... We bonded over beers and discussions of mental health, particularly anxiety. Independently, we’ve both been writing about mental health and what it means to possess and inhabit a body for years, so we wanted to spend some time collaborating to investigate these issues more deeply and explore what arises from combining our respective voices and experiences.
During our residency at Gunyah, we plan to create a collaborative zine of poetry about materiality, mental health and the panic of being a contemporary body-in-world. Using a new term coined by Albrecht – the 'panic sublime' – we'll investigate bodily relationships with environment under threat.
Claire Albrecht |
Dr Claire Albrecht is a Newcastle based poet and has recently completed her PhD. She was the 2019 Emerging Writers Festival fellow at the State Library of Victoria, a 2020 Varuna ‘Writing Fire, Writing Drought’ fellow, and will be a resident at the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, New Mexico in 2021. Her debut chapbook 'pinky swear' was published in 2018.
Sarah Pearce |
Dr Sarah Pearce is a poet and researcher from Tarndanya/Adelaide. Her work appears in Aeternum, Outskirts, Meniscus, Writing from Below, TEXT and various anthologies. She has held residencies at Adelaide City Library and FELTspace gallery and performed at Blenheim Festival and Adelaide Fringe Festival. She writes on female embodiment, the Gothic, queer narrative(s) and mental health.