Session number 7, 26/04/2023

Posted on: 7 June 2023 by Eleanor McAdam in Creative Writing group

It was a beautiful warm day heralding the start of the spring and summer months, so we decided to sit outside Ye Cracke, a tiny old pub hidden away on a side-street, so it felt as though we weren’t in the city at all, and with eleven attendees in total, we took two long picnic benches...

We started with Hollie reading a short piece of fiction, as yet undecided whether to be a longer piece or a short story. It was entitled ‘Procrastination’ and followed the protagonist as her friend encouraged her to write, while her mind wandered to the past. Describing a favourite English Teacher in High School, it was a wonderful retelling of such a familiar experience that many writers will resonate with. There was a discussion over whether the piece should be extended, primarily in support of such, as the writing seemed to pull the perfect mix of nostalgia that wanted to be expanded further.

Next to share was David Tierney, who read two chapters from his novel Ark which he is writing for his Creative Writing PhD. The first chapter followed Ahab, a bullock who escaped his farm animal sanctuary and got lost in the woods. The poetic prose was unique and interesting, imagining what an animal would think in this scenario – with invented words, square-brackets for human interpretations of animal emotions, and emulating a great depth of feeling. It read so cohesively for such an experimental form, where while being unusual, the reader can still understand the physicality of what was happening to the scared animal. The second chapter was from the perspective of the sanctuary owner going to find Ahab and was left on a cliff-hanger which makes us want to read more next time!

Moving inside as the breeze picked up, we all refreshed our drinks and it was my turn to read. I decided to choose one of two alternate openings I have wrote for my PhD novel-in-progress, the chapter titled ‘Incipit ubi desinit’, following an android character as she struggles to survive in a futuristic city where androids are hated for replacing humans. My opening is very heavy on world-specific jargon, experimenting with how much alienation a reader can withstand in the first few pages and still be intrigued enough to keep reading. With most nouns being in Latin, the response was as expected and most of the workshop group felt the alienation. However, there were some who picked up on the ‘robotic’ narrator, and the sense of dread the world invoked, which is definitely a positive to the reading. Further work would be to disperse some more understandable sentences, or dialogue, between the more jargon-dense sentences, to help readers still feel engaged.

Juan had a piece entitled ‘Random Memories’ where we were transported across the globe, from Buenos Aires to Chicago to Prague, seeing scenes as snapshots as clear as postcards. The format was very stream of consciousness, the detail rich while not being overly description heavy, as the places were built with actions, too, such as the eating of hot dogs while observing the colour of the sky. We discussed expanding this into a larger piece and wanting to read more, while Juan had no current plan for the piece other than the random memories that he had wanted to write down.

Our first poet of the evening was Tom Kaye, who performed three poems. While executed brilliantly on page, hearing Tom read them aloud added a whole new level of understanding of the poems. Both humorous and bleak, they told the story of any lost teenager growing up in Britain, relatable no matter what region you are from. While not a poet myself, many within the workshop helped Tom with some of the details; advice on the punctuation-and word-level; while the overall consensus was that they were already basically perfect.

Patrick Brennan read out a piece called ‘Front Gate Back Gate’, which he informed us before reading that this was an idea he had on his notes app and the piece was a first draft. The piece did not read as a first draft, with perfect grammar and pacing, telling the story of a young boy with some rather fickle friends in a hilarious tone that had not just us, but Paddy, laughing along! While being based about an Irish boy, with all the dialectal jargon that comes with it, it was still very relatable to everyone’s childhood, which shows the power of the writing. This was intended as a short story, but the comments were that it needed more structure to give a more cohesive plot, or he should expand it (I believe it could be a whole novel!).

Some more new members to the group read next. Ravenna Christie, a Creative Writing MA, read from her SF short story, ‘Egg’. While there were some comments on the title itself, the piece was brilliantly written, a cohesive short story about a ship of men who land on a new planet and all find themselves inexplicably pregnant. Following how each react to the news, a social commentary of gender and pregnancy, she used tropes of the genre to her advantage so as to not have to overexplain her SF world.

Finally, we heard some poetry from Ellen Hutchinson, a BA student who read two pieces which were short and poignant, very personal and wonderfully written. Some of the group had left by this point, the workshop overrunning with the sheer number of readers we had this month, so we decided to give feedback online, making this easier for those of us who want to give something more detailed. Winding down, the workshop itself was an incredible success, but we could tell that Ye Cracke was starting to pick up with the hot weather, and for the next session we planned to return to the perhaps cosier confines of The Belvedere.