Welcome to the 15/16 year at UCA!
Hello there everyone!
It’s your course leader Craig Jordan-Baker
here, back after an exciting summer of creative projects, writing and of course
planning for the new year. I’d like to give everybody a lowdown on the main
developments in creative writing here at UCA, along with what I’ve been up to
over the summer.
What
have I been doing?
That’s a good question, and I am glad you
asked. Since May, I have been busy with a number of projects. In June, I was a
speaker at the Great Writing Conference 2015 in Imperial College, London. This in an annual international gathering for
writers and creative writing academics and I presented a paper on ‘Peter Abbs
and Aesthetic Education’, which considered the relationships between the arts
and what this means for creative writing. I’ll be presenting on a related
subject at the annual NAWE conference in Durham this November.
I was also very
happy to have a paper of mine entitled ‘The Philosophy of Creative Writing’
published in New Writing: The International Journal of Creative Writing Theory
and Practice. This was a piece developed at the Great Writing conference last
year and concerns some of the problems of creative writing as an autonomous
discipline within the academy. All UCA students should have access to the
journal via their Athens login and the paper can be found at the following links:
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/14790726.2015.1047854
Another thing I’ve done is to spend two
weeks in the wonderful city of Edinburgh, as part of the Fringe. Two of my
shows were at the festival, one being an adaptation of the Anglo-Saxon poem
‘Beowulf’ and the other a children’s show, ‘The Tale of Tommy O’Quire’. Both
shows got good reviews and you can find some links here:
Myself and actor Tom Dussek were also
interviewed for Fringe Review about our work, the fringe and ideas of poetry
and storytelling. Here’s the link if you are interested:
And what do I think of Edinburgh? Well, to
put it mildly, Edinburgh is an intense environment with over 3,500 shows to
choose from, bars open until 5am, constant street shows, deep-fried Mars bars,
crying actors, pockets full of flyers and daily grind of making sure your show
goes up on time, comes down on time and that you have not sunk into terrible
poverty. This Fringe was my first as a practitioner (writer) and I realise, now
having done it, that I stayed away for some very good reasons. There is much
you can get from the Fringe in terms of reviews, developing relationships and
seeing some amazing work. However, your fortitude is constantly tested as you
are always active, always worried, always thinking about what has immediately
just happened and what is immediately to come. Some people seem used to this
(seem), but I find it mildly hard to believe that their souls are not being
slowly scraped out with a penknife, as there is so little time for reflection
or repose.
Overall,
an experience I may well repeat once memory had blunted the sharpness of
experience.
New
Staff
As many of you will be (painfully) aware,
in the first year of creative writing, you only had the debatable pleasure of
having me to deliver creative writing. Well, change comes inevitably and I am
genuinely happy to announce that UCA has employed two new Sessional Lecturers
in creative writing. Dr Richard Hawtree and Samantha Talbot will be joining us
and will be delivering the year 2 unit, ‘Developing a Writer’s Voice’ in term 1
and then will be taking Year 1 for ‘Poetry and Poetics’ in term 2. Here are
their biographies:
Dr
Richard Hawtree
Richard took his primary degree in English
Language and Literature at Exeter College, Oxford. He next travelled to Ireland
where he studied Old and Middle English poetry, work that culminated in a 2009
Ph.D at University College Cork concerning the tenth-century Exeter Book
manuscript. From 2010 onwards he acted as a post-doctoral fellow with the Irish
Research Council-funded ‘Christ on the Cross’ project, examining textual and
material representations of the Crucifixion in Ireland from 800-1200 A.D.
Research
interests include the history of reading, manuscript studies, and the varied
uses of the past in contemporary British and Irish poetry. His own poems, often
inspired by the metaphysical tradition, have appeared in literary magazines
including: Scintilla, The Penny Dreadful, Brain of Forgetting, and The Weary
Blues.
Samantha
Talbot
Sam is a writer and artist with a
background in interdisciplinary research and practice in the creative arts. She
has a BA (Hons) Fine Art Painting (Winchester), Cambridge CELTA, PGCTEAP
(Nottingham) and an MLitt in Creative Writing (Glasgow). Since 2006, she has
held positions as Lecturer and Teaching Fellow in EAP at the University of
Nottingham, Nottingham Trent University, the University of Bath, INTO
University of East Anglia and the University of Sheffield, respectively, and
has worked in Literature Development at Nottingham Writers’ Studio.
At UCA, Sam lectures on the BA Hons in
Creative Writing and Journalism course, and the International Foundation,
Graduate Diploma and Pre-Sessional programmes in Art and Design. Research and
teaching interests include facilitating creative and critical writing in the
various disciplines and across cohorts; the personal essay; narrative
non-fiction; autobiographical fiction; the journey as metaphor; travel
literature; image and text; final major projects and exhibitions; editing and
publication: anthologising; and the fictionalised travelogue. As part of the
Creative Writing team here at UCA, she also facilitates the ‘Scrivener Series’
of external talks and is about to embark upon an interdisciplinary and
practice-based PhD.
Plans
for the new year
Finally, the 15/16 year will hold some new
things and here’s a short overview of what we will be up to:
1.
The Scrivener Series. The Scrivener
Series returns with a series of talks and readings from established writers.
Speakers will be announced very soon, but I can promise some fine writers will
be visiting UCA!
2.
Acting and Performance. The new Acting
and Performance course under the leadership of Ruth Torr will have its first
intake this year, and I have organised some opportunities this year for CW
students to work with AAP students to have their work developed into short
pieces. This will provide invaluable experience for writers and actors alike.
3.
Creative Residencies. We have some
creative residencies coming to UCA in term 1, which will appeal to CWers.
Firstly, artist Daksha Patel returns to deliver workshops around text and image
and students will have the change to explore the synergies between the written
and the drawn. Secondly, we will have a week of linked workshops looking at
puppetry, direction, music and theatre production from Atomic Force
Productions. This will primarily appeal to CWers wanting to explore some of the
practical elements of performance and how it might relate to their own writing.
4.
Winter School. There will also be an
opportunity for five CW students to attend a new winter writing school at UCA
in December. This will involve CW students, other UCA students interested in
writing and HE students from the local area. We will engage in a compact
writing programme exploring the development of technique and an introduction to
some of the fundamental forms of literature. More info on this soon….
That’s about it! Welcome to the new year at
UCA!
Craig
