Place Writing (Transcript)

Featuring: Jean Sprackland, Andre Naffis-Saheley and Andrew McMillan on the work of Robinson Jeffers, ecological nightmare and the responsibility of the place poet; David Cooper and Richard Skelton on the importance of considering time when writing about place; Natalie Burdett and Zofija Tupikovskaja-Omovie on their project exploring eye-tracking in the urban landscape and whether writers see the world differently.

Read along while you listen! Find the full episode transcript below.

Disclaimer: The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in the RAH! Podcast belong solely to the speaker, and are not necessarily reflective of the views of Manchester Metropolitan University, or the speaker's employer, organization, committee or other group or individual.

Rah Podcast - Episode 07 Place Writing 

Rah! Opening Jingle  

Martin Kratz: Hello, and welcome to the Rah podcast at Manchester Metropolitan University. My name is Martin Kratz. I'm the poetry projects manager here. My biggest project is the Manchester poetry library, which will be opening in 2020. If you'd like to find out more about that, go to mmu.ac.uk/poetry library. This podcast will showcase some of the excellent work being done by our students and staff within the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at Manchester Metropolitan University. We will produce a themed episode each month with topics ranging from around the faculty. You can join the conversation on Twitter by hash tagging #RAH_Podcast. This episode will explore poetry and place.  

For our first segment, I'll pass over to Andrew McMillan who will be speaking to Andre Naffis-Saheley and Jean Sprackland about how nature poetry has become politically charged over the last decade, and is increasingly focusing on the exploration of ecological disaster over the celebration of pastoral spaces. 

In our second segment, we'll hear from Richard Skelton and David Cooper, on how writing poetry of place can be a kind of translation between other places, or past civilizations and the now.  
For our final segment, we'll hear from Natalie Burdett and Zofija Tupikovskaja-Omovie, who experimented with eye tracking technology and city spaces to establish whether or not writers see the world somehow differently.  

Rah! Mini Jingle 

Martin: For our first segment, we'll be talking to Andre Naffis-Saheley and Jean Sprackland. Andre Naffis-Saheley is a poet, critic and translator. He’s a visiting fellow at the Manchester Writing School. He was at Manchester Met during the time of this podcast to deliver both a workshop and a lecture on the work of Robinson Jeffers, who is one of California's most famous and influential poets. He discusses Jeffers in terms of the poet’s living in humanism but also looks at the idea of ecological nightmare in his work. Andre is talking to Jean Sprackland, who is professor of creative writing at Manchester Met with her poetry and her nonfiction touching on many of the themes raised by Andre in his lectures. So it's unsurprising to find them discussing ideas around nature writing, but also pitting the ideas of a writers responsibility against the kind of writing which offers an easy escapism. We also hear some beautiful readings of poetry by both of them. A guide through the ecological nightmares that are discussed as the poet Andrew McMillan, who is a senior lecturer at the Manchester Writing School at Manchester Met. 

Andrew Macmillan: Welcome to this podcast. My name is Andrew Macmillan and I'm joined by Andre Naffis-Saheley who is a visiting fellow here at the MMU writing school and also by Jean Sprackland and who's a professor of poetry here at MMU and we’re thinking about ecological poetry, eco poetry and a poetry of place as well. And I just guess a good place to start with that kind of thinking is to ask each of these guests what it is they think of when they think of that kind of phrase. Is it a specific genre of poetry or is it something that's new or is it something that's been around for a long time?  

Andre Naffis-Saheley: This is something that, we actually discussed this earlier in the workshop on Robinson Jeffers. And he's actually in a very interesting point to talk about when we consider place. From what I've seen of American poetry, not that many American poets actually ground themselves specifically in a single place, they tend to roam around the country really right from a fairly unrooted position. Whereas one of the things that really attracted me to Robinson Jeffers in the first place was that he was a truly Californian poet, and he was someone for whom environmentalism meant bypassing our anthropocentrism. And there is actually a poem that I wanted to read, because I think it really sums up the ecological nightmare that he was often describing. And it's a scene that we can all relate to, because of the fact that it really talks about our very roots as a species on this planet, and the poem is called Original Sin: 

The man-brained and man-handed ground-ape, physically  
The most repulsive of all hot-blooded animals  
Up to that time of the world: they had dug a pitfall  
And caught a mammoth, but how could their sticks and stones  
Reach the life in that hide? They danced around the pit, shrieking  
With ape excitement, flinging sharp flints in vain, and the stench of their bodies  
Stained the white air of dawn; but presently one of them  
Remembered the yellow dancer, wood-eating fire  
That guards the cave-mouth: he ran and fetched him, and others  
Gathered sticks at the wood’s edge; they made a blaze  
And pushed it into the pit, and they fed it high, around the mired sides  
Of their huge prey. They watched the long hairy trunk  
Waver over the stifle trumpeting pain,  
And they were happy.  

Meanwhile the intense colour and nobility of sunrise,  
Rose and gold and amber, flowed up the sky.  
Wet rocks were shining, a little wind  
Stirred the leaves of the forest and the marsh flag-flowers; 
the soft valley between the low hills  
Became as beautiful as the sky; while in its midst, 
hour after hour, the happy hunters  
Roasted their living meat slowly to death.  

These are the people.  
This is the human dawn. As for me, I would rather  

Be a worm in a wild apple than a son of man.  
But we are what we are, and we might remember  
Not to hate any person, for all are vicious;  
And not be astonished at any evil, all are deserved;  
And not fear death; it is the only way to be cleansed. 
So that's Robinson Jeffers, Original Sin.  

Andrew: I think that’s such an interesting introduction to Jeffers and the idea of un-rootedness and the idea of the vastness of America because Jean, in this country, we often begin talking about poets by saying where they're from, and I'm just interested in how you feel your own work and particularly, I think your new collection Green Noise which is kind of both at once about nature, but also about the kind of layers of history of landscape how that idea of either a rooted sense of place or actually a sense of being everywhere kind of comes through you thinking in your poetry? 

Jean Sprackland: Hmm, yeah, that really occurred to me as well that this was clearly a poet who you know, who identified with a particular place and lived there all his life, although certainly for me, my relationship with place is about not belonging is about a feeling of not having any secure roots in any place. And actually, perhaps, because that's my experience of life. It feels like a more creative space, that sense of not belonging to any place not being owned by any place. I think also, there's sort of poetry of place and poetry of nature. And the two are not necessarily the same thing. There's a kind of, there's an obvious sort of overlap between them, but there are poets whose life's work was to write about particular places we might think of someone like Roy Fisher writing about Birmingham, you wouldn't describe Roy Fisher as a nature poet, he's engaging with a different kind of spirit and sense of place. And, and in his case, I think, a strong feeling of belonging and of kind of translation of making sense of this city. But nature poetry, I think, has really kind of changed and doesn't want to be called that anymore. I'm sure either, but poems which engage with the natural world have undergone a huge change in the last 50 years from a position where the poem tended to be associated with the pastoral and poems about the natural world now don't necessarily position themselves in that way and have much more of the of the kind of unease and dislocation in them that so many of us experience in relation to everything else that's living on the planet around us. 

Andrew: And it really strikes me then that when we think of a poetry of place or when we think of a poetry of the natural world, that we're actually really talking maybe about a new political poetry, you know, poetry sales are kind of booming and that's actually being driven by politically engaged younger readers and maybe where we might have thought in the 60s or 70s, that there was something quite urban or poetry that was taken to the streets in that. Whereas actually now in eco poetry or in poetry that is looking at the kind of shift in the ecological landscape, that that's really maybe the main political battleground for poetry. 

Andre: I think Andrew is absolutely right. I think the question of politics inevitably comes up, one of the things I wanted to point out is that sometimes I've had misgivings about nature writing, because I think sometimes it can represent a running away from humanities mistakes from the responsibilities we have for wrecking the world the way we have. And I don't mean to apply that to all nature writers at all. I'm just saying that it can be a feature of that modal way of thinking. And so to write about nature, you have to eventually go toward humanity as well. You can't just limit yourself to describing the natural world. Otherwise, I think that just becomes a circuitous perspective, that doesn't really go anywhere.  

Jean: Absolutely. I think that there can be a real element of escapism in lots of nature writing, I have this perception that there was a period during which poetry steered away from writing about this stuff. Because it did come to be seen as rather comfortable and perceptions of nature, it tended to be rather pretty and, and pastoral, and it's something you would read to give yourself a bit of a break. And that's the thing that I think has really changed. There is this element of nightmare in a lot of the poetry of nature nowadays. And I suppose that feels like quite a different approach and dynamic as well, because there was a time I mean, you were talking about the 60s and 70s, when environmental poems were really quite lecturing. You know, it was all about everything we were doing wrong, and we'd all got to think differently. And if only we could mend our ways everything would be fine. And I think that is just such a gross oversimplification of the state we find ourselves in which is one in which we don't have a functional sense of what we have to do with all this, where we fit in. Even the language doesn't work, fit in doesn't work. You know, nature is not separate from the human. In fact, each human being in the world is teeming with other lives. We have things living on our skin, our hair, in our guts in our mouths, you know, we are all full of life that isn't our own. And at the same time, we are also absolutely part of all the other life that goes on around us. But that's really hard to maintain that way of thinking all the time. I think it's just that a poem can be really good at opening up these moments where you do see the world differently. And so that's where I think poems can show us some of that and we can have a momentary revelation or glimpse of that integration, that that reality, which is that we're part of it as much as any other living thing.  

Andrew: And I wonder as we, coming towards the end of our time, if Jean you'd like to maybe read us a poem from Green Noise? 

Jean: Yeah, I'm going to read the first poem in the book, which is a poem that is its own sort of ecological nightmare if you like. It's a poem about spring. And I know that April is the month much beloved of the poets and has tended to be associated with sweetness and softness and renewal. But my experience, really, of spring is not always like that. And this spring that gave rise to this poem was one that came very late after a very long winter that just seemed to go on and on and on. And spring came all of a sudden, everything burst into life at the same moment, and it was just too much it was just actually quite terrifying.  

April 

Machine of spring with all your levers thrown to max  
clouds in ripped clothes and sheep trailing afterbirth 
where last week's buds sucked blue juice from the dusk 
now the branch is swollenpriapic  
cherry bling and hawthorn sex-bed smell 
motorway hedgerows on thrust electric rapefields 

your levers are jammed and nothing can pull them back  
Not nownot frost not squall  
City gutters clogged with blossom  
muddy ponds spuming with cannibal tadpoles 
the long blinding daysyour bashed clock 
the violent small hours magpie clacking at the robin's nest 

and us lying open-eyed all night  
breathing in the green noise of pollen  
hearing the long bones of the trees stretch and crack 
wondering  will you ever power down or is this it now 
wondering   what can any death among us mean to you 
and will we make it through to summer or is this it now 

Andrew: Thank you very much to Jean Sprackland, Green Noise is published by Jonathan Cape and thank you very much as well to Andre Naffis-Saheley. The Promised Land is published by Penguin and a future pamphlet is forthcoming with Rough Trade later on this year. My name is Andrew McMillan and tune in for more podcast, courtesy of MMU. 

Rah! Mini Jingle 

Martin: In our second segment, we'll be talking to Richard Skelton. Richard is currently completing a PhD at the Manchester writing school. His project title is, North of Here: Past Imaginative Geographies of Northwest England. He'll be in conversation with Dr. David Cooper. David Cooper is a member of the centre of place writing here at Manchester Met. What stands out in this conversation for me is the importance of considering time when we write about place and Richard’s work takes us all the way back to late-glacial northern Britain. If you're interested in his work and that of Corbel-Stone Press, definitely check out Corbel-Stone Press’s website, but you can also find out more on richardskelton.tumblr.com. My name is Martin Kratz, and I’m here with David Cooper from the centre for place writing at Manchester Met. And Richard Skelton who as well as running Corbel-Stone Press with Autumn Richardson is currently doing a PhD here. And that's where I'm going to stop to allow space for Richard to tell us about his PhD. 

Richard Skelton: Yeah, this is this is a tough one. Now when people ask me, I see their eyes start to glaze over. When I get into kind of the third paragraph of what it is I'm trying to do but I guess simply I'm trying to think myself into the head of somebody who would have come from mainland Europe after the last ice age and returned to Northern England. When I think of what the PhD is I'm literally trying to think my mind into another mind and write as if they were speaking. 

Martin: So when they're coming across again, is that over Doggerland? Are we still connected to, 

Richard: Doggerland is until sort of about 7000 years ago. The period I’m particularly interested in is called the Late Upper Palaeolithic. One of the big sites is Creswell Crags on the border of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire. There are the only examples from that period of cave painting. There is a carving called pinhole cave man. And it's of a humanoid figure with an erect penis. And it's just a real enigma. I've been trying to get access to it. 

Martin: My PhD was on poetry in the sense of touch. So yeah, I get that nothing substitutes that actually feeling the weight of it as well. There's something important about that. Until you felt the weight of it, all the rest of it is kind of missing, isn't it? 

Richard: And just that just that idea that you know, you can, you can go I think, is it the M55 or the M56? 50? 

David: 55. 

Richard: Five, you can literally drive over the Curcan Moraine. And that was a big deposit of earth material that the ice left as it retreated. So in a way, that daily commute for people. They're travelling through Ice Age history, they're touching it almost. 

Martin: That's just incredible, isn't it? And that feels like you think you have to dig very deep, but actually, just surface level stuff is incredible. 

Richard: It is indeed, Yeah, what's also really interesting but also quite infuriating is the way that there's no real way to situate a particular discovery perfectly in time, because the science is imprecise. That level of precision, I think is where poetry comes in and where archaeology has to step aside, in, in a way. 

David: I think that fundamental question is really interesting about how poetry can sort of lift off where archaeology sort of stops. And I think that is sort of a core question that is behind the thesis. But something I actually said, I think it's really interesting the way that you said that you could sort of think yourself into the sort of the mind or the sort of experience of another. Because obviously, over recent years, there's been this massive explosion of writing about place and landscape, but there has been sort of this preoccupation with place in the south in landscape. There’s this real obsession with sort of the lyrical or the autobiographical I. And so like Richard’s project that I is often sort of stripped out. 

Richard: I think, being comfortable in unknowing and actually exploring that, it allows a multiplicity of different ideas and personalities and opinions, but I'm treating it very much as trying to find individuals with within that space.  

Martin: Now I've heard historical fiction writers, I think in this case, Hilary Mantel. He says, and she's not fleshing out facts, but actually, it's where the facts stop is the bits where she feels historical fiction has something to add because that's where you can move in. And it's really interesting to me actually, to hear the word precise and poetry together as well. The idea of poetry as a vehicle of precision, which I think more often than not, it's kind of 

David: Ambiguity,  

Martin: Ambiguity. Yeah, 

Richard: Exactly.  

Martin: So I'm just wondering about that? 

Richard: Well, I think you can have those two, in an uneasy balance. I think paradox is often at the heart of many real interesting questions. I like the idea of trying to retain that sense of paradox not to resolve it because I think in in trying to resolve something you inevitably reduce it, and there’s possible ways for for poetic language in being situated alongside technical language to lose some of its ambiguity and become more grounded. So the two kind of work against each other and with each other at the same time. 

David: I think because like I said before, we live in this great age of writing about place, but for me some of the most interesting work is that work, which is sort of defined by it's difficulty to define us, but it's bringing in these sort of different discourses. And if this sort of term place writing is going to do work, I think it's when it's applied to, to work like that, to writing like that, where the existing labels don't really hold, as it sort of resists categorizations, or sort of genre, of form. So that's why I think this term place writing has got real sort of, traction, if you like, so it allows for poetry, it allows for creative nonfiction, I'd argue it would also allow for fiction. 

Martin: Because it cuts across or it kind of, it’s a different way to think about it, isn't it? Sort of, it kind of what happens when you let writing rise to the demands of the project that you're trying to do that reminds me of an essay by Rudy Wiebe who’s a Canadian writer who was writing about the Arctic. I think the book is called Playing Dead and he talks about nouns having different forms, depending on whether the object was stationary or whether it was moving and that was kind of related to living in a snowy landscape where a lot of things if they stay still, you can't see them all. So they’re a kind of different entity. 

Richard: I think those kinds of forms of knowledge really interesting. That’s been one of the things that I've been looking at, how other people outside of our Western mindset, how they perceive themselves in their landscape, it being completely alien to us the idea that we would give something a different name according to whether it was stationary or moving. It's not necessarily that you take that, but you use it as a stepping-stone to thinking about other ways that we can think about the world and our perceptions of reality. 

Martin: What are you doing then about language? Because I'm thinking when you're writing yourself into this space, in English, 

Richard: There are there isn't really any any accepted theory as to what language was spoken. We talked about Proto-Indo-European being the oldest substrate of the languages that the majority of the speaking in Europe. There's another idea that because genetically some of the stock that that is still existent in Britain is connected to The Basque region, the suggestion has been made that possibly an ancestor of the Basque was spoken in Britain. I don't know if you've, you've done any translation, but what one does with translation first is one transliterates the text. So creating literally a word for word version in English, which then often has to be reordered and switched around. And even sometimes there are words that don't have any direct equivalence. But what I often find really interesting is that transliterated text has a unique strangeness to it, but it's in that uneasiness. There's actually something quite powerful poetically. 

Martin: I like that. So I do translate, but I'm thinking now your entire project is an act of translation? 

Richard: Yes. 

Martin: Well, then in some ways, actually, it's the other way around, isn't it you're trying to translate yourself into that, it is the other way around you’re actually translating yourself into, 

Richard: Yeah, it’s sort of like a hall of mirrors, sort of refracting and mirroring itself. So in that kind of direct analogy, it it does feel like a blank page landscape that's in front of me and I'm slowly peopleing it with letters and words and phrases. And so on.  

David: I think also what's been really interesting to think about is then when you sort of the creative work has been it's been created, it would be interesting to know what archaeologists or anthropologists make of that really. There’ a point at, which sort of conventional archaeology maybe stops, because it enters the realm of speculation, and then sort of that's where the creative work comes in. But then if you then feed that back into sort of archaeological discourse, I'm sure there's archaeologists who’d be really open to that as a method. Over the past few years there's been this sort of big growth of activities within the Department of English and the writing school, here at MMU, and it's bringing some real focus on place. So over the past few years, we've come together and put on a whole range of programmes so from short courses to a place writing festival that we held a couple of years ago, and to sort of event series that take place in the evening. So this year, we've got six events, badged as writing place creative, critical conversations. Each event will consist of someone who's associated with Manchester Met, whether it be a member of staff or a PhD student and an artist or an academic from another institution. And so we're bringing them together with the idea that the two practitioners whether they’re creative or critical, have got this shared preoccupation with place in some way. But I think alongside that we're really interested in this relationship between the creative and the critical. So people who are sort of embedding both creative and critical practices within their own work, or maybe bringing two people together one critic and one creative practitioner, to have conversations about those two different approaches to the shared, sort of, preoccupation of place. So that's it we’ve got six events over the course of the year. 

Martin: Yeah, I think, we’re coming to the end of our time, I just want to say thank you very much. 

David: Well thank you. 

Richard: Yeah, thanks. 

Rah! Mini Jingle 

Martin: For our final conversation, we'll be talking to Natalie Burdett and Zofija Tupikovskaja-Omovie. Natalie was selected by Carolyn Duffy as a Laureate’s Choice poet in 2018. She's currently studying for a creative writing PhD at Manchester Met. She's in conversation with Zofija, who is a CEEF research fellow at Manchester Met and who’s research expertise is in fashion mobile marketing. The way their work intersects is both surprising and fascinating. And I think because they come from such apparently different disciplines it was a really enriching conversation to be part of they discussed their collaboration on a project in which Zofija tracked Natalie's eye movements through a special pair of glasses as she walked through the urban landscape, which raised questions about how and whether writers see the world differently. I'm here today with Zofija and Natalie to talk about poetry and place. 

Natalie Burdett: I’m Natalie Burdett. I'm a PhD researcher at MMU. I write poetry about the city and I'm researching ways of exploring the city through creative writing. 

Zofija Tupikovskaja-Omovie: Hello, I’m Zofija Tupikovskaja-Omovie. I’m at Manchester Fashion Institute. I’m postdoctoral researcher with creative industries. I’m researching digital consumer behaviour in fashion retailing. And I'm interested in how shopping experiences can be improved in digital spaces. So I use mainly mobile tracking technology which allows to explore real experiences of users and potentially make necessary changes to make their experiences better. So So this type of technology could be useful to Natalie's research in terms of when she's interested in looking at visual elements in the city and how much you can recall seeing the way. 

Martin: So, the image I've got of your project is of Natalie walking around, but having a special pair of glasses on, what's happening? 

Zofija: Quite often, previous research use just lab environments where by creative person would be inside the room. Using mobile checking glasses, we can actually take real creative person outside to the city. 

Natalie: So I would just do what I would usually do just walk around the city and trying to be natural wearing these glasses. The glasses, were recording The environment but also recording my eye movements to see how long I’d look at different, you know, bits of rust or tiles in, in in, you know, to see how intensely I was looking at particular details.  

Martin: Trying to be natural walking around with your glasses, because to Natalie, how conscious were you? I mean what did that do that kind of being sort of hyper conscious of your looking? And then to Zofija, is that something you took into account in the end results? 

Zofija: Well using our tracking technology I noticed that it takes a few minutes for people to get used to wearing the glasses and kind of forget that they were in them.  So initially might be a bit artificial way of trying to look at things and not only later on reflected, we recorded interviews straight away after tracking. And then we had another set of interviews after viewing eye tracking recording and the experience after seeing what you were looking at, which is completely different area. 

Natalie: I was just kind of wandering around as usual kind of, getting distracted by things and yeah, once I got used to it, I think it felt okay. And I you know I was just drawn where I was drawn.  

Martin: So, what were you looking at? 

Natalie: I was looking at bits of rust, bits of weeds, litter, graffiti, anything in the city that's, you know, a bit out of the ordinary, I found I was quite interested in angles and stripes. There wasn't thinking in terms of poetry at that point, but I just was drawn to different shapes and details. 

Martin: I don't if you were to look back on it about what kind of connects those things. To my mind what you're talking about there is kind of if you've got the city as a kind of a surface, you're looking at all the things that kind of disrupt that surface slightly, rust and graffiti you know. 

Natalie: Yeah, no, you know, real concrete things. I wasn't really thinking about abstract, a bit of red plastic at one point, I think I got really interested in and I was like, wow, what is that bit of red plastic?  

Martin: And what did you make of it? Did you see something else that Natalie didn't see she was seeing? 

Zofija: Initial idea when I had to use eye tracking was actually exploring how things they have seen but probably have not noticed that they have seen might have triggered some are going beyond that actual physical object. For example, the second paper we presented at the conference, specifically looked at, are there any patterns in terms of what Natalie was looking at? And there were quite many viewing patterns aligning with actual patterns in the environment. 

Martin: So how does the data manifest itself for you? Literally, what does it look like to you the kind of record of Natalie's looking? 

Zofija: The recording of the eye tracking data can come out in various shapes. So one of the types which I found the most useful was video recording, which had overlaid fixations, which showed different size of circles, where Natalie has fixated looking at and then lines connecting those circles showing the pattern of where and how the viewing has happened. 

Martin: What did you make it in the second interview seeing that then? 

Natalie: I was, surprised at how long I’d looked at certain things that had not necessarily made that big an impression on me. 

Martin: Is there anything that you can make now between what happened there and writing that came later? Or even actually thinking about writing from the past? I mean, there were two things I guess I looked at a bridge that I'd already written a poem about, and I remember thinking about the number of struts across this bridge and I counted, you can see my eyes darting. I think for me, it always starts with that physical thing. The noticing is a key part for me starting a poem, I'd say, if I went to set out to write a poem without an idea I’d find that um, impossible. Because if I see something, I go, oh, that's an interesting idea. And then from that maybe I could build something.  

Martin: So what about you? Because you haven’t mentioned yet the fact that your own background is also in creative practice? Was there anything there, particularly to writing that you discovered? Or was do you think it's pretty consistent with other kinds of behaviours? 

Zofija: I would really like to explore with different creative people, let's say painters, or other creative artists who are more visually represented what they're creating. I imagine there would be differences in terms of what these people are looking at. And I think it comes to the fact that each person has their own personality, I would say and certain interest in their own practice, which I noticed Natalie is more interested in those social aspects of our city and uncertain issues in the city. So for example, if you remember Natalie when you were looking at the graffiti on wall, you were not really focusing on the actual visual of the graffiti. But you were focusing on certain litter and weeds at the bottom of it. 

Martin: Yeah, because then you're looking at a place that allows graffiti to happen, which is the same kind of place that allows you to litter and for weeds to grow, which is places which are neglected right? So the graffiti just becomes part of the same mix. 

Natalie: Yeah, I mean, the graffiti in itself feels like someone's art, but I didn't feel it. I'd write a poem about that graffiti itself. Yeah, like you say, the whole environment.  

Martin: So what happens next? Is there anything you would do else with in terms of this project? 

Zofija: Well, possibilities, I would say are limitless. Because normally eye tracking is used in websites, gaming and more digital spaces out in stores sort of more commercial areas and exploring the usage in creative research. I think they would open some ideas, I suppose. 

Martin: So tell us quickly about your PhD research. 

Natalie: My creative side is writing poems about the West Midlands where I'm from, and I'm also doing literary geographical readings of Black Country writing. And then what I'm doing at the moment is looking at some of the other writers who write about the city and in bringing that back into thinking about, you know.  

Martin: Who are you looking at now? 

Natalie: Initially I was looking at Roy Fisher, Lee Berry, you know Midlands poets, but I've just been reading Geraldine Monk who I've not read before but that's quite exciting you know a woman writing about the city in experimental ways.  

Martin: And Zofija what are you working on now? 

Zofija: Ideally mixing different environments, digital and actual 3D spaces. So I would like to explore business side how people are looking at websites, as well as how they explore the actual real stores, and how those linked together into whole shopping experiences. And then allow my participants to view all the recording and then reflect on that about what they were actually trying to achieve, which allows to learn much more about the experiences and potentially you could do with any other research method. 

Martin: There's still those overlaps though aren’t there with you looking at literary mapping. Is that also not a bit about how what we write about place changes how we see the place. You know, Manchester, for instance, is very much defined by a lot of writing about it as a rainy city, which actually meteorologically doesn't bear out any more than it does for many other cities. But this becomes the rainy city because we keep insisting on it in writing. This is the rainy city. This is a rainy city. So it becomes a kind of truth.  

Natalie: Interesting, isn't it? 

Rah! Mini Jingle 

Martin: Thanks so much for listening. We hope you enjoyed the podcast. Don't forget to follow us on Twitter for future podcast updates. You can find us on at @mmu_rah. For more information on all the research and events we discussed in this episode, please go to the Rah website for full links. And again, thank you for listening. 

Rah! Closing Jingle 

Martin: This episode of the podcast was produced by Lucy Simpson Edited by Tim Jackman presented by me, Martin Kratz and mixed by Julian Holloway.