Nick Kneale, who teaches English Studies on the Liberal Arts Programme and is a residential warden to IB students, as well as being a tutor at the Oxford University Department for Continuing Education, has co-edited a book of writings on the theme of 'memory' entitled True to Life (Heaventree Press, 2007). This is a collection of life writing arising from Nick's experience as a tutor in English & Creative Writing at Ruskin College, Oxford, which was founded more than one hundred years ago to offer opportunities to students from disadvantaged backgrounds. The book contains work from diverse people who have passed through the college, many from marginalized backgrounds (the unemployed, pensioners, prisoners, those with mental health issues) as well as articles from the internationally renowned poets John Kinsella and Eva Salzman.

Nick's own piece in the collection considers the nature of memory in relation to both his personal experience and his experiences as a teacher:

When I teach Life Writing, I sometimes ask students to find a metaphor for the slippery relationship between remembering and writing about the self. The poet Craig Raine described memory as an onion, which you peel away, layer by layer, while your eyes involuntarily fill with water. Freud, as ever, had an impressive word for it – Nachträglichkeit – how memory is continuously rewritten in the mind, layer upon layer, so that the buried original can never be recovered.

Nick, who is helping to co-ordinate a series of seminars on Learning & Teaching for staff at our Bardwell Road Centre, goes on to discuss how the process of dealing with his mother's struggle with Alzheimer's has helped him to see how central the process of remembering is to the personal identity of each of us: ‘For me, memory has become a peninsula … the water trickling in between body and mind, threatening to cut her off'.

The Afterword of the book is written by the Australian poet and global rights activist John Kinsella, who is widely regarded as one of the world's most important contemporary writers. As Kinsella sums up:

Nick Kneale says that for him “memory has become a peninsula”. This analogy might work as commentary on this superb collection as a whole. The peninsula is both solid, and as Kneale notes, surrounded by water on three sides. Memory is our connection with who we were, and forms who we are … All stories are vital.