Memorial Benches: Conversations in the Landscape

Chopin, Yasmin (2024) Memorial Benches: Conversations in the Landscape. Doctoral thesis (PhD), Manchester Metropolitan University.

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Abstract

This thesis comprises two sections: a substantial piece of practice-based creative writing accompanied by forty-one images, and a critical reflection. It was generated in the years of the Covid-19 pandemic—a time when person-to-person contact was restricted, and isolating lockdowns were enforced to control the spread of the virus. The creative element of this thesis is a piece of first-person non-fiction place writing, which is principally about place and memory. The core thematic focus is the memorial bench and I explore this as a private-public object and use a heterogeneous range of research methods to do so. This project imbricates extant and emerging thinking regarding practices of memorialisation and includes personal stories connected with particular benches. I use place writing as a research method, and draw on a range of literary sources, to examine this object of site-specific memorialisation. The critical reflection is divided into two parts: In the first, I reflect on genre and consider the question ‘What is place writing?’; and in the second, I reflect on my writing process and practice. I situate my own creative work within the context of contemporary creative non-fiction place writing and, saliently, I provide a road map for identifying the genre of place writing. I argue that this thesis contributes new thinking in three areas. First, in terms of subject—little has been written about memorial benches and, as ubiquitous objects in the landscape, they deserve greater scholarly attention. Second, the creative element of this thesis stands alone as a work of creative non-fiction and with wider publication it will sit within, and contribute to, the growing canon of place writing. Third, my exposition of place writing in the critical reflection will, I hope, encourage further discussion of the genre.