Master's in Creative Writing

“Despite losing a baby and suffering several miscarriages and IVF failures, writer Alice Jolly was determined to find a way to have another child…”

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‘Every beautiful poem is an act of resistance’^[1]: reflections on a voyage poétique.
By Jenny Lewis, 31 March 2015

For every physical journey there is an accompanying internal, psychological and spiritual one and my trip to the Third Rencontre Internationale de la Poésie in Morocco this month was no exception. The fact that the festival theme this year was ‘poetry and resistance’ was the reason I had been invited. Since the publication of my book Taking Mesopotamia (Oxford Poets/ Carcanet, 2014) I have been categorized as a contemporary war poet, tackling themes of resistance and dissent. The fact that I have a growing body of poetry translated into Arabic (with the help of the Iraqi poet Adnan al-Sayegh) has also given me a passport to Arabic-speaking festivals and is a key factor in opening doors to a wider international readership. Over the eight days of the festival I and the other 22 poets from 15 countries gave 12 readings and took part in round table discussions on where the poetry of dissent is taking us in the continuing aftermath of the 2003-2011 Iraq War. My book started as a search for my lost father who fought with the South Wales Borderers in Mesopotamia-Iraq in the First World War and died when I was a few months old at the end of the Second World War. Because of this it is deeply personal to me and the fact that poems from the book shared the same forum as the work of great activists such as André Breton, Yannis Ritsos and Mahmoud Darwish – not to mention the other poets I was travelling with – gave me a sense of a validation. A core theme of the debates and round table discussions was the importance of moderation in the revolutionary discourse, reflecting Mahmoud Darwish’s assertion that ‘every beautiful poem is an act of resistance’ and Adonis’^[2] belief that focusing on the artistic aspects of poetry is a more effective way of educating people than propaganda, and a better way to serve the nation than more aggressive forms of resistance.

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MSt tutor Nicoletta Demetriou’s University of Nicosia TEDx talk on “The Wonders of Writing” in November 2014 is now available to view online.

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MSt tutor Roopa Farooki has a new blog post for Tinder Press

“…in the end, being a writer isn’t a grand and complicated thing. A writer is simply someone who makes the time to write.”

Read the rest of the post at http://tinderpress.co.uk/2015/03/roopa-farooki-on-making-time-to-write/

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A Word On Agents
Marti Leimbach

A writer may think of agents in London, New York and elsewhere as gateways to publication in a major house, or she may consider them as fortresses that barricade her from the world of publishing and all her hopes in that direction.

They are both, of course.  At times, they may seem elusive, discouraging, and wholly disinterested in anyone who isn’t already in the media with a grand following. They attend parties and launches and awards dinners for already-established authors, and appear to have no interest whatsoever in bringing aspiring authors into the fold.

By contrast, agents can dazzle you with attention. Sell a few stories, or appear in a newspaper article with what seems like a good non-fiction idea, or have another writer slip your manuscript into the right hands, and suddenly you are treated like a celebrity. The same agent assistants who once protected their boss from you now crowd around, telling you how much they love your manuscript. The assistants are smart and educated and often the daughters of terribly famous other authors. They present you to an agent who has a list of the best prospective editors for your work, ideas of how to sell your foreign rights, and enormous confidence in your future. You go out to lunch and your agent wants to talk about you, your book, and even your next book. Finally, you’ve entered the beguiling and heady love affair that is the author/agent relationship, with your life’s work at its centre, and it feels just great.

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On Letting go of a Novel

Wendy Brandmark

The launch of novel is an odd experience. Suddenly a book which never let go of me, no matter how exasperated I became with the puzzle of its story and bothersome group of characters, is finally making its way in the world.

My second novel, The Stray American, came out just before Christmas. I’ve been delighted to hear from readers who identify with Larry’s lonely journeys through London, who enjoy the comedy and have favourite characters and scenes. The novel is no longer mine. It’s true there were editors and writers who read the book before it was published, whose comments affected the revisions: the ending changed and most recently the title. But I miss the writing of the very first drafts when a tangle of relationships emerged from what had been just an image of expatriate Americans in London.

When asked why she wrote, poet Denise Levertov once said, ‘I like to make a thing.’ We spend much time thinking about agents and publishers. Somehow a book is not alive until it is published, and we as writers can only be validated in this way. But looking back, I think the real satisfaction was in early days when the novel began to take shape. That lone journey.

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MSt tutor Wendy Brandmark’s novel The Stray American is published by Holland Park Press.

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