The list, the aphorism, the diary, the notebook, the essay, the poem, the journal, the pillow book… From Sappho through to T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf, to more contemporary voices like Maggie Nelson and Claudia Rankine, writers have been working with and in the fragment for centuries. And like its visual counterpart, the mosaic or collage, the combining of fragments into larger wholes can often bring about new and surprising results.

What happens when we intersperse our personal meditations with fragments of a wider reality? How does the juxtaposition of contrasting fragments enable a new reading of first-person accounts? And how might this fragmenting vision depict our contemporary daily life, which is full of many — often contrasting — pieces? Join poet, essayist, teacher and Landfall editor Lynley Edmeades to find out.