FENWOMEN

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.

FENWOMEN borrows its name from Mary Chamberlain’s Fenwomen: A Portrait of Women in an English Village first published by Virago Press in 1975. In Fenwomen, Chamberlain chronicled the lives of several generations of women from one village in the Cambridgeshire fens, — their sense of belonging (or not), community, labour and social isolation — as well as their relationship to their surroundings. Shrouded in a mythology of remoteness, this region is perceived to be on the fringes of society and culture; fringes, which owing to coastal erosion, are in a constant state of flux.

The event series began as a response to Chamberlain's text, but each iteration roams further from her initial proposition, drawing together writers, artists and musicians who form a rich and varied reimagining not just of the fenlands but of the entire region and beyond. And although these writers roam far, they share an intention: to disrupt conventional notions of place-based writing. 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).

Each event is loosely themed and forms a chapter on the website, featuring contributions by some of the country's best writers, and building to a body of work for a print anthology in the coming years.

FENWOMEN 5

Friday 4th April, The Holloway

To mark two years of FENWOMEN, we held a very special event at The Holloway, featuring writers Amy Jones, and Rosa Torr, followed by an afterparty with by DJs Effy Mai, Mariner of Danu and Tegan. Pleasure is never more important than it is during crisis and these writers seek moments of joy and revelry amidst it — embodied, loud, dissident moments. Together, they asked: How do we occupy space? How might revelry be its own form of transgression or trespass? How does it return us to our bodies and in doing so, refuse the cold nihilism of patriarchy?

All photograps courtesy of Joseph Hayes

Chapter 1

FENWOMEN began life on 17th May 2023, 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.

Read Chapter 1

Chapter 2

The second event in the FENWOMEN series took place on Friday 24th November 2023 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.

Read Chapter 2

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 contributed to artists' monographs, written several chapbooks and Limn the Distance is her first full-length book, published by JOAN.