ABSTRACT
This collection works inductively from practice to reflection, starting with the idea of silence as enabler. From the very first impulse, how creative ideas are formed, we trace an arc from history and tradition, reclaiming lost tales and silenced voices, raising difficult and uncomfortable truths along the way – towards the unspoken as both technique and subject of silence.
From lost and rare works, to vanishing traditions and reclaimed motifs, the authors gathered here offer a reconsideration of what silence, breaking silence and speaking out entails, as well as consider the role of silence and silent spaces in human development and thought.
From reconsiderations of traditional tales, from women’s traditions to explorations and work with the disenfranchised, a graphic novelist, a poet, a storyteller, a banshee and Geoffrey of Monmouth can co-exist in these pages, each bringing something to this consideration as the book follows a writer’s arc: from initial idea through its various guises to the rigours of the editorial process following the natural journey of writing intended for audience, and pausing mid-way to consider a voluntary ethic of exclusion and the difficulty of representation of the ‘other’.
