The Conference was held at the Hand Hotel, Llangollen, Friday 19 August to Sunday 21 August 2005.
Conference Report
The Hand Hotel from the River Dee
Our opening speaker was Charles Lock, Professor of English Literature at the University of Copenhagen. Our next distinguished speaker was Richard Maxwell, who lectures in Comparative Literature and English at the University of Yale. Then Barbara Ozieblo, who teaches American Literature at the University of Malaga in Spain and who is currently working on a biography of Alyse Gregory and Gamel Woolsey, spoke on ‘The friendship of women: Alyse Gregory and Gamel Woolsey’. Finally Ian Robinson, an expert on T.F. Powys, talked to us on the subject of ‘Theodore's Prose Style’.
On the Saturday evening there was another one of the splendid entertainments to which the Society has become used in recent years.
Programme
Friday 19 August
4.00 Arrivals
5.30 Informal Reception in Dinas Bran Suite; welcome by Chairman
6.30 Dinner
8.00 Professor Charles Lock: ‘Atlantis and Homer and the Aether’
Saturday 20 August
8.00 Breakfast in Dinas Bran Suite
9.30 Richard Maxwell: ‘Rescuing Time in Porius’ followed by Coffee
11.15 Barbara Ozieblo: ‘The friendship of women: Alyse Gregory and Gomel Woolsey’
12.45 Lunch
Afternoon free, with informal arrangements between members for trips if required
4.30 Tea available
6.30 Dinner
8.00 ‘PLAYER KINGS’:
A compendium made up from letters of Louis Wilkinson, Oliver Wilkinson, Frances Gregg and John Cowper Powys, devised by Christopher Wilkinson and Peter Foss. — view programme
Sunday 21 August
8.00 Breakfast
9.30 Ian Robinson: ‘T. F. Powys and the Renewal of English Prose’, followed by Coffee
11.00 AGM, including our welcome to the incoming Chairman, John Hodgson.
To be followed by a Discussion by all present on JCP’s experience of Wales, leading on to a general examination of the influence of place in the life and works of all the Powyses. Were they disadvantaged as writers or thinkers by the remote places in which many of them lived, or did that very remoteness feed their creative power? Were their many letters in themselves a form of life?
1.00 Lunch
2.00 End of Conference and departure in afternoon
Conference Photographs
Pat, a real actress, with Richard Perceval Graves in ‘Lost To The Common World’
Committee members at the AGM
Our outgoing Chairman RPG at the AGM
Valle Crucis Abbey
