August Newsletter
Hello Everyone,
As we move into the new teaching year and our courses here at WordPath get started we’ve been thinking about new beginnings and fresh chances - how the writing life offers us the opportunity, with every new project, to begin again. How many new stories are made out of parts of old narratives, or fragments of past novels? We can think of a few, and it’s exciting to think about writing this way, where everything we make contains the seeds for other stories.
We still have spaces available on the current Ignite Your Fiction course, Monday September 20th – Friday September 24th – and would love to have you join us, asking these questions and exploring answers - and more!
WHAT WE’VE BEEN READING:
Elizabeth Hardwick's 1979 novel Sleepless Nights recently re-issued by Faber with a fabulous intro by Eimear McBride. An genre-blurring novel which glides through people, places, times as the mind does at 3am.
WHAT WE’VE BEEN WATCHING:
THE TREE OF LIFE
Returning to the great work of Terence Malick...His films take years for him to think about and make and are, each of them, beautiful renditions of and meditations upon the state of being in this world.
WHAT’S GOT US THINKING:
Thinking about Hardwick and many of our favourite women writers: What does it take for a woman to stay in print? Men’s legacies are often burnished by wives and daughters. Most women artists are less fortunate. Many of our favourite women writers have taken decades to be re-discovered and re-printed. Thank goodness for initiatives like Second Shelf.
WHAT WE’VE BEEN UP TO LATELY:
BRIXTON REVIEW OF BOOKS
Finding out about great new review magazines like The Brixton Review of Books - a place where we can read about work published by the small independent houses.
BE INSPIRED:
From Eimear McBride’s introduction to Sleepless Nights:
‘On being quizzed about the absence of twists and turns in her work, she [Hardwick] replied: “If I want a plot, I’ll watch Dallas.” This understanding that plot and story are not the same, that plot is not appropriate to every narrative while story is indispensable, propels the book forward…’
