FENWOMEN
Truck-stop strip lights, stock-car racing, peat grooves and dykes with clouds in them; the cold metal grip of a handlebar; limestone clunch; chicken factories and turkey farms; hay bales, playgrounds; horizons; bog oak; the wrung necks of chickens; the severed hand of a saint; menstrual blood; women—centuries of them; women gleaning from the fields—centuries of them; with little girls running at their feet—centuries of them; little girls who want to grow up to be hairdressers—centuries of them—and mothers—centuries of them and—
This is unreal country, they say.
Rose Higham-Stainton, organiser of FENWOMEN
Welcome to FENWOMEN — an event series and longer-term project that gathers women, non-binary and trans voices from across East Anglia, using nonfiction and experimental prose to share their experiences of living and working across the region.
FENWOMEN borrows its name from Mary Chamberlain’s Fenwomen: A Portrait of Women in an English Village first published by Virago Press in 1975 and republished in 2011 by Full Circle Press with an accompanying photo essay by Justin Partyka. Chamberlain several generations of women from one village and this book captures the particularities of that landscape while also charting some of the difficulties of an ethnographic approach.
With each event in the series, we roam further from Chamberlain's initial proposition to form a rich and varied reimagining of not just the fenlands but the entire region, while honouring some of the themes in the book, including social isolation, belonging, community, labour and mythologies of remoteness. Each event in the series forms a chapter on the website, made up of newly commissioned works by some of the country's best writers, and building to a body of work for a print anthology in the coming years.
Chapter 1
FENWOMEN began life on 17th May, in Norwich, as an evening of readings, sound and film that took place as part of an experimental arts programme called Even.
The event brought together writers Philippa Snow, Hannah Levene and Rose Higham-Stainton, filmmaker Geistė Marija Kinčinaitytė and members of Embers choir who responded to Chamberlain's book of ethnographic portraits of various generations of women from a village in the Fens—a landmass of 1500 square miles that stretches from The Wash to Wisbech, and Norfolk in the south. What was once marshland and bog with cottage industries like eel fishing and weaving and binding and herb gathering, was drained by the Dutch for arable farming in the 1650s and is now a site of industrial scale farming, solar panels and stock car racing.
Hannah, Philippa, Geistė, Rose, and Deva along with members of Embers choir, explored the book's abiding themes of social isolation, community, a mythology of remoteness, decentralisation, peripheral spaces thinking through Chamberlain’s original text but also moving beyond it and beyond ethnograpphy, responding but not limited to Fenwomen and the Fens, breaching time and place and working across and through different mediums.
From a murky horror story, and drone-accompanied and deconstructed fenland folk song to a film on outsiderness and undersides—living as fen dwellers do, under the water line, or of things being lit from underneath—, the contributions were testament to all the knotty junctures of this low flatland.
This website will operate as a kind of living archive for a project that holds many voices, mediums and formats, and will continue to grow limbs.
Chapter 2
The second event in the FENWOMEN series took place on Friday 24th November at St George's church of Colegate in Norwich and featured newly commissioned work by writers Sophie Robinson, D.Mortimer and Hannah Levene, Lotte L.S and Evelyn Wh-ell.
The second iteration roamed further afield, away from Chamberlain's text and towards writing that explores the experience of living and working in East Anglia, leaving it or returning to it. It included a fenland soap opera, writing on Lorina Bulwer, feminism and doom in Great Yarmouth, an extract from a book-length poem on devotion and miscarriage and a collaborative play set in a travelling library.
Rose Higham-Stainton
Rose Higham-Stainton is a writer and critic based in Norfolk and runs the project FENWOMEN. Her work is held in the Women’s Art Library at Goldsmiths College and published internationally by the likes of LA Review of Books, Texte Zur Kunst, Artforum, The White Review and Art Monthly. She has written several chapbooks and Limn the Distance is her first book, published by JOAN.