Artist of the Month: Amy Grandvoinet
- cerys35
- Jul 2
- 4 min read
Updated: 3 days ago
Artist of the Month is a feature where we put the spotlight on the incredible work of one of our members.
Our Artist of the Month for July is Amy Grandvoinet!
Amy currently abides in Aberystwyth and is trying for a proper existence. She’s undergoing PhD research in so-called literary psychogeographies and will teach autoethnographic writing in Lerpŵl from September. Her status as DAC Artist of the Month July is such due to her upcoming new short fiction – ‘SLATE PILLOW MARBLE PILLOW PILLOW PILLOW’ – in Folding Rock 002: Speak to Me, scribed during Literature Wales x Disability Arts Cymru’s Re-Inventing the Protagonist programme 2024-5. Below, Amy answers some of our questions in regards to it. Read on if you wish.
DAC: Congratulations on your short fiction’s publication in Folding Rock 002: Speak to Me, Amy! Can you tell us anything of it?
Amy: Thank u DAC yes! My short fiction in Folding Rock 002: Speak to Me, ‘SLATE PILLOW MARBLE PILLOW PILLOW PILLOW’, is a fable-tale structured ’round Italian anti-fascist resistance song ‘Bella Ciao’ (see tribunemag.co.uk/2021/03/bella-ciao-the-song-of-the-partisans). I don’t wanna say too much (Folding Rock 002: Speak to Me’s out imminently), but it’s about psycho~somatic distress and healing, culture industry tensions, academia, late-capitalist travel, socio/emotio-economic precarity, the fragility and preciousness of relationships, more. The narrative arc’s fairly straightforwardly linear, but I think maybe the tone’s a bit weirdie. English, Welsh, and Italian mix in a fuzz of linguistic and locational confusion, and then there’s a happy ending. I meant for it to be a triumphant solidaritous love story against structural tragedy. Main characters are Ciao Bella and Saint Francis, and everything’s set between Rome and the Welsh Riviera.
DAC: Sounds great. How does your experience participating in Literature Wales x DAC’s Re-Inventing the Protagonist programme come into this?
Amy: Hmm well I’d been wanting to explore some things through short fiction relating to a long-time-coming PTSD diagnosis for quite a few many years. Soon after eventually diagnosed last May I heard about Literature Wales x Disability Arts Cymru’s Re-Inventing the Protagonist programme, a series of tutor-led (amazing Kaite O’Reilly this cohort) online group sessions exploring writing and Deafness, Disability, Neurodivergence. After attending a Zoom-run F.A.Q.
meeting, I managed to banish self-sabotage tendencies, apply, and get a hot process-validating spot on the course. I read SICK (see sickmagazine.org/homepage) and thought deeply about the short story form partly via contribution to Jonathan Gibbs’s excellent ‘A Personal Anthology’ project (see apersonalanthology.com/category/amy-grandvoinet/). Folding Rock magazine launched (hooray!) that autumn (after controversial Books Council Wales funding rejigs BIG UP Planet: The Welsh Internationalist et al); I thought my loco-specific attempts to de-frustrate expression might fit there, so sent ‘SLATE PILLOW MARBLE PILLOW PILLOW PILLOW’, which I’d grafted between Aberystwyth (where I currently live) and the British School at Roma (visiting talented filmmaker Laura Phillips), to Kathryn Tann and Rob Harries. I’m happy it made sense to them cos I’d not really written much like it before. Literature Wales x DAC’s programme helped me think about writer~reader contracts: my writing might do summink for me, but how does it translate beyond that? I love phrasing the programme as run by ‘Literature Wales x Disability Arts Cymru’: the ‘x’ collaboration thing is UBIQUITOUS at the moment (Gucci x Adidas, C.I.A. x Taylor Swift, et cetera)? This is further ripped in ‘SLATE PILLOW MARBLE PILLOW PILLOW PILLOW’.
DAC: Quite! So where does it all connect with your PhD research, then? And also why did you get into writing-stuff more generally?
Amy: My PhD isn’t practice-based so endeavours like ‘SLATE PILLOW MARBLE PILLOW PILLOW PILLOW’ aren’t directly involved in my thesis. I didn’t even know you could do practice-based PhDs (fyi) before being miraculously gifted a gold-dust AHRC research scholarship back in 2022. But it’s part of my wider personal * praxis * life ofc!! Doctoral-officially I’m monographically investigating five different text + image phenomena that explicitly deploy techniques of ‘psychogeography’, defined à la
Lettrist and Situationist Internationals in the 1950s as ‘the study of the precise laws of the specific effects of the geographical environment, whether consciously organised or not, on the emotions and behaviours of individuals’ (see bopsecrets.org/SI/urbgeog.htm). Mid-century ultra-functionalist profit-ravenous atomising global civic development was, they argued, wrecking humans. Growing up in post-war New Town Bracknell in the nineties and early noughties, my formative habitat is a post-Thatcherite mutation of exactly those systems Lettrists and Situationists (plus Henri Lefebvre) wept over. Many zones, tho, in neoliberal Britain condition havoc: psychogeo activity seeks to tackle this and celebrate alternative decency. I write and stuff for this aim. Once my PhD’s finito (God willing), I just wanna continue.
DAC: Nice! Bendigedig! Bene! Is there any way we might keep an eye on these tacklings and celebrations?
Amy: Yes, plîs find out more at my website amygrandvoi.net (so joyeux for punny domain) or linktr.ee/amy_k_grandvoinet as preferred. At hour of writing I’m active on Instagram as @amy_k_grandvoinet. There is also my blog, ‘Going About, Baby’, which you can access clicking yma a.k.a here.
*
Diolch so much, Amy! Order Folding Rock 002: Speak to Me, also featuring work by Manon Steffan Ros, Greg Flynn, Beth Preece, Yasmin Zaher, Horatio Clare, Grug Muse, Ania Card, Liz Churchill, Sophie Buchaillard, Hannah Dafforn, Natalie Ann Holborow, Emma Glass, and Maya Jordan via foldingrock.com/shop/standalone-issues/folding-rock-002-speak-to-me/. Out 10th July! Vive la révolution!
