October Newsletter
Hello Everyone,
Thoughts turn inward for autumn here in Scotland. It’s ideal writing and reading time as we head into winter and celebrate the joy of small things – a new notebook, a new pen, the red and yellow leaves on the ground, wind at the windows, enough power to stay warm and sit with the laptop…
Places are now available for our weekend retreat - On the WordPath: Creating Your Novel - our short, highly creative at-home writing course February 26-28 2022. A perfect Christmas gift for someone you love, perhaps - or for yourself!
WHAT WE’VE BEEN READING:
Maggie Nelson: The Argonauts and Bluets
Catching up with Maggie Nelson’s back catalogue before reading On Freedom, her latest book. The Argonauts beautifully explores love, motherhood and creativity through the prism of her relationship with the artist Harry Dodge. Notions of gender, sexuality, and family are challenged here in prose that is luminous and also sharply incisive. Those qualities are also evident in an earlier work, Bluets - a glorious meditation on heartbreak and the colour blue. Her work slips between categories: memoir, essay, creative non-fiction and poetry to create something vibrant and wholly her own.
The Shadow, by Neil Gunn
With a beautifully thoughtful introduction by Gunn’s nephew Diarmid Gunn. As with all Gunn’s novels, the story is fretted with ideas and fresh approaches to making fiction - novel as workbook, novel as place of risk and daring.
Learn more about this gorgeously strange work of fiction.
WHAT’S GOT US THINKING:
Diane Williams Will Never Be Dutiful
The idea of ‘wildness’ on the page. Something Katherine Mansfield also wrote about. Of allowing yourself and your characters to actually ‘go there’, into the difficult places. As acclaimed short story writer Diane Williams puts it in a recent New Yorker interview:
But wildness usually encompasses the unspeakable—an insistence on speaking what is too difficult to speak about. When one reaches this point of “Oh, no, that’s what it was!” there is horror. But then there’s relief and sometimes triumph—I’ve made something out of my wound.
WHAT WE’VE BEEN UP TO LATELY:
A Conversation with The Saltire Society
Katherine Mansfield Society Annual Birthday Lecture
WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR FICTION PROGRAMME FOR NEW WRITERS
BE INSPIRED:
Risk! Risk anything! Care no more for the opinion of others, for those voices. Do the hardest thing on earth for you. Act for yourself. Face the truth. ~ Katherine Mansfield
JOIN OUR UPCOMING COURSE:
On The WordPath: Creating Your Novel
FRIDAY 26th February - SUNDAY 28th February 2022
A long weekend course– from Friday morning to Sunday evening – designed to kick-start your creativity and start you on your “wordpath” to completing a novel.
In three creatively charged and highly productive days you will be taking part in workshops, discussion groups, feedback sessions - all dedicated to craft and creativity - including a visit from an industry professional with Q&A and a Sunday night reading aloud of work produced.
