Aileen La Tourette
Research Interests
I am still interested in memory and during my sabbatical 2006 I travelled to Italy to research a novel The Oldest Girl about Saint Maria Goretti, her legend, cult and the part she has played in the lives of (ex-)Catholic women of my generation. I am also writing a book of poetic sequences in which memory plays a very large part. In both of these research projects, as in my novel Late Connections, I am looking at both personal, individual and social, collective, communal memory. I am also completing a theatre play, Frida and Gwen, which imagines a meeting between the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo and the English artist Gwen John, having discovered that they were both in Paris in 1939 but never, as far as is known, actually met. I am interested in various kinds of realism in storytelling (and in poetry and drama ) – realism, surrealism, magical realism, and the different ways in which they work to the same or similar ends.
Current Projects
Publications (Selected)
Books
The Writer's Workbook (2nd edition, co-edited with Edmund Cusick & Jenny Newman; London: Arnold, 2004)
Short Stories
Oral History and Other Stories (West Kirby: Headland, 2007)
"Andorra", in Tobias Hill (ed.), Pool 2 Anthology of Short Fiction (West Kirby: Headland, 2003)
Poetry
Touching Base (West Kirby: Headland, 2006)
Poetry Pool Three (anthology; co-edited, with Gladys Mary Coles & Edmund Cusick; West Kirby: Headland, 2006)
Poetry Pool Two (anthology; co-edited, with Gladys Mary Coles & Edmund Cusick; West Kirby: Headland, 2005)
Downward Mobility (West Kirby: Headland, 2004)
Poetry Pool (anthology; co-edited, with Gladys Mary Coles & Edmund Cusick; West Kirby: Headland, 2003)
Book Chapters
"Creative Writing Studies: Research, Practice, Pedagogy", in Graeme Harper & Jeri Kroll (eds), Creative Writing: Practice and Pedagogy (Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 2007), 130-140
