Edward Thomas Fellowship Virtual Study Day – 12 June 2021

Fellowship members Matthew Oates and Guy Cuthbertson and the author and poet William Wootten are participating in an Edward Thomas Fellowship Virtual Study Day on Saturday 12 June 2021.

The format for the day will be:
10:15 am – Introduction to the day and the first speaker
10:30 am – Speaker – Matthew Oates
11.45 am – Speaker – Guy Cuthbertson
1.00 pm (approx) – Break
2.00 pm – Speaker – William Wootten
3.15 pm (approx) – Close

This is a ticketed events and tickets are available to purchase through Eventbrite (https://www.eventbrite.com/e/edward-thomas-fellowship-study-day-tickets-156239272871).

As we are delivering the event through the Fellowship’s Zoom account, ticket sales are initially being limited to 100 and are priced (for Fellowship members) at £10 each for the whole day or £5 per event.

Non-member tickets are priced at £20 and £10 respectively.

The topics for each speaker will be:

Matthew Oates will talk about and read from Edward Thomas’s poems on the subjects of belonging, heartland and saying farewell.

Guy Cuthbertson‘s talk will be on the theme of ‘Run hard hounds’: Edward Thomas and dogs

The last year has seen a boom in dog-ownership, and everyone lucky enough to own a dog has been grateful for their company during lockdowns.  So perhaps this is the moment to look at Edward Thomas’s dogs – not just the dogs he owned, but also the dogs in his writing.  There are many dogs in his work, in the foreground and the background: they doze at pubs; they have names like Beauty, Gallant, Music, Chanter, and Bravery; they run through fields in pursuit of the fox (‘Run hard hounds […] Run hard, fox, and may you escape’).

William Wootten will talk about the friendship between Walter de la Mere and Edward Thomas.

The friendship between Walter de la Mare and Edward Thomas plays an important role in the lives and works of both writers.  Drawing on his new book, Reading Walter de la Mare, William Wootten will examine some of the de la Mare poems that pay tribute to Thomas and discuss what the two writers shared in life and art as well as the strengths and strains to their friendship.