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KATRINE LYNN SOLVAAG Leisure Since retiring, I have undertaken some consulting work (one main role continues) but the majority of my time is now focused on travel, domestic duties (cooking and gardening) and, principally, continuing to take part in several sporting pursuits as well as being a regular and keen spectator at Lord’s, the Oval, Wimbledon, Twickenham and Wembley with the recent addition of Tottenham Hotspur’s new stadium. I am lucky enough consequently to have a little time to prattle to the students who are kind enough to call and enliven my evenings.
Donating So why am I a donor? Several reasons. First, it would be rude to speak to these brave students (cold calling is not easy) and then do nothing. It makes this a very effective way to raise funds. Although these sums may be small, they may well establish a regular donating pattern which in the end will mount up. Secondly, my wife and I are regular donors to several charities and I found that I wanted to add UKC to the list because it was a more personal cause. Finally, I was very pleased to be contacted by the University and thus to have some continuing connection with it. Being a donor makes this connection somewhat closer.
Katrine Lynn Solvaag is an Alumni Postgraduate Research Scholar (just like Sam was: see pages 4-5) studying for a PhD in Poetry: Text Practice as Research. Her work entails transforming the entirety of Herman Melville’s classical novel Moby-Dick into a sequence of prose poetry, while simultaneously researching similar literary transformations among fellow contemporary female writers. The accompanying poem (overleaf), created through a blend of found poetry and confessional poetry, utilises the language found in the fourteenth chapter of Moby-Dick to express her emotions while reminiscing on Dungeness, a location she once used to visit with a former partner. When asked what inspired her to undertake this project, she highlights how throughout the majority of literary history women have predominately been excluded from the act of storytelling. As a result, recently there’s been a trend of female writers taking it upon themselves to rewrite canonical texts, in particular ancient Greek classics, in order to infuse a female voice within a narrative where it has previously been missing. She continues by explaining that her poetry is jointly inspired by the concept of translation within a single language from one literary format and into another, alongside the found poetry tradition of using the words of another to tell a story about oneself. What she hopes to achieve with the poetry collection is primarily to highlight the poetics already present in Melville’s language, potentially inspiring more people to read and enjoy the novel she has personally fallen in love with, and secondly to establish literary transformation as an accepted technique within the academic world. However, she also is aspiring for the collection to take on a similar emotional journey to the one experienced in the original, tackling parallel themes of grief, loneliness, companionship and adventure in order to showcase that regardless of how much our exterior world might change across time, we will always continue to tell the same stories.
“I just want to extend my most heartfelt thank you to all of you who donate to the Kent Opportunity Fund. Without your support I wouldn’t have been able to embark upon this degree, and more importantly, to receive the time and support needed to undertake this poetic journey. I look forward to the day I can share the finished collection with each and every one of you.”
