Creative Writing And ‘the Moral’ With Emily Holman

This workshop looks at creative writing from both theoretical and practical aspects. Participants meet twice per week over a five-week period to read, discuss and critique one another’s work, as well as to combine this analysis with relevant creative and critical readings.

Over the last decade or so, creative writing workshops have become enormously popular. Literary agents and publishers increasingly ask whether prospective writers have participated in such a course; they also peruse the journals produced by such courses when seeking new writers for their lists. By focusing on critical and theoretical as well as creative pieces, I hope to ensure the intellectual rigor and demand of the course, while also acknowledging its certain utility in a world in which many people wish to write.

The workshop has a broad theme: the so-called ‘moral’ in literary fiction. We begin by considering what sort of things might come under the umbrella term ‘moral’, and assess differing accounts of how to write ‘morally’, along with different practices of such writing. The workshop draws particular attention to the relationship between form and content, widening ‘moral’ to include notions such as attitude and mode of perception, as well as socio-cultural practice. Each week we read selections of poetry, prose and criticism, and consider the crucial question of relating how one writes to what one writes about. Participants will be set a piece of writing in response to such readings throughout the course of the workshop, ensuring that the workshop be fruitful both for writers with work-in-progress and for those who are intending to write but have not yet done so. Another reason why writing during the workshop is useful is to suggest the sheer diversity of possible responses to set critical or creative pieces. This should spur the imagination of participants while also extending their sense of due practice and encouraging them to go beyond convention. Finally, writing during the workshop is what the workshop is all about: bringing creative writing into the realm of the everyday, something that one must simply do, instead of something of which one dreams, yet always postpones. By the end of the five weeks, participants will have written poems and short pieces of prose, in various forms—essay, non-fiction, short story, flash fiction, novel extract—as well as begun work on a longer piece, on which advice and feedback will be offered.

The course is open to anyone over the age of 18. Classes will be conducted in English and will be focused upon literature written in English.

Please get with you pens, pencils, highlighters and notepaper

About the Instructor
Emily is a writer and doctoral candidate in English Literature at the University of Oxford, UK. Her research is on the contribution that literature makes to the way in which we live, paying special attention to how literary form shapes conceptual content, and therefore shapes our perceptions, conceptions and expressions. Emily has published short stories and poems, and her novel is currently under review.

Cost
$300 or $60 per week

For more information or to make a reservation
78.919.504