Edinburgh Book Festival: Helen Mort & Claire Askew
'You’re imagining her life… but you’re miles off.' Playful, self-referencing and blunt: these lines from Claire Askew’s poem Picker set the tone for one of the first poetry readings at this year’s Edinburgh International Book Festival. Askew is reading alongside fellow poet and writer Helen Mort, and the theme that emerges through poems and conversation is the re-imagining of the lives of women who have lived in the margins of history.
“I’m very interested in people, especially women, whose lives are not depicted in art,” Askew explains. “I’m aware that I have privilege; I have a platform to put my words out there. There’s an obligation to tell the stories of women who didn’t have that.” In Askew’s collection, This Changes Things, these women range from her own grandmother to a 16th century poet who ended up burnt at the stake. Mort, meanwhile, celebrates the often untold history of the women who scaled the Alps in crinolines, as well as more recent women climbers, in No Map Could Show Them.
These themes don’t just redress a sense of balance in the telling of history, they also offer up comic and poetic gold: Mort tells of how groups of early women climbers would invent an imaginary male friend, “Bob”, who was “just up ahead”, purely to avoid unsolicited advice from the men they passed as they climbed.
Of course, there are dangers inherent in telling the lives of those we’ve never known. How much is it permissible to imagine? Pointing to the scarcity of facts about women’s lives down the centuries, Askew argues that it’s necessary to embroider, even as she laughs at herself for her “guilty pleasure” in doing so. “A certain amount of licence is necessary,” agrees Mort, “otherwise you become paralysed by the facts.”
Helen Mort and Claire Askew were speaking at Edinburgh International Book Festival on 13 Aug