient Stone’. The poem is based in an Iranian tradition that when your pain is overwhelming, you go in search of your ‘patient stone’. Once you have found it, you sit alone with it and tell it your story. As you unburden yourself, your pain will lessen and once you reach the end of your story, the stone will break into pieces.
Apol’s poem records an afternoon of searching for her own ‘patient stone’, so that it can hold something of her overwhelming grief. She accords agency to the stone, believing not that she will find it but that ‘it will find me’. But what stone would be the right one for the task? She asks, ‘How large is a stone / that can manage this work?’ Should she carry it home with her when she has found it? Once it has broken into pieces, should she visit it? She concludes by reflecting that she will need to find ‘the right stone’, because, whole or broken, ‘it will be mine for life’.
A few days before the last anniversary of my sister’s death, I was on Lindisfarne, a tidal island just off the Northumberland coast. I had wanted to find a stone on the beach here that would mark this anniversary, and I wandered along the strand looking at the pebbles. I was drawn to the smooth, oval-shaped stones, coloured like the sand, that were piled there. Picking them up, they sat well in my hand, and they had a pleasing weight and heft to them. Turning over one of the stones, I saw that it had been inscribed in pen with a name and date, and I liked the idea that this stone had already been picked up and held by someone else. I put the stone in my bag and continued my walk around the perimeter of the island to the causeway, accompanied by the sound of seals singing on a sandbar just offshore.
It was only when I examined the stone more closely at home that I realised the date that had been marked in pen on its surface was 28 August 2021. Not only had this stone already been picked out by someone else, but it had been inscribed on the anniversary of my sister’s death. It felt that this was the ‘right stone’, and that, even as I had been looking for it, it had found me.
I had recently attended an online weaving course run by Sarah Ward of Lark and Bower. Sarah teaches off-loom weaving, which uses left over yarn to stitch basic weave structures, such as twill and herringbone, around everyday found objects. Instead of writing or drawing on the stone, I decided to make a weaving around it, a practice reminiscent of the Japanese art of wrapping stones. Choosing a plain, natural thread that toned with the sand-hued pebble, I wrapped the warp threads carefully around the stone, working from left to right. I then stitched the weft threads through the warp in a two-twill pattern, working across the width of the pebble from bottom to top. The weaving was a slow and meditative process, taking several days to complete.
I sat with this stone, not to tell it the story of my grief, but to weave around it a thread that, as I was winding and stitching, held memories of my sister. The process of weaving was slow and patient work. The yarn covered over, without erasing, the pen inscription that had already been made on the stone, so that the finished work took on a palimpsestic quality. The stone currently sits on a bookshelf in my study, and I often pick it up and hold it for a minute or so, feeling its weight and texture in my hand.
In her workshops, Sarah encourages participants to place their woven objects back where they found them. For her, it is a cathartic process to return these objects to their original surroundings, enhanced by the weaving. The thread used is a natural yarn, which will degrade naturally over time. I wonder what this stone would look like back on the beach at Lindisfarne, taking its place amongst the other oval pebbles. Would the weaving gradually disappear, eroded by the action of weather and the tides, to uncover the writing once more? Would another person encounter this stone and imbue it with their own meaning and significance, adding another layer to the palimpsest? Would it feel cathartic to return it to the beach on Holy Island, or would it feel as if I am leaving something precious behind?
I have long intended to walk across the causeway to Holy Island, as many pilgrims do each year. Perhaps I could carry the stone with me as I do so, and end the walk by returning it to the strand. This gesture would honour the spirit of Sarah’s workshop by giving the stone back to the island and to the sea.
Picture Credit: Anne Whitehead
References
Laura Apol, A Fine Yellow Dust (East Lancing, Michigan: Michigan University Press, 2021).
I was delighted to be in conversation recently with Rebecca Helman about the Relating Suicide book. Rebecca is part of the Suicide Cultures team at Edinburgh University, a five-year project funded by a Wellcome Trust Investigator Award. The project focuses on the social and cultural contexts of suicide in Scotland, and it has a deep commitment to working with lived experiences of suicide and suicidality.
My conversation with Rebecca began by reflecting on the trajectory of my work and how I came to write a book on suicide. We reflected on the writing of the book during the Covid-19 pandemic, and what impression this left on the work. We then moved on to think about what creativity means in relation to the book and the ways in which its form bridges the critical and the creative. We considered the importance of capturing feeling as well as facts in relation to suicide, which formed an important link between the book and the Suicide Cultures project.
We then focused on the book more specifically. We talked about the structuring of the chapters around a series of questions, and the limits of what we can know in relation to suicide. We thought about the emphasis that I put on the importance of place in connection to suicide-related grief, and about the language of living beside suicide.
Our conversation closed by thinking about the archive, reflecting on the ways in which my book disrupts institutional archives relating to suicide and is suggestive of more creative archiving practices. Rebecca shared the project’s making of a photographic archive, based on images contributed by those affected by suicide. We ended by registering the importance of listening as well as speaking in the context of suicide narratives.
In February 2023, a book launch for Relating Suicide: A Personal and Critical Perspective was hosted by the Institute for Medical Humanities at Durham University. It took place in the Birley Room at Hatfield College, and I was both moved and delighted to see the venue filled with so many dear friends and colleagues.
The evening was launched by Professor Angela Woods, Director of the Institute.
Newcastle University Emeritus Professor Linda Anderson then reflected on the book’s combining of creative and critical writing.
My conversation with Durham University Emeritus Professor Patricia Waugh deepened the discussion of creative and critical approaches in the book. We ranged across other topics, including the integration of the personal into academic writing, the value of reticence, the question of form, and the influence of Virginia Woolf.
I closed the launch by reading a short extract from the third chapter of the book, in which I reflect on the tide clock that hangs on the wall of my kitchen.
Thank you to the Durham Institute for organising and hosting the event.
The image I have chosen for the page that introduces the Relating Suicide project is of a cyanotype. One of the earliest forms of photography, the cyanotype process does not need a camera. Instead, the object that is ‘photographed’ is placed directly onto a surface that has been coated with chemicals. Glass is laid over the object to flatten it onto the surface and it is then placed in direct sunlight. The coating on the paper gradually changes colour, the speed at which this happens being dependent on the strength of the sun. This represents the exposure of the image. To develop the image, the glass and object are removed from the surface, and the object appears in negative. Once immersed in water, the chemicals deepen to the dark cyan blue that characterises the cyanotype, and the object appears in white against this ground. The surface that is treated is usually paper, although fabric and other materials can also form the basis of a cyanotype.
I started to experiment with cyanotypes at the beginning of lockdown. Even though it was early in the year, the start of lockdown was marked by sunny days. I made my first cyanotype on fabric in my garden, using one of the plants that was growing there, and I was immediately hooked. Through successive lockdowns, I cyanotyped the different plants that grew in my garden or that I encountered on my walks. Developed onto fabric, the images enabled me to stitch in added detail. Gathering these cyanotypes together, I realised that I had created an archive of my lockdown experience. I stitched the cyanotypes into two albums, bound between fabric covers recycled from tops I no longer wore. I wrote about my lockdown cyanotypes for my good friend Kate Davies’ blog, and you can read the post here.
More recently, I have experimented with cyanotypes of plants and objects gathered on the beach at Redcar where my sister died. I like to walk there, and I often pick up small treasures along the way – a pebble, a feather, a strand of seaweed. The lockdown cyanotypes were created using the process described above, which is known as dry cyanotype because the chemicals have been allowed to dry on the treated surface before the object is placed on them. For the beach cyanotypes, I have mostly used the technique of wet cyanotype, so called because the object is placed on the surface when the chemicals are still wet. This allows the addition of other materials into the chemical mix, including dilute vinegar, sea salt or turmeric powder. The result is more unpredictable than with the dry method but it can be beautiful. I have written about the beach cyanotypes in a blog post for Bloomsbury Press, which you can read here.
The cyanotype pictured on this page takes the sea as its object. Unlike many of the beach cyanotypes, it uses pre-treated paper because it was impractical to coat the paper when I was at the beach. But as a dry cyanotype, it collapses the distinction between the exposure and the developing stages. With the sea as its object, the cyanotype is exposed by dipping the paper into the edge of the tide and letting the receding pull of the water create the negative image. This already merges into the submersion of the paper into water for the developing stage, meaning that the image captures a part of the cyanotype process – the washing away of the chemicals – that is normally invisible.
This experimental cyanotype of the sea’s edge feels resonant to me with the subject of relating suicide. It is made in the place where my sister died and, on the anniversary of her death, it records a unique moment in time as the tide washes over the paper. I have written in my book about grief’s disturbance of time, and I used the tide clock that hangs in my kitchen to represent the rhythmic ebb and flow of time that commonly characterises grief. This image records both a washing away and a staining, which also speaks to me of what it means to visit this beach to remember my sister’s death.
