The Connecting Conversations blog
Laughter and loss
‘How do you teach a parrot to speak Yiddish?’ asks psychoanalyst Leon Kleimberg, speaking of the maverick, polyglot pet in Gregorio’s Kohon’s novel, Red Parrot, Wooden...
Posted by Caroline Graty, 25/05/2008
Learning to read
‘Every “quack” is different,’ said Martin Waddell. Enchanted by his readings at our latest Connecting Conversations event, I had bought one of his books, Farmer Duck, for my small nephew....
Posted by Caroline Graty, 19/03/2008
What's on your mind?
‘When I was growing up people were unhappy, not depressed.’ Lisa Appignanesi was talking to psychoanalyst Margot Waddell at Connecting Conversations. She feels that the definition of ‘ordinary'...
Posted by Caroline Graty, 13/03/2008
The ideal and the real
The Connecting Conversations series is providing fascinating comparisons, not just between art and psychoanalysis, but between different approaches to creativity.
Take playwright Diane Samuels’...
Posted by Caroline Graty, 06/03/2008
The accidental symbolist
Though Esther Freud, speaking with John Tydeman at Connecting Conversations (25 January 2008), was interested in psychoanalytic interpretations of her novel Love Falls, her own perspective remained...
Posted by Caroline Graty, 20/02/2008
The sadness club
Whoever mistyped the Poet Laureate’s name on the sign in the venue foyer, renaming him ‘Andrew Notion’, made an apt mistake. December’s Connecting Conversations event with Andrew Motion and...
Posted by Caroline Graty, 03/01/2008
Diving for pearls
For a mere mortal like myself, it’s somehow comforting to know that even renowned, Booker-winning novelists have anxieties about their work. Barry Unsworth is about to publish his 16th book but, as...
Posted by Caroline Graty, 09/10/2007
What's in a name?
Brenda Maddox abandoned one of her own principles of biography writing when she tackled the life of Ernest Jones in Freud’s Wizard. Discussing her work at the latest Connecting Conversations event,...
Posted by Caroline Graty, 25/09/2007
Trusting the silence
For author Kate Grenville, creativity comes out of the dark, from beneath the surface. It is a leap of faith rather than an active corralling of thoughts; a passive state into which ideas and voices...
Posted by Caroline Graty, 16/07/2007
Connection and disconnection
Connecting Conversations is a series of events at which psychoanalysts talk to leaders in other fields in order to make new connections; connections between ideas, between disciplines and between...
Posted by Caroline Graty, 18/06/2007