An Evening with J. T. Welsch

Join author and academic J. T. Welsch in conversation with fellow author Mary Fairclough, for a conversation about his book, The Poetry of Suicide: Lessons in grief from the lives and deaths of poets.

Date: Wednesday, 29 April

Time: 7-8.30pm

Tickets: £7

Tickets can be purchased in the shop or here via Eventbrite.

Refreshments will be served.

Our Guests

J. T. Welsch is a Lecturer in English and Creative Industries at The University of York. Prior to that, he was a lecturer, then Head of Creative Writing at York St John University, and, before that, an associate lecturer with the Open University and taught at the University of Manchester, while completing his PhD. JT studied at Berklee College of Music in Boston for his undergraduate degree, followed by an MA in Screenwriting and an MA in Creative Writing at Royal Holloway, University of London.

His teaching and research interests are in the contemporary creative industries, 20th- and 21st-century poetry, and the intersection between creative and professional practices more generally.

JT is the author of several books of poetry, including The Ruin (Annexe, 2015), Hell Creek Anthology (Sidekick, 2015), Waterloo (Like This Press, 2012) and Orchids (Salt, 2010). His monograph The Selling and Self-Regulation of Contemporary Poetry was published by Anthem in 2020, and a poetry anthology Wrteched Strangers: Borders Movement Homes, co-edited with Ágnes Lehóczky, by Boiler House Press in 2018. He has also published articles and chapters on twentieth-century American poets, including William Carlos Williams, T. S. Eliot, John Berryman, and Elizabeth Bishop, with a focus on poets’ essays, letters, and manifestos.

JT is director of The Centre for Modern Studies at York, co-director of Thins Ice Press, and co-ordinates the Writers at York event series.

Mary Fairclough is a Professor at the University of York. She previously taught in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Huddersfield, and completed a Government of Canada Postdoctoral Fellowship at Carleton University, Ottawa. She completed her MA and PhD at the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies and Department of English and Related Literature at York.

Her research and teaching interests lie in the intersection between literature, politics, science and religion in the long eighteenth-century. Her first book The Romantic Crowd: Sympathy, Controversy and Print Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2013) is a study of the representation of crowds in the Romantic period and the way in which sympathy is understood as the catalyst of collective behaviour. Her second book Literature, Electricity and Politics 1740-1840 (Palgrave, 2017) investigates the science and figurative language of electricity in late eighteenth-century and Romantic-period literary and political discourse.

In 2023-24 she held a Leverhulme Research Fellowship to complete her third book about Romantic period women writers and devotion, focusing on the print culture and book history of devotional writings, and the ways in which reading aloud produces devotional feeling. She is currently editing Mary Wollstonecraft’s The Female Reader for the forthcoming Oxford University Press edition of The Complete Works of Mary Wollstonecraft.

Mary is Treasurer of the British Association for Romantic Studies. She has organised conferences on literature and medicine, the works of Anna Letitia Barbauld, and the BARS 2017 International Conference Romantic Improvement.

About The Poetry of Suicide:

This wise and touching exploration of the relationship between poetry and suicide offers new insights for those struggling with grief.
Following the loss of his twin sister, J. T. Welsch found himself drawn to the stories of poets who took their own lives. In The poetry of suicide, he interweaves these stories with the long history of suicide in his own family, searching for a new way of understanding these difficult deaths.

Beginning with Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be?’, he delves into the work of Sylvia Plath, Marina Tsvetaeva and others, asking what it can teach us about suicide’s messy reality. He also explores recent controversies involving suicide, including the response to the Netflix drama 13 Reasons Why and Logan Paul’s notorious visit to Aokigahara, Japan's ‘suicide forest’.

Suicide is more like poetry than we realise, Welsch argues. Both are filled with ambiguities, contradictions and unknowable intentions. Both demand and resist interpretation. Recovering the personal dimension often lost in our sanitised public discourse, Welsch finds practical ways of confronting suicide’s poem-like difficulties.

Reviews:

‘A nuanced and deeply insightful book.’ (Emilie Pine, author of Notes to Self)

‘A bold and truly vital work.’ (Adam Farrer, author of Broken Biscuits)

‘Essential reading.’ (Anne Whitehead, author of Relating Suicide)

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