As a Matter of Love. A Short Dialogue on Love Made Material.
co-authored with Francesca Rendle-Short
Book Chapter published in: The Materiality of Love, Essays on Affection and Cultural Practice, Edited by Anna Malinowska and Michael Gratzke
Routledge, 2018.
The proposition is simple. We will correspond about love. In both of our writing practices we have explored a preoccupation with the body as it applies to writing, as well as an interest in the materiality of the body and its traces (collected objects, family photo albums, letters tucked into books, collected handkerchiefs—artefacts of the everyday). How do we explore collecting matter as love, and loving matter as a mode of collecting? Could whatever it is we are doing come close to what Quinn Eades (2015) terms écriture matière (a complicating of Hélène Cixous’s écriture feminine [1994]) or a writing of the material where matter is both noun and verb—“atoms joined and joining”, these pages, these lines, these words: “A penumbra. A root system. A text that matters. A body that is a poem. A poem that sings” (Eades 2015, 25, 27)? Through an investigation of content and form, poetry, inventory, and wishes tied to trees we ask: in what ways does matter matter?