On Saturday 15 July, Scott Thurston held an event at The Tin Arts and Music venue in Coventry to celebrate the publication of Leanne Bridgewater’s (1989-2019) adDictionary – an experimental dictionary featuring 12,000 new words, each with their own definitions.
This book started life as Leanne’s Masters thesis at Salford from where she graduated in 2020 with a distinction. Not long after completing it, Leanne had submitted the book to the Knives Forks and Spoons Press (run by Salford graduate Alec Newman) but the logistics of publishing such a vast text were too complex for a small press at the time. So the project has bided its time for over a decade until, following Leanne’s untimely death, we decided to realise it – a task which has taken about two years, supported by Leanne’s family, friends and contributors to a crowd funder.
As Leanne writes in her Introduction to the adDictionary (subtitled ‘of experimental language’):
“In today’s world, we have achieved interaction with words so much that we believe we are superior to animals who do not speak. Language was around before the word; in the spirit of sounds, visuals, gestures and movement. With this dictionary I aim to encourage people to create new paths, new insights, to discover unknown places inside of themselves.”
It’s in the spirit of such creative statements of intent that The Leanne Bridgewater Award for Innovation and Experiment was set up at Salford in order to recognise each year a Masters in Creative Writing student who has not only excelled creatively and academically, but embodied something of Leanne’s adventurous spirit. We were very happy that Lucy Hulton (shortly to begin her PhD studies with us) — only the second person to be awarded Leanne’s prize – was able to join the project to copyedit the book (a huge task!) and to contribute with various design ideas.
The event in Coventry began with an introduction from Scott, followed by a fascinating talk from Giles Goodland, a poet and lexicographer working for the Oxford English Dictionary, putting Leanne’s work in the context of the history of dictionaries and previous creative experiments in the form. There then followed an impressive roster of poets associated with Leanne as her friends and collaborators, all finding ways to celebrate her work and to activate the potential of the adDictionary by employing its rich new vocabulary in original creative compositions. The full line-up featured: Lucy Hulton, Ollie Evans, Adrian Slatcher, Scott Thurston, Becky Varley-Winter, Barry Patterson, Lucy Harvest Clarke and Lisa Kanabar.
You can find out more details about the book on the Knives Forks and Spoons website here.