Katherine Collins

‘We are survivors of immeasurable events,
Flung upon some reach of land’

Rebecca Elson

Life-Writing of Immeasurable Events (LIVE for short) was named after a line from a poem by the late Rebecca Elson, from her collection A Responsibility to Awe. Elson was an astronomer whose scientific research into dark matter took her to the boundary of the visible and measurable. Her poems, too, make inferences and speculate, always from meticulous observation, undeterred by how little we can know of the universe. ‘Facts are only as interesting as the possibilities they open up to the imagination,’ she wrote. Read more…

With this project I encouraged people to share what they were doing, feeling, experiencing, in those strange pandemic times. I released regular creative prompts, which people were free to interpret as they wished, and I collected anecdotes, poems, journal or diary entries, essays, short or long. With the permission of the writer, I selected some contributions to feature on the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing website.