World Ocean Day: Reading List by Holly Corfield Carr

Today is World Ocean Day - a day to shed light on the wonder of the ocean 
and how it is our life-source, supporting humanity and every other organism on Earth. The perfect day to share news of the third contributor to our Artica Writings essay series inspired by UN Decade of Ocean Science.

British writer Holly Corfield Carr is a poet and writer based in Bristol, UK. She is a Research Fellow in English at Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge where she works on site-specific writing practices with a particular interest in caves, shells and holes in the landscape. She received a Society of Authors’ Eric Gregory Award in 2012 and the Frieze Writer’s Prize in 2015.

Holly’s Artica Writings essay will be available to read on our website soon. Prior to that she has prepared a Reading List:

How do we think with water? A question, an essay, a guide, a poem, a conversation.

To begin, a question for water—

Oxford Professor of Poetry Alice Oswald’s Interview with Water (2020)

—to whet your thinking and wet your thinking—

Kimberley Peters and Philip Steinberg, A Wet World: Rethinking Place, Territory, And Time’ in Society + Space (2015)

—before you learn how to read the line of the shore—

Rachel Carson, The Edge of the Sea (1955)

—and watch it wander over the waves of a poem—

Vahni Capildeo, Seastairway’ (2018)

—and find we are all at sea—

Astrida Neimanis, Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology (2017) and you can hear Neimanis’ discuss the practice and ethics of being a ‘body of water’ at RIBOCA2’s online series of talks on the idea of ‘care’, We Are All At Sea (2020) or read the transcript of her conversation with Sofia Lemos.

—swimming—

We hope this reading list opens up a different way to think about the ocean. You can read previous essays in the series by Philip Hoare and Dora García here.