With skills in silversmithing and analogue photography, Isabel’s creative process is centred around intersectionality and hybridity of genre. She has a First-Class Honours degree in English Literature and Creative Writing from University of Brighton, and has also studied film at degree level. Her essays have featured in Clandestine Magazine and Kingfisher Magazine, and she is currently finalising her debut poetry collection. An avid literary reviewer, Isabel runs a local book club and writing workshop, and engages in discourse surrounding these practises on her substack blog: substack.com/@averymessypage

 

About the piece featured, Isabel says:

 

‘This piece was written for the purpose of my bachelor's degree in English Literature and Creative Writing at University of Brighton. A key guideline for deciphering an essay question was to distinguish a concern within creative writing that is yet to be answered or expansively explored. Collectively, within the literature I read, and my own writing practice, I am perpetually searching the page for lost voices and unique translations of the visceral, ineffable matters of the voice, with particular regards for the historical suppression of women’s words. This notion became the epicentre of what I would creatively and critically explore across this combined piece, with the title question mutating along the timeline of the writing process, in alignment with new discoveries through research and practice. 

 

The creative piece Enys Unnamed encapsulates a series of narrative vignettes spoken through several ‘lost’ or forgotten voices bearing relation to the fictional setting; this unnamed, perhaps undiscovered, lost or forgotten semi-mythical place. The island setting was visually inspired by Cornish landscapes and the geographical mystery of The Cassiterides. Figuratively, the setting strives to conceptualise utopia, and is referred to as semi-mythical because I want to believe in the possibility of a world free of violence. 

 

Drawing on my own Cornish heritage and personal fervour for folklore; obscure means of storytelling; island studies; feminist literary theory; ecofeminism; and fictional reworkings of myth, my research consistently informed my practice, eventually transpiring an archive of possibility of my own utopic visions.’