7th Annual Writers’ Festival Day
March 16th 2011 at Leeds Trinity University College, Horsforth
Leeds Trinity is holding its seventh annual Writers’ Festival Day. On March 16th,
students, staff and members of the local community will again come together to
explore the range of possibilities opened up by working with professional writers.
Workshops in poetry, dramatic writing, building plots and characters, short stories,
and firing your imagination will be offered by experienced writers in their fields:
Susan Barker, Michael Blackburn; Pat Borthwick; Miles Cain: Peter Guttridge:
Philip Meeks; Sophie Nicholls and Paul Sutherland.
The aim of the Writers’ Festival Day is to foster a sense of excitement about writing
so that participants will return to their own writing invigorated with a renewed sense
of purpose. Writing produced on the day will be included in a publication.
Workshop places are free of charge but very limited so book early using the form
below to avoid disappointment.
External
WRITERS’ FESTIVAL
Application Form
The day will commence with coffee from 10.00am and will comprise the following workshops. Each workshop
will last 2 hours and will run once in the morning commencing 10.40am and once in the afternoon
commencing 2pm. There is no charge for workshops. Lunch may be purchased from the College dining room
or Atrium Café, or participants may bring their own. There will be a programme of lunchtime readings.
A)
B)
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D)
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F)
G)
H)
Inventing Characters – Susan Barker
Firing the Imagination – Michael Blackburn
Fast & Loose Poems – Pat Borthwick
Getting the Voice Right – Miles Cain
Great Beginnings – Peter Guttridge
Mastering the Monologue – Philip Meeks
Telling your ‘true’ story – Sophie Nicholls
Prose Poetry – Paul Sutherland
Every effort will be made to accommodate your first choice, but it would be helpful if you could please
indicate, in order of preference, your choice of three for each of the morning and afternoon workshops.
Please complete the reply slip below and return to:
Sylvia Simpson,
Leeds Trinity University College,
Brownberrie Lane,
Horsforth,
Leeds LS18 5HD.
Tel: 01132837126. Email: s.simpson@leedstrinity.ac.uk
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To: Sylvia Simpson, Leeds Trinity University College, Brownberrie Lane, Horsforth, Leeds LS18 5HD.
Name: ………………………………………………
Tel: ….………………………………………..
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I wish to attend the following workshops, given in order of preference.
AM Preference
PM Preference
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1.
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Please state any special access requirements:
Susan Barker – Inventing Characters
How do you create convincing and memorable characters? How do you create a protagonist who emotionally
engages the reader and persuades them to read on? This workshop will explore aspects of characterisation and
discuss the techniques for creating characters with depth, who come to life on the page.
Susan Barker is the author of two novels, Sayonara Bar (2005, Doubleday) and the Orientalist and the
Ghost (2008, Doubleday), both of which were longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize for young writers. After
graduating from Leeds University in 2000 she spent two years teaching English in Kyoto, Japan, and has
travelled extensively in Asia and the USA. She has an MA in Novel Writing from the University of Manchester,
and is currently a Royal Literary Fellow at Leeds Trinity University College.
Michael Blackburn – Firing the Imagination
Michael’s workshop is designed to get your imagination up and running so you can quickly start exploring
language and ideas in poetry and prose. By taking part in a few simple exercises, you’ll soon be writing away
and by the end of the workshop you’ll have surprised everyone – including yourself – with the work you have
produced.
Michael Blackburn, poet and occasional publisher, is currently a lecturer in English Literature and
Creative Writing at the University of Lincoln, where he was instrumental in setting up the MA in Creative
Writing. His work has appeared in numerous magazines, journals, anthologies, pamphlets and books, both in
print and online. Back in 1995 he was a Writer in Residence on the Internet and in 2004 received a bursary from
the Arts Council for a hypertext project, Portrait of the Artist as a Cyborg. His poetry collections include The
Lean Man Shaving and The Ascending Boy. His most recent collection is Big on the Hawkesbury (2010) and
another book is due this year, entitled Spyglass over the Lagoon.
Pat Borthwick – Fast & Loose Poems
This workshop will encourage you to experiment with line breaks to achieve different effects. You will be given
published examples to read and discuss before making a start on your own poems. Time will be given to
develop one of these ready for a final readback/feedback session which will leave you with ideas for further
improvement beyond this two hour session.
Pat Borthwick has published three full length collections and several pamphlets. She has won many
poetry prizes including the Templar pamphlet prize. In the last three months she was shortlisted for the Keats
Shelley award and two of her poems were published in Mslexia as runners-up in their poetry competition. She is
known for her sparkling readings and workshops and Billy Collins describes her work as being ‘the real
business’. She was awarded an International Writers Hawthornden Award in 2003 and is currently Writer in
Residence for RSPB Bempton Cliffs and poetry tutor for the Open College of the Arts.
Miles Cain – Getting the Voice Right
This workshop focuses on writing through the voice of one of your characters. Using examples from works such
as The Catcher In The Rye, The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time, Talking Heads, Martin Amis'
Money and Emma Donoghue's Room, Miles will help writers explore issues around writing with an effective and
powerful voice, and lead discussion and exercises designed to assist writers to develop their ideas and confidence
in tackling one of the biggest challenges that faces writers as they construct effective short stories and novels.
Miles Cain's writing has included journalism for national newspapers, poetry in a number of journals
and anthologies, song lyrics, short stories, a weekly satirical column for BBC Radio York and A Song For Nicky
Moon, a novel for teenagers. Miles also works as a storyteller and plays gigs as an acoustic songwriter. He lives
in York with his family, 6 guitars, 2 cats and a list of books he would like to read.
Peter Guttridge – Great Beginnings
“Call me Ishmael” is perhaps the most striking opening of a classic novel (Herman Melville’s Moby Dick).
Joseph Heller, multi-million selling author of Catch 22, spent eight years between novels because he couldn’t
write a novel until he had its first sentence clear in his mind. Pulp fiction bestseller, Mickey Spillane, more
commercially minded, said, “the first sentence of a novel sells that novel, the last sentence the next one.” Getting
started on a novel is tricky enough but getting the right start is crucial. This session explores the starts of novels.
But not just the first sentence…
Peter Guttridge is one of two Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellows at Leeds Trinity. He has been the
Observer newspaper’s crime fiction critic for the past eleven years. He has written six award-winning comic
novels and the Brighton trilogy, three – definitely non-comic – crime novels. His short stories appear in a range
of anthologies.
Philip Meeks – Mastering the Monologue
The monologue has been an important form of stage writing for the last two decades thanks initially to Alan
Bennett’s “Talking Heads” and latterly due to a need to find exciting dynamic plays using the minimum number
of performers. The monologue therefore is often the first thing the aspiring playwright attempts to tackle. But it’s
a very exacting form of theatre writing. It needs a fine tuned structure a gripping story and a character an
audience will want to spend a full theatrical experience with. This practical workshop in devising character,
writing effective dialogue and telling a theatrical tale from one person’s perspective.
Philip Meeks’ acclaimed one man play Twinkle Little Star received its premiere at the Edinburgh Fringe
in 2006 starring Tim Healy. It has since been produced and toured by York Theatre Royal and a new production
launches this spring at the Everyman Theatre Cheltenham. Other theatre credits include Elsewhere…, recently
commissioned by York Theatre Royal, and the supernatural thriller I Met a Man Who Wasn’t There which tours
this summer starring Philip Madoc and Catherine Shipton. For television, Philip has written Doctors, Heartbeat
and over forty episodes of Emmerdale. His novella Miss Carkshine’s Donation was recently published in the
acclaimed anthology, The Obverse Book of Ghosts.
Sophie Nicholls – Telling your ‘true’ story
Do you sometimes find yourself wondering what it is that is your story or what it is that you have to say to the
world? Do you find yourself endlessly analysing your ideas, wondering if they’re ‘good enough’ or ‘original
enough’ and struggling with the critical voices that tell you that you just can’t write this or that? This workshop
will help you to discover what it is about your story that is uniquely yours. Whether you want to write
autobiography, autobiographical fiction or poetry, or simply get more of your own personal truth into your
words, we’ll explore some fast, fun tools and techniques that will get you writing and help you to tell your story
in new ways and from different narrative points of view. You’ll leave with at least three autobiographical pieces
of writing and with exercises and approaches that you can use to continue to craft your relationship with the
story you have to tell, the story that only you can write.
Sophie Nicholls is a writer, therapist and coach. Her poems have won several awards and she publishes
widely in magazines such as Poetry London, Smiths Knoll, Horizon Review and Rialto. She created and
facilitates the Word Sauce online community and e-courses for writing and wellbeing, uses writing in her one-toone work with clients and trains health care professionals and educators in using writing for their personal and
professional development.
Paul Sutherland – Prose Poetry
Prose and poetry are seen as separate literary forms so what's a prose poem? A criticism against modern poetics
is that 'it's chopped up prose'. Yet prose poems have become popular in poetry collections and with
publishers. Contemporary culture permits a poet to explore a subject without the controls of poetic form. But
there are constraints on prose poems. Will we discover more about what makes a poem, if we release it from any
formal structure except for what can be found in prose? In the workshop we will explore examples of Prose
Poems from the Imagists (1910s-1930s) and recent exponents and then have a go ourselves at writing in a form
that allows freedoms but still demands to be called poetry.
Paul Sutherland has published six poetry collections and has edited six others. He is the founding editor
of Dream Catcher a distinguished national-international journal. His poems have appeared in journals and
newspapers and anthologies; recently, in Sama Ghazal Salaam UK, an anthology of Islamic-inspired
contemporary British poetry, and in The Mantle Adorned, an anthology in Praise of the Prophet. In 2009 a poem
of his was selected for Writing Your Self (edited by Myra Schneider and John Killick). He’s collaborated with
calligrapher Mick Paine to produce a collection of his poems, ‘Selected Ben Nicholson Miniatures’ in two art
books. Since turning freelance (2004), he’s been involved in a range of literary based projects and events
promoting his writing. His latest publication is the pamphlet, Spires and Minarets (Sunk Island Publishing,
2010).