Home is Where We Start: on utopian dreams, collectives and childhood with Susanna Crossman

Join us as we delve into fascinating, and timely, questions of home, ideology, community and how we make the world we want to see, in the company of Susanna Crossman and Ewan Morrison.

In the turbulent late seventies, six-year-old Susanna Crossman moved with her mother and siblings from a suburban terrace to a crumbling mansion deep in the English countryside. They would share their new home with over fifty other residents from all over the world, armed with worn paperbacks on ecology, Marx and radical feminism, drawn together by utopian dreams of remaking the world. They did not leave for fifteen years.

Decades later, and armed with hindsight, Crossman revisits her past, turning to leading thinkers in philosophy, sociology and anthropology to examine the society she grew up in, and the many meanings of family and home. In this luminous memoir, she asks what happens to children who are raised as the product of social experiments and explores how growing up estranged from the outside world shapes her as a parent today.

Our speaker:

Susanna Crossman grew up in an international utopian community in England during the 1970s and 80s. Now based in France, she works internationally as a writer, clinical arts therapist, and lecturer. Her recent writing has featured in Aeon, the Paris Review and Berfois. She is a published novelist in French, and regularly collaborates with artists. She lives with her partner and three daughters.

The event will be chaired by Ewan Morrison