Sarah Pearce, poet, editor and researcher
Heather Taylor-Johnson, novelist and poet
Join Heather Taylor Johnson in-conversation with 2024 SA Literary Fellowship recipient Sarah Pearce to discuss her new experimental found ecopoetry project, PERMACRISIS.
PERMACRISIS is a collection of experimental found ecopoetry, created with support from a 2024 SA Emerging Writers Fellowship at the State Library of South Australia and an Emerging Fellowship Residency at Island View Writers House (Clayton Bay, SA).
The project uses found poetry techniques and media and archival sources over 200 years to bring insights into how we experience our changing climate and environment, focusing on South Australia. PERMACRISIS explores how public conversations about the environment and climate have evolved and connects this to the physical experience of living in a changing world. It highlights ways we can understand and relate to our environment through our bodies. The goal is to raise awareness of the climate crisis and encourage deeper connections with nature through reading and writing.
Sarah Pearce is a poet, editor and researcher working on unceded Kaurna land. Her work appears in Aeternum, Outskirts, Meniscus, Writing from Below, TEXT, The Suburban Review, Overland, Cordite, Rabbit and various anthologies, including Best of Australian Poems 2023. She has held residencies at Adelaide City Library, FELTspace gallery, Gunyah (NSW) and Island View Writers’ House (SA), performed at Blenheim and Adelaide Fringe Festivals, and was the recipient of a 2024 Literary Fellowship at the State Library of South Australia. She writes about embodiment, queer experience, mental and physical health and the environment.
Heather Taylor-Johnson lives and writes on Kaurna land near Port Adelaide. Her third novel is a work of autofiction, called Little Bit. Before that, Jean Harley was Here was shortlisted for the Readings Prize for New Fiction. Her essays on art and illness have won the Island Nonfiction Prize and been shortlisted for ABR’s Calibre Prize. Her most recent poetry books are the verse novel Rhymes with Hyenas and the collection Alternative Hollywood Ending. She is the editor of Shaping the Fractured Self: Poetry of Chronic Illness and Pain, read widely in disability circles. She is an Adjunct Research Fellow at the J M Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice.