Master's in Creative Writing

Month: November 2016

  • Seminar: Dr Anna Beer – “Breaking Stories: Writing Women’s Lives”

    Creative Writing Seminar Series
    Kellogg College Centre for Creative Writing
    Mawby Room, Kellogg College, 62 Banbury Road

    5 pm (refreshments) for 5.30 pm
    Michaelmas Term Week 7: Thursday 24 November 2016
    All are welcome and no bookings are necessary

    Dr Anna Beer: “Breaking Stories: Writing Women’s Lives”

    Women, just as much as men, believed and believe the stories we tell ourselves about genius. The composer and pianist Clara Wieck, soon to be married to (the tortured genius) Robert Schumann wrote: ‘I once thought I possessed creative talent, but I have given up this idea; a woman must not desire to compose – not one has been able to do it, and why should I expect to?’

    a-beerAnna Beer, author of Sounds and Sweet Airs: the Forgotten Women of Classical Music, will talk about the ways she as a writer set out to challenge Clara’s despair. She will argue that recovering a female tradition (whether in music or in literature) is only the first step, that – in the words of one scholar – it is not enough simply to rewrite history ‘on the principle of add women and stir’.

    Beer will explore the possibility of casting aside the usual biographical pegs upon which we hang a creative woman’s life, whether the nun taken from the world, the sacrificial wife, or the maiden aunt. Perhaps it’s time to break the old story, and find new ways to tell the lives of creative powerful women.

    Seminar Convenor: Dr Clare Morgan http://www.kellogg.ox.ac.uk/researchcentres/CW

    Email, RSS Follow
    Share

  • MSt tutor Jane Draycott’s new collection, “The Occupant” out on 24th November, 2016

    MSt tutor Jane Draycott’s new collection, The Occupant, which is a Poetry Society Recommendation, will be published by Carcanet Press on 24th November 2016.

     

    “‘I’ve waited some time to read something this intelligent, this sensuous and this crystalline.’ – The Guardian on The Night Tree

    ‘The language is marvellously modulated yet stirringly wild. Draycott has carried over into our tamer, tired world a strong, strange sense of how original, gorgeous and natural this old poem can be.’ – David Morley, Poetry Review

    Following her T.S. Eliot Prize-nominated Over, Jane Draycott’s fourth collection, The Occupant, illuminates the quiet intricacies and brief intimacies of urban life. In the National Gallery, a gardener steals part of a still-life canvas to replant in his own garden; on a winter train a commuter imagines his braver, doppelgänger as a firefighter; in an abandoned sanatorium, a grand piano dreams of former days, ‘rose-spotted paintwork peeling softly, half-moon fanlights rising, sinking’, waiting for anyone to return. At the heart of these imagined scenes the long title poem, ‘The Occupant’, draws on settings proposed but left unwritten by Dutch poet Martinus Nijhoff in his great 1934 modernist narrative Awater. In the stifling summer air, Draycott’s occupant trawls the streets of an unnamed city, while ‘at tills and kiosks police post notices, ‘Missing: Have you seen this wind?’”

    More information and how to order.

    Email, RSS Follow
    Share

  • MSt tutor Ben Brown’s play “Four Letter Word”, Burton Taylor studio, Oxford, 8th November)

    MSt tutor Ben Brown’s one-act play “Four Letter Word’ is being produced at the Burton Taylor studio in Oxford at 12.30pm on Tuesday (8th November) by St Anne’s students as part of the first year play competition, Cuppers.

    Entrance is free.

    Email, RSS Follow
    Share