Thurs 6 August / Water, words, wildness and womanhood

Two Sophies: Water, Words, Wildness & Womanhood

An evening with Sophie Pavelle & Sophie Dumont

Join us for a warm, watery and wild evening of conversation, readings and reflection, as two writers come together to explore the currents that connect their work.

Across prose and poetry, Sophie Pavelle and Sophie Dumont navigate landscapes both starkly familiar and quietly overlooked, tracing the relationships between bodies of water, bodies of knowledge, and the lived experience of womanhood. From nature’s hidden relationships to the intimate pull of rivers and coastlines, their writing moves through themes of symbiosis, conservation, memory and wildness.

Through a conversation peppered with readings, the two Sophies will explore how language becomes a kind of ecology: a way of noticing, holding, and reimagining the natural world and our place within it, with reflections on climate, craft, and connection, as science writing meets poetry.

There will be time for audience questions, followed by a book signing.

The books

Sculling by Sophie Dumont

In Sculling, poet Sophie Dumont explores a deeply personal relationship to the River Avon, as she circles the curses that unravel from a canoe club. At the age of sixteen, Sophie Dumont trained to be a canoe coach before her own coach and partner of three years died suddenly in an aquaplaning road accident, which led to five of his organs continuing at least seven people's lives.

His heart was donated to a young man studying in the same city as he did. Using the kayak as a vessel to traverse life's accumulation of losses, Sculling speaks of how this bereavement caused Dumont to reflect on her relationship to bodies of water, from her own body to the state of pollution in UK rivers. Here, she explores the campaign for rivers to be given personhood status for rights to protection and inspects the symbiosis of her body and the river's.

To Have or to Hold - Nature's Hidden Relationships by Sophie Pavelle

What can nature teach us about living together? Investigating eight symbiotic relationships trying to survive the climate and biodiversity crises, Sophie Pavelle explains why it has never been more vital for us to understand symbiosis. Symbiotic relationships regulate ecosystems, strengthen resilience and bind pivotal connections, and nature thrives on relationships as glamorous as they are grotesque and as bizarre as they are engrossing.

Symbiotic relationships don't happen accidentally – these dynamics evolved – and species form and sever alliances everywhere, from deep within temperate rainforests to the open ocean, quiet tidal pools or chalk grasslands. In To Have or To Hold, Sophie low-carbon travels in the British Isles relishing the interconnectedness between species, celebrating the relationships underpinning natural environments and sharing some of nature’s frauds, fortune-tellers, misfits and cheaters. The natural world is built on parasitism, a cunning blend of bargaining and exploitation in the name of survival.

In our relationship with the natural world, are we the parasites? Will we continue to exploit nature’s resources? Or will we vow to love and cherish what remains – shaping a more restorative life alongside nature – till death us do part?

Tickets coming soon