Connie our International Resident

Connie Greig is the recipient of this year’s Writing Squad International Residency. Originally funded by an anonymous donation from a Squad grad, the residency is £1000 towards a trip a Squad writer couldn’t otherwise make. Last years resident Tom Katie Walters researched whales in Iceland and you can read the results in Cetancients here.

Connie says “Enniskillen in Northern Ireland is the root of my matriarchal ancestors’ family tree, I want to trace a line between the rural landscapes that have defined my experiences with mental health treatment, and a kind of psychiatric mythology linking the real demonisation of ‘hysteria’ in witch condemnation, with more local mythology. The legend of Cethlenn, after which Enniskillen was supposedly named, is rooted in the story of an injured warrior woman, swimming to safety on a stranded island. This narrative of retreat, and the pastoral landscape mirrors a local legend where I have grown up in Northern Lincolnshire of ‘the Dead Moon’; a woman representing the moon is captured by the creatures of the night, held under a river until a village bands together to save her.”

Out of the experience Connie hopes to complete her first poetry collection and a series of lyric essays.