Jeremy Banning and Tania Hershman

Leaving the Line: Images & Words of War & Wondering is the result of a collaboration between military historian Jeremy Banning and Tania Hershman, a fiction writer and poet. Jeremy and Tania worked together, each stepping into the other’s world, to create a set of 12 postcards (12 is the number of members of a Section in the army), combining an image with a 100-word short story or poem – eight written by Tania and four by Jeremy –  inspired in some way by the First World War – with particular focus on Bristol, women in the war, and Jewish soldiers. The images were either taken by Jeremy or Tania or are from archive material, and on the back of each postcard are a few lines explaining the facts that inspired the poem or story.

The gorgeous postcards were designed by Paul Hewitt of Battlefield Design. 500 sets were printed, and they are also available in electronic form from the project website at http://leavingtheline.com.

Jeremy and Tania appeared at the First World War Day: Bristol 2014 Arts Projects event on 15 November at Watershed.

They have recently returned from their annual battlefield trip to the Western Front. The five-day trip to the Somme, Loos and Ypres provided them with an opportunity to visit graves of Bristol men whose stories they had researched as well as generating lots of ideas for their ongoing collaboration.