Literary Conversations

Paul Harris leads our Writing Boot Camp for Busy People at Circle of Misse 20-26 Sept. 2010. 

Award-winning Poet Meryl Pugh urges us to not be intimidated by poetry and to use what it can teach us no matter what genre we write. She offers inspirational and practical advice to beginning poets, discusses her own poetic beginnings and suggests some great reading. Get more of this wonderful support and advice, not to mention an exciting holiday, by joining Meryl at Circle of Misse in July. She leads two courses: a Jumpstart course for those interested in any genre of writing who want to get started and write more fluidly and poetically about the world around them; and a Poetry Boot Camp for those wanting to explore all the possibilities of poetry writing with Meryl as their guide. Because of our unique programme design and it's small class size, both these courses offer a level of individual attention to you and your work that you just don't find in other places. Read what past participants have to say about the Misse Experience.

Annie Kirby, Asham Award winning short story writer, joins us again to offer advice on how to balance writing craft with inspiration, the writers who inspire her, and her personal experiences with short story contests. Annie leads two courses at Circle of Misse in June. If you have any questions about the courses, drop us a line. See you in Misse in June. Enjoy. And if you like our theme music, it's called Acclimate from the album Cool Aberrations by General Fuzz. You can download it at www.magnatune.com

Award-winning short story writer Annie Kirby shares an excerpt from her forthcoming novel Blood, Hands, Moon, Snow. Annie joins us at Misse June 2-6 for a Creativity Jumpstart course aimed at helping participants start writing by exploring story-telling and methods for starting to write and continuing. She also plans to lead a Short Story Boot Camp June 7-13 for those with an idea for a story, or a work-in-progress they want help with. Annie hopes to help participants leave with a draft of a story that they can continue to polish. Annie is an Asham Award winner for short fiction and her stories regularly appear on Radio 4 and in anthologies. She says she is excited about both courses and energized about working with hanging out in Misse with her course participants. To get a better idea of the Misse experience, check out our photo gallery and testimonials from courses during the Spring. Enjoy the reading.  

A short treat. Writer and teacher Jan Woolf gives us a sneak peek of her April 7-11 Jump-start Your Writing course and her thoughts on the pleasures and perils of the writing life.   Enjoy and thanks for listening.

We are delighted to share with you a recording of Emma Sweeney reading from her forthcoming novel My Broken Twin. It is about the relationship between twin sisters, one of whom is disabled. We hope you enjoy this short excerpt from this beautifully written, powerful novel. Emma joins us at Circle of Misse April 12-18, 2010 to lead a Get Writing! Boot Camp. Her teaching and writing career has taken her as far a field as South East Asia, Japan and India. She lectures in Creative Writing at New York University - London, and at the Open University. Emma has won various prizes for her writing including an Arts Council Award and a Royal Literary Fund Bursary. She was also a recent Byrdcliffe Artist in Residence, and has been short-listed for various prestigious awards including the David Wong Fellowship, the International Fish Prize and the Asham Award (Britain’s foremost short story prize for women writers).

A special treat on this episode. Award winning poet Meryl Pugh reads her new poem "The Charcoal Bridle" due to appear in The Rialto this spring. She also discusses her influences, including the power of nature, and we explore the concept of "poetic territory" and what it means to the beginning writer. Meryl leads "Creativity Jumpstart: Seeing With A Poet’s Eye" and "Poetry Boot Camp: Discovering New Territory" at Circle of Misse in July. Meryl is a Jerwood/Arvon Young Poet, was awarded a Hawthornden Fellowship and short-listed for the New Writing Ventures Poetry Prize. She has led writing workshops in museums, schools and prisons and was selected to participate in both the Jerwood/Aldeburgh Seminar, “To and From a First Collection” and the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival Masterclass in 2009. Her work has appeared in the anthologies: Entering the Tapestry (ed.s Mimi Khalvati and Graham Fawcett, 2003, Enitharmon) and Reactions 5 (ed. Clare Pollard, 2005, Pen and Ink Press). Reviews and poe

Writer and teacher Emma Sweeney and I talk about what it's like, especially for the beginning writer, to garner the courage and support to embark on a long writing project. Drawing from her own creative process and experiences teaching students at NYU and the Open University, Emma sheds some light on what actually happens during writing courses and why they are so useful.  Emma offers advice that is applicable for those considering longer creative writing courses, such as an MA, as well as those considering a shorter course like the week-long Get Writing! Boot Camp she will lead at Circle of Misse 12-18 April, 2010. For those interested in that course, Emma offers some specific details of what she has planned and her ideas and inspirations for the week. As always, if you like our theme music, it's called Acclimate from the album Cool Aberrations by General Fuzz. You can download it at www.magnatune.com Enjoy the podcast. Thanks for listening.  

Playwright, short story writer and writing teacher Jan Woolf took a break from her writer's retreat at Circle of Misse last August to join me under the arbour in the garden to discuss her forthcoming short story collection Fugues on A Funny Bone from Muswell Press and what inspires her to write. Jan Woolf is the Harold Pinter writer-in-residence at the Hackney Empire, where her play Porn Crackers (about her past job as a film censor) was produced last year. Her fiction has appeared in literary magazines including Libbon, and her short story “Moving On” was short-listed for the Asham Award. She leads the ‘Writing the Visual’ workshops at the Hackney Empire, for writers whose fiction engages with the visual arts. Jan returns to Circle of Misse in April to kick off the 2010 season of writing, cooking and painting holidays with a five-day course designed to jumpstart the creative process and get people writing. If you like our theme music, it's called Acclimate from the

I had the good fortune to catch up with novelist Kate Pullinger at the New Writing Worlds Symposium this summer. We managed to find time to sit down and talk about her most recent novel, A Little Stranger.  The novel is a fascinating, complex, and textured exploration of what happens when one women wonders if she made a mistake by giving birth. Maybe she's not cut out to be a mother after all. She acts on this notion, leaves her young son and husband, and escapes to Las Vegas where she meets another women struggling with her own doubts. Her journey takes her back to her childhood and her mother's past in an attempt to understand her actions. Kate and I discuss how she came to write about this often taboo subject, and about the dialogue, and subsequent backlash, generated by the discussion in the media about 'the perils of parenthood.'  Also check out Kate's cool award-winning digital literature project Inanimate Alice. Enjoy. 

What are the boundaries between the stories we tell--to ourselves and each other--and truth? Are facts, and reality for that matter,  just too unimaginative for us to cope with, so we rely on stories to survive?  James Scudamore takes on these ideas in his compelling debut novel, The Amnesia Clinic, which was recently (after our conversation) longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. Anti is English, quiet, asthmatic; risk averse. He lives the typical expat life with his parents. Fabian is Ecuadorian, charismatic, always up for an adventure and reckless. Orphaned by a car accident that killed his father and his mother (although her body was never recovered,) he lives with his equally flamboyant Uncle, who entertains the boys with outrageous stories of shrunken heads and adventures in the countryside.   The boys acquire his passion for outlandish tales and soon begin conducting their relationship entirely through the medium of storytelling.  The stories

After some delay, it is my pleasure to bring you the second part of my conversation with Jill Dawson about her current novel Watch Me Disappear. I've been on the road and, much to my surprise, reliable Internet connections were few and far between. The good news is that while out and about, I crossed paths with several authors who either agreed to do a podcast in the future, or started talking on the spot while I recorded. I'll post those conversations over the next several weeks.  Until then, enjoy the second half of the discussion with Jill Dawson. Please feel free to post your comments here, or email me at literaryconversations@yahoo.com. Thanks for listening. Let's continue the conversation.

For our first episode, I travelled to The Fens near Ely, England, an atmospheric area of rich black soil and wildlife filled wetlands, to talk with Jill Dawson (www.jilldawson.co.uk) at her home.  Jill is the author of five novels: Trick of the Light, Magpie, Fred and Edie, Wild Boy, and, most recently, the Orange Prize longlisted Watch Me Disappear. Watch Me Disappear tells the story of Tina Humber, a British-born marine biologist now living in the U.S. with her husband and daughter. Her life appears ideal. Then, after a long absence, she returns home to the Fens for her brother's wedding. Surrounded by the hauntingly flat, dark fields of her childhood, an underground river of forgotten, and often ambiguous, memories burst forth.  She begins to relive, in trickles and then torrents, the disappearance of her best friend Mandy during the 1970s.  She turns her scientific eye to these recovered facts hoping to assemble a true report of what happened. But memory doesn't work that way she soon learn