Session number 1, 13/07/2022

Posted on: 31 January 2023 by Words by Bernadette McBride in Creative Writing group

Looking around the grass at expectant faces, all seated in the Quadrangle, with its curiously lollipop-shaped trees behind the Victoria Gallery and Museum on campus, our first reader Saul started things off for us, whilst others listened on with interest, glasses of sangria in hands, on this balmy late summer evening...

Saul’s words describing the plight of his plagued protagonist amid a heady Van Gogh-inspired vignette, rang out into the environment of the summer breeze and caught against the bricks of the original red brick building surrounding us, pausing in his reading only as the clock tower bells of the Victoria Gallery and Museum intermittently delivered the sound of time. 

This was our first meeting for creative writers after a long hiatus due to the pandemic and subsequent lack of opportunities to come together and connect. Prior to the pandemic postgraduates in the English department, although always a small cohort, had met monthly to share and critique work. Like most things post the pandemic, former connections, both creative and social, remained stagnant in some ways and needed some gentle nudging to be brought back to life again. Myself, and my fellow PhD candidates David Tierney and Saul Leslie, had mused one day over a coffee, about the possibility of bringing our often-informal sharing of work together in a more orderly fashion and to include other writers in the School of Arts and across other schools within the university.

On that first meeting, with just six of us and two readers, I read from my recent short fiction work “Washed Over”, set along the Sefton coastline and inspired by the prehistoric footprints there. A listener commented that Saul’s reading was a feat in telling a story on a macro scale – the cinematic panning out of scene set on a train – and that mine offered a contrast, in telling a story on a micro scale, zoning in on the small details of a footprint of a deer on a beach. This first session showed that, altogether, these writing sessions offer the chance for listeners and readers alike to see all the parts and perspectives and ways that can make a story, with the chance for connection, and feedback, or to simply offer encouragement.