NCLA
has enjoyed a busy few months with well-attended events and visits from an
exciting list of eminent writers. The Centre continues to play its part in
the literary vibrancy of the North East with more high profile events to come
plus involvement in the recent Radio 3 Free Thinking
Festival and the launch of a new online magazine. There are also
opportunities to have creative work broadcast on Culture Lab’s radio station
and to enrol on one of NCLA’s short courses.
All three of Newcastle University’s Professors of
Creative Writing contributed to the BBC Radio 3 Freethinking
Festival. Sean O’Brien wrote a new audio
drama designed to be listened to on the walk over the Gateshead Millennium
Bridge. Jackie Kay contributed to The
Verb and W.N. Herbert talked about the cultural
and symbolic significance of Hadrian’s Wall.
This
new online magazine has just gone live. Established with the aid of a grant
from the Catherine Cookson Foundation, its aim is to be a website where
readers and writers engage together creatively; where reviews, posts and
blogs are stimulating and though provoking; and where top quality work from
established, emerging and new writers can to be found.
Undergraduates
from the School of English Literature, Language & Linguistics are working
with Culture Lab to encourage writing that can be broadcast on the recently
launched Culture
Lab Radio station. Their aim is to increase the number of students
engaged in creative work university-wide encompassing poetry, short stories,
novels, plays and new media. In addition, they are keen to encourage
participation in NCLA events.
The New
Year sees the start of four more courses that will run from 3rd February -
10th March 2011 on Thursday evenings from 5pm – 7pm at Newcastle University.
Improvisation
& Adaptation is led by Ian Fenton, a writer and
director with awards from BAFTA, the Royal Television Society and a number of
international film festivals. The course will enable participants to learn
how to improvise new work from the art of other writers, artists,
photographers and musicians. This course has previously received enthusiastic
feedback and there are still a few places available.
Led by Cynthia
Fuller, Writing
& Health: Writing in Groups is a course for anyone interested in
using creative writing to work with groups and individuals in health care or
other community settings. The emphasis is on building up a resource bank of
exercises and examples to use with groups, and developing skills in setting
up writing exercises.
Poetry Masterclass is one of two independent six week courses run by some of the most prestigious tutors in the country including: Colette Bryce, Linda France, Professor Bill Herbert and Professor Sean O’Brien.
An
enormously successful course earlier this year, Memoir Writing is again led by
Professor Jackie Kay, whose recently published memoir Red Dust Road
(Picador, 2010) was a Radio Four Book of the Week, and Julia Blackburn, author of the critically
acclaimed memoir The
Three of Us (Cape, 2008). The emphasis of this course is on
reading and thinking critically about memoirs and about the limits and
possibilities of it as a form.
To book a place please contact Melanie Birch on 0191 222 7619 or email melanie.birch@ncl.ac.uk
NCLA’s exciting programme of events for semester 2 2011 is currently at the printers.
The new programme brings another series of world class literary events to Newcastle. To whet your appetite we can reveal that the highlights will include visits from Jeanette Winterson, Diana Athill, Marilynne Robinson and August Kleinzahler. Professors Jackie Kay and Sean O’Brien will both be reading from their new poetry collections.
Full details of all events in the new programme will be published on the website and sent out to our mailing list by the end of this week.
Even
More Tonto Short Storieswas launched on 22nd November to coincide with National Short Story Week.
It includes work by Marianne Archbold, David Denton, Glenn Liddle, Kelly
Railton and Judy Walker, all of whom are students from the MA in Creative Writing
at Newcastle University.
Peter
Keane, an MA in Creative Writing student, has produced an idea for a
children’s book, Standing Stone, which is one of the three
finalists selected for the Northern Star new author competition to be
announced at the Northern Children’s Book
Festival. The winner will have their book illustrated and published.
Kachi
A. Ozumba, who is completing his PhD in Creative Writing, was commissioned to
write a short story, Snow, for BBC Radio 3’s The Verb. The
story was broadcast on Friday 26th November.
Professor
Bill Herbert is attending a writers’ retreat in Pondicheri, India in
December.
Creative
Writing PhD student Victoria Adams has had several pieces of short work
accepted for publication including: Breakfast, Take my Advice and The
Beginning in the Spilling
Ink Review; three prose poems in Classifieds; Embroidering in One Million Stories; and Phoenix in Cyclamens and
Swords. Her short story, Doing it by the Book, will be
published in the The
Unthology, published by Unthank Books.
Professor
Linda Anderson’s poem, ‘Cherries’, was shortlisted for the International
Arvon Poetry Prize. The anthology of the finalists’ poems can now be ordered from the Arvon Foundation.
The next NCLA newsletter will be published in February 2011. In the meantime, festive good wishes and happy reading!