Creative Residency at UCA: Creative Writing students take note!

UCA to open Animation Archive for public workshops

UCA FARNHAM, Falkner Road, Farnham
September 22-26.
Entry: Free

The University for the Creative Arts (UCA) in Farnham is to open its Animation Archive to the public for a series of workshops, talks, screening and games.

Funded by UCA's Creative Residency initiative, the sessions will be led by Sonia Friel, a PhD researcher at Norwich University of Arts who specialises in the work of Jan Švankmajer and the Quay brothers.

Scheduled events include 'Wunderkammer,' where the archive will be investigated to creatively build an electronic collection of texts and images into a digital 'cabinet of curiosities,' 'Surrealist Games,' where the group will replicate a selection of games using materials from the Animation Archive, and a film screening of Jan Švankmajer's surrealist work, Surviving Life: Theory and Practice (2010).

Sonia has experience in utilising archives in both critical and creative contexts, having worked with the archive of the Czech-Slovak Surrealist Group, the Národní Filmový Archiv in Prague, BFI Special Collections, and the personal archive of the film producer Keith Griffiths.  This included documentation, categorisation and organisation of archival material.

Her doctoral research into the work of Jan Švankmajer and the Quay brothers considers a diverse range of material created by the artist-animators, from their most famous animations to virtually undocumented drawings, sculptures, games and ephemera.  Her research has benefited considerably from close contact with the contemporary Czech and Slovak surrealist group and with the producer Keith Griffiths and Sonia has recently completed a chapter on Griffiths for a forthcoming edited collection on the role of the producer within film and media, due to be published by Bloomsbury in July 2014.

The Animation Archives at UCA Farnham are home to a number of fascinating collections, including the works of Bob Godfrey, Britain's first Oscar winning animator.

To book a session, and for further details on times on when workshops are running, please email Rebekah Taylor at rtaylor8@ucreative.ac.uk

The new creative writing stream starts soon....

Hello readers!

The new academic year beckons like a badly constructed simile and much has to be prepared before the first intake of CW students at UCA. So far, the our numbers are very good and we are expecting twenty-two students across the Media and Creative Writing and the Journalism and Creative Writing courses. I've already been in contact with a number of students and I'm excited when I meet the full cohort in induction week.

This is a fairly new blog that is as much for my students as it is for those outside UCA to see a little of what we are doing. As such, I thought it would be appropriate if I outlined some of the ideas that inform CW at UCA, in terms of arrangement and philosophy.

1. CW at UCA is interdisciplinary. Writing is not something that happens in a vacuum and it requires skills, foci, knowledge, interests and ideas from other areas of study: Philosophy, Media, Fine Arts, Art History, Enlglish Literature, Journalism. The list could go on. This is partly because 'writing' represents something so vast that there is simply not one, or even a few things, that it can mean. Writing is like the preposition 'up'. You can mess it up, put up with it, take it up, pass it up, be up to it, shake it up. You can rise up, keep up, hold up and think up writing. As such, it seems sensible that we firstly accept how it is connected to  many areas of human endeavor and secondly, that this is reflected in how we do writing. That's one of the reasons we have mixed CW with Journalism and Media.

2. We study CW. That is, we do not only write. We read, research, cogitate, critique, reflect, compare, study, listen. At UCA, we have a mixed approach to CW: Lectures, seminars, writing sessions and workshops. We have to learn about literature, art, humanity and ideas before and after we write. CW then is not about writing, but about studying a broad range of subjects in a variety of ways.

3. We are wee. UCA Farnham is a small campus in a fine Surrey town. There is (just about) one of everything here and we are near London, the Surrey Hills and have access to a number of galleries and venues. What I think is most advantageous about this is we are small enough and with that, we stand more chance of getting to know each other, feel a part of a community and feel at home where we are. This though need not be stifling because there is still variety. There are concrete walls, brick walls and granite walls here. There is glass, stained glass and pint glasses. After my own experience in a rather insalubrious London-belt town university, I can certainly say that this is a good thing!

Well, I must away for the time being. I'll be posting again soon and hopefully we shall be seeing students put up their own work within the month.

- Dr Craig Jordan-Baker

NAWE membership for Creative Writing courses at UCA

UCA become NAWE Institutional Member

The University for the Creative Arts (UCA) has become an Institutional Member of the National Association of Writers in Education (NAWE) in support of their new creative writing degrees.

The NAWE, whose patrons include playwright Alan Bennett and poet Gillian Clarke, promote creative writing within education, offering valuable resources including article archives, professional directories and career development programmes for teachers and lecturers.

UCA will begin running two new creative writing degrees at its Farnham campus from September - BA (Hon) Media & Creative Writing and BA (Hons) Journalism & Creative Writing - as part of its renowned School of Film and Media.

Dr Craig Jordan-Baker, Lecturer in Creative Writing at UCA, said: "Obtaining NAWE membership is a natural step in strengthening creative writing within UCA. As a result, we will have access to new networks, pedagogic tools and advice and we'll be able to advertise the success of our courses to the wider creative writing community."

Whilst specialist creative writing courses are new to UCA, the university has a long history of producing successful writers for literature and motion pictures, including Mary Tourtel, creator of Rupert Bear, and more recently, Dominic Mitchell, Bafta winning writer of the BBC3 series In The Flesh.

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http://www.ucreative.ac.uk/news/2014/july/UCA-NAWE-Membership#.U9uTovldVfQ