Introducing Jen McDerra - Exeter City of Literature’s New Public Programmes Manager
Exeter City of Literature is delighted to welcome Dr. Jen McDerra as our new Public Programmes Manager.
Jen is a writer and a literary life historian whose work reunites people--whose voices and stories have been denied a place in history - with their achievements.
Her experience spans two decades of literary, cultural, and community engagement, from leading creative programmes in the South West at The Charles Causley Trust, The Reader UK, The Writers' Block and Barefoot Books, to a range of national and international roles with the University of East Anglia, Commonwealth Writers, and the BOCAS Literary Festival in Trinidad & Tobago.
In this role, Jen will lead the design and delivery of innovative, inclusive public programmes that deepen our work with communities across Devon and strengthen our collaborations across the global UNESCO Cities of Literature Network.
From our flagship programmes to new, co-created initiatives, Jen will help shape the cultural heartbeat of Exeter as a City of Literature--celebrating storytelling in all its forms and championing Devon's voices locally and internationally.
Jen says, "I’m over the moon to be joining the ExCoL team. It is a gift to be offered a programming role in a well-established and generous literary landscape in the South-West. The sense of curiosity, kindness, and enthusiasm amongst the people in Exeter is inspiring. We are already having such exciting conversations about what a pleasure it is to bring new ideas, influences, and opportunities to a place with a strong sense of community and a genuine appetite to engage at a national and international level with the ever-growing constellation of UNESCO Cities of Literature."
Anna Cohn Orchard, Executive Director, says, “Jen brings a rare combination of deep literary expertise, a grounded commitment to place and access, and an international perspective to our small but growing organisation that works locally and thinks globally. I’m thrilled to welcome Jen to the team as we expand Exeter’s role as a storytelling city both locally and across the UNESCO Cities of Literature network.”
Please join us in welcoming Jen to the team - we can’t wait to see what she'll bring to Exeter City of Lit.
Like with all members of the team, we asked Jen a bookish question to get to know her better.
What book do you love to give as a gift?
84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff. I like posting it to people. It’s all about letters, books, epistolary effort, friendship, laughing, reaching across cultures and into other people’s landscapes, and how this kind of reading relationship can help people to see themselves and their lives differently and shape them for the better. This book is reading and the pursuit of ‘a good clean second-hand copy’ taken seriously. People doing things against the odds, against the grain, loving in literary long distance.
This book has accumulated meaning since it was written and possesses a rare quality since the methods and reason for the slow transnational literary exchange at its heart have become redundant or at least, less commonly relied upon. Communication has become easier and the effort and reliance the two main characters have on each other for books and support via airmail letters and parcels has been altered by our faster form of digital connection and ability to find and order books online. For me, this book is a record of what can be most truly valuable in a shared literary life.
I choose to take it down and re-read it often from where it lives on the top shelves of my peripatetic book planks, finding the two correspondents crystallised as the exemplar of slow, trusting, generous exchange. I am heartened by what can be understood and effected by epistolary relationships and a shared love of books. I really value these qualities, and looking with hindsight at what has at times seemed like a changeable journey of a CV, I recognise that my own choices have in fact been marked very clearly by these same traits of reaching out, seeking, listening and rerouting according to what I find, hear, and receive. There’s method emerging from what felt like tumbling. This book is an important reminder to me of the sustaining potential of literary friendships to change more than one life. Hannff is also very funny, I’ve rarely written 'YES' so much in the margins of a book – except maybe for May Sarton’s ‘Journal of a Solitude’ which also, as Mary Oliver says in her poem to trees, ‘saves me daily’.
