Wolverhampton Literature Festival: Engage your memory for literature talk

One of the country’s best-known authors, journalists and television personalities will present his thoughts on reading fiction and how perspectives change as people re-read stories from years ago.

Will Self will join in discussion with Professor Sebastian Groes from Wolverhampton University about the relationship between neurology and literature on tomorrow afternoon.

And the virtual audience at the event are being invited to enter into an interactive memory experiment.

Mr Self said he worked on another scheme with professor Groes around a project concerning whether novelists have better visio-spatial skills and orientation than non-writers and spoke about what he understood the aim of the event to be.

He said: “The aim is to try and find out the extent to which we do remember books we’ve read a long time ago.

“It’s also to somehow get the audience, via Zoom, to participate in a series of memory exercises devised to summon up their literary memories and analyse them.”

The 59-year-old, who will also read from his autobiography “Will: a Memoir”, said he hoped people would be inspired to recall the books from the own childhood and spoke about how much the reading of fiction affects how people think.

He said: “It’s horses for courses as some people are deeply affected by quite shallow books and others are only shallowly affected by the deepest and most serious works of fiction.

“You could put someone reading a complex imaginative passage, one that involves all sorts of sensory experiences and intellectual games, into an MRI scanner,” he added.

“From that, you can see the parts of their brain light up that would be activated were they to be doing those things in real life, so reading and experiencing are, in neurological terms, the same thing.”

Mr Self has spent time in Wolverhampton previously, having visited the Express and Star offices as part of a BBC Radio 4 series on post-Brexit Britain, as well as trips to a local Indian restaurant and the Giffard Arms.

He said he hoped people would enjoy the event due to being able to engage with memory, texts and impacts in a virtual setting

He added: “Using a virtual rather than actual space means they’ll be able to simultaneously engage with the wider issues of memory, texts and their impact, while remaining free to explore their own memories at the same time.

“If you like, the event itself will become a field of collective consciousness, with its own collective, if diverse, memory.”

“Will Self: Novel Memories” takes place on Sunday, February 14 at 2.30pm, with free admission.

To book tickets and to find out more, go to wolvesliteraturefestival.co.uk

Tomorrow’s events also include Emma Purshouse and Steve Pottinger taking part in a creative writing workshop designed to get people writing love poetry.

A full rundown of all Wolverhampton Literature Festival events including workshops, storytelling, literature, readings and performance is available by visiting the website.

A number of events are scheduled to take place today.