Voicewalks

How do we experience the voices in our minds?

How do voices help or hinder our navigation of familiar and unfamiliar spaces, when wandering alone or when moving through a crowd?

Where do ‘hallucinated’ voices come from and how are they linked to specific places?

How does it feel to ‘see and be seen’ when hearing voices?

How does hearing voices influence and determine movement within the city space?

What paths are traced and retraced?

On Saturday October 12th 2013, in collaboration with the Hearing the Voice project at Durham University, StepAway Magazine launched a special issue dedicated to the creative exploration of inner speech and voice-hearing experiences within the context of walking in the city. The issue presented a collection of walking narratives by both voice-hearers and writers who creatively imagined hearing voices to accompany a commissioned piece by renowned writer, author of American Smoke, and pioneer of British psychogeography, Iain Sinclair.

Contributors to Voicewalks included: Gill McEvoy, Roz Oates, Pippa Anais Gaubert, Liz Cookman, Martyn Halsall, Adam Steiner, Carole Glasser Langille, Rebecca Chamaa, Ed Attlee & Hannah Gregory.

Our launch event was held at the Durham Book Festival, where we distributed our first print issue.

An online version is available by clicking the image below:

StepAway Magazine is an established online literary magazine that aims to encourage all writers to walk in the city and record what they see, hear and feel. Writers record these observations in poetry, prose and non-fiction.

Hearing the Voice is a Wellcome Trust funded, interdisciplinary project led by researchers at Durham University. The project aims to help better understand the phenomenon of hearing a voice no one else can hear, its cognitive-neuroscientific mechanisms, its social, cultural and historical significance, and its therapeutic management.