NAZRENE HANIF: WRITING A LIFE IN FRAGMENTS

‘I think of it like a sort of magpie way of writing where I collect things that seem shiny to me and build a nest around them…’ Jenny Offill

Life is by nature fragmentary. As the poet and author Maggie Nelson once said: ‘We can’t see the whole until we’re dead, and then we can’t see it.’ When writing about our experiences, we must accept that the picture is incomplete. How do we piece together what we know so far, assemble the shards of memory to create a compelling and comprehensive narrative?

In this class, we'll explore the possibilities of the fragmented form and play with structure and genre through writing prompts. From Nelson to Chimamanda Adichie Ngozi, Ocean Vuong and TS Eliot to Teju Cole – we'll read extracts from works of creative non-fiction, fiction and poetry, to learn different applications of the fragment and discuss their effects.

Writing a life in fragments opens us to inspiration. Anything can be a tool for creation: an anecdote, a dream, a diary entry, a photo, a text message, a quotation, a souvenir, a lost object. Students will be guided in generating ideas from the fragments of their life, seeing the unfinished or abandoned as something worth preserving.

JOANNA BROWN: LISTENING FOR HIDDEN HISTORIES

Whose stories do we get to hear in historical fiction? How do we flip the narrative to open up space to hear a more diverse range of voices? Using a rich range of archival material to inspire, this workshop explores techniques to develop unique character perspectives and voices for compelling historical fiction for adults.

GWEN MACKEITH: THE ART OF DIALOGUE - EXPLORING THE CRAFT OF WRITING CHARACTERS' SPEECH

In this second workshop we will explore the various aspects of crafting dialogue in our own work, paying close attention to:  

- the riches of the regional, historical and cultural characteristics of speech 

- the typography of dialogue and how it interacts with the rest of the text 

- cultivating subtext 

With in-depth analyses of diverse examples in fiction, we will explore techniques for enhancing the dialogue in our own stories, allowing our characters to come alive through their voices and to take us where our stories need to go.

There is no need to have attended the first workshop to attend this second one.

APRIL YEE: THE INSTANT SESTINA

Struggling to write a sestina? This workshop will help unlock this most complex yet rewarding of verse forms. We will review contemporary poems by Raych Jackson, A. E. Stallings, and Chad McCracken to gain insight into the sestina’s emotional weight and humorous potential, as well as its proclivity for memory and monologue. Participants will leave with a step-by-step plan and key tips to complete their own work.

JEHANE MARKHAM: POEMS OF THE GARDEN

In this workshop we'll consider poetry with a natural setting. We'll start with the Garden of Eden and the expulsion of Eve. We'll move on to small holdings, the countryside and love of the land. Paradise. Although it's not all roses. We'll read and discuss published poems and we'll write and share nature poetry of our own.

TRAVIS ELBOROUGH: A SENSE OF PLACE

A chance to work with the writer and TV/Radio commentator Travis Elborough, trying out a whole raft of techniques to bring the places in your writing vividly to life. Travis will take you through a magical mystery tour of prompts via images, symbols, maps and ideas, to help you build your settings and make them leap from the page. Writing will be done in the session and shared by those who wish to share.

Travis Elborough

NON-FICTION AUTHOR & COMMENTATOR

Described by The Guardian as “one of Britain’s finest pop culture historians”, Travis Elborough has been a freelance writer, author, broadcaster and cultural commentator for two decades now.

Travis’s books include Wish You Were Here: England on Sea, The Long-Player Goodbye, a hymn to vinyl records that inspired the BBC4 documentary When Albums Ruled the World, in which he also appeared, and A Walk in the Park, a loving exploration of public parks and green space. His latest, Through the Looking Glasses: The Spectacular Life of Spectacles, was published in July 2021 to immediate acclaim, saluted as ‘fascinating’ by The Observer, while New Statesman stated, ‘It will make you look at specs with fresh eyes.’

He has also collaborated on the popular and award-winning series of ‘Unexpected’ Atlases with the cartographers Alan Horsfield and Martin Brown, the most recent of which, Atlas of Forgotten Places, appeared in November.

Gwen MacKeith

WRITER AND TRANSLATOR

Gwen MacKeith is a writer and a literary translator. Her short stories have appeared in the arts quarterly, Ambit Magazine and her flash fiction was short-listed for the Ambit Magazine flash fiction competition. She was awarded a PhD in 2007 from University College London in Hispanic studies in which she examined the work of the Argentine fiction writer, Antonio Dal Masetto (1938 – 2015).

She held the position of post-doctoral research fellow between 2008 and 2011 at King’s College London for the theatre in translation project, “Out of the Wings”, an AHRC collaboration between King's College London, Queen's University Belfast and the University of Oxford which created a resource to make the theatres of Spain and Spanish America accessible to English-speaking researchers and theatre professionals.

Gwen's anthology of translations by the internationally-acclaimed Argentine dramatist, Griselda Gambaro, was published by Methuen/Bloomsbury in May 2022.

She is currently completing her first novel and is represented by the David Higham agency.   

April Yee

WRITER AND TRANSLATOR

April Yee is a writer and translator published in Salon, Newsweek, The Times Literary Supplement, and Ploughshares online. A Harvard and Tin House alumna, she reported in more than a dozen countries at sites ranging from Chernobyl to Iraqi oil fields before moving to London, where she is a National Book Critics Circle Fellow and the University of East Anglia’s Malcolm Bradbury Memorial Scholar. She also serves as a reader for Liminal Transit Review, trustee for SeeBeyondBorders UK, and mentor for University of the Arts London’s Refugee Journalism Project.

In 2022, she was shortlisted for the Manchester Poetry Prize and won the Ivan Juritz Prize and the Jeannine Cooney Scholar for Excellence in Fiction. In 2021, she was editor-in-residence at The Georgia Review, and her fiction and essays won or were listed for the Fitzcarraldo Essay Prize, the Alpine Fellowship, the Women’s Prize Trust’s Discoveries, the Mendocino Coast Writers’ Conference Contest, the Deborah Rogers Foundation Writers Award, and the University of East Anglia’s David T. K. Wong Fellowship.

She has presented at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Bath Spa University, and the Oxford Centre for Life Writing, and has received support from Ledbury Poetry Critics, Faber Academy, the Community of Writers, the Society of Environmental Journalists, and (with multidisciplinary collaborators) the EU-Russia Civil Society Forum.

She tweets at @aprilyee.