Welcome to FENWOMEN: an event series and longer-term project that gathers women, non-binary and trans voices from across East Anglia, and invites others in.

Through experimental literary forms, and a live event series, FENWOMEN seeks to occupy space and hold space for voices at the periphery and frayed edges of language. The entire genesis of FENWOMEN was to create a space for writers within the region to share their work, and to invite others in, and past contributors include Philippa Snow, D Mortimer and Hannah Levene, Kole Fulmine, Sophie Robinson and Lotte LS as well as performances from Spivak (Cyprus) and Arianne Churchman (London).

FENWOMEN: POLYPHONY

Friday 16th October

Octagon Chapel, Norwich, NR3 1BN

7.30pm - 9pm

FENWOMEN: POLYPHONY brings together writers and researchers Daisy Lafarge, Anna Goldreich, Katie J Barlow and Rose Higham-Stainton, alongside musical four-piece Bushes, to expand upon polyphony as form, subject, and mode of address. The event will take place at the unitarian Octagon Chapel in Norwich, itself a multi-faith chapel that brings multiple voices into conversation and into one beautiful space.

This is the latest event in the FENWOMEN series — part of a longer-term project that gathers women, non-binary and trans voices from across East Anglia, and invites others in. Borrowing its name from Mary Chamberlain's book Fenwomen: A Portrait of Women in an English Village, first published by Virago Press in 1975, the project is attentive both to the power of documenting overlooked lives and to the politics of representation. The event series began as a response to Chamberlain's text, but each iteration roams further from her initial proposition, to form a rich and varied reimagining not just of the fenlands but of the entire region and beyond.

FENWOMEN asks, who has the authority to speak, who is spoken for, and how do communities narrate themselves.

FENWOMEN: POLYPHONY will explore these ideas and the many sounds and voices within language.

Book tickets

All photograps courtesy of Joseph Hayes

LAST EVENT

FENWOMEN: UNREAL COUNTRY

Saturday 1st November 2024, 5pm-7pm

St Peter Hungate Church, Norwich

For the last event in the FENWOMEN series, we returned to the the project's roots or genesis: Mary Chamberlain's book, Fenwomen: A Portrait of women in an English village — the first book to be published by Virago Press in 1975 and republished last autumn to mark its 50th anniversary.

In Fenwomen, a vivid social and oral history of women's stories from one isolated village in the Cambridgeshire Fens, someone says: “This is unreal country”. With a very special appearance from the book's author Mary Chamberlain, alongside literary responses from writers Rowe Irvin, Camilla Balshaw and Deirdre Canavan, this event explored the profound sense of unreality that living in the world now presents and began this massive task by starting where we are. Looking both forward and back, inwards and out across the Fens (and far beyond it), these contributors explored the land, labour, enclosure, gender, patriarchy and social isolation through their own lived experiences and fictions.