Creative Writing Events, Guest Lectures and Masterclasses Spring 2024

Here is this semester's programme of Creative Writing guest lectures and masterclasses happening this term in the Centre for New Writing at the University of Leicester. All the events are free and open to everyone: students, staff and the public alike. If you'd like to attend one of them, and aren't already registered, please email Jonathan Taylor (jt265@le.ac.uk) for further details.

Centre for New Writing, University of Leicester: Programme of Events Spring 2024

Dave Bradley, "How to Nearly Make It as a Professional TV Writer" (Guest Lecture)
Tuesday 13 February, 11am-12, Bennett Building, room F75a.
This guest lecture is part of the first-year undergraduate module "Introduction to Writing Creatively 2." All are welcome to attend. Please email jt265@le.ac.uk to reserve a place if you are not registered on the module. 

Kit De Waal, "The Journey to Publication" (Masterclass)

Wednesday 20 March, 2-4pm, George Davies Centre, room 1.26.

This masterclass is part of the MA in Creative Writing. All are welcome to attend. Please email jt265@le.ac.uk to reserve a place if you are not on the MA. 

Literary Leicester Festival 2024

Wednesday 20 March to Friday 22 March.

Free and open to all! You can see this year's fantastic line-up of events and book in advance here. 

Creative Writing Student Showcase

Wednesday 20 March, 5-6pm, Attenborough Film Theatre.

Free and all welcome! As part of Literary Leicester Festival, we're holding our annual showcase event for University of Leicester BA, MA and PhD Creative Writing students to read and perform their poetry, stories and scripts. If you're a student or graduate and would like to get involved, please email Jonathan Taylor (jt265@le.ac.uk) in advance. 

Corinne Fowler, "Country Walks Through Colonial Britain: Combining Historical Research, Nature Writing and Reported Conversation" (Guest Lecture and Masterclass)  

Monday 25 March, 10am-12, Attenborough Building, room 2.02. This workshop is part of the MA in Creative Writing. All are welcome to attend. Please email jt265@le.ac.uk to reserve a place if you are not on the MA.

Barbara Cooke, "Pedagogic Puzzles: Harnessing the Thrill of Discovery in the Creative Writing Classroom" (Guest Workshop)

Wednesday 27 March, 2-4pm, George Davies Centre, room 1.26.

In this workshop, we will experience how the "dopamine hit" that accompanies the solving of literary puzzles can be harnessed for use in Creative Writing. While an established part of literary criticism since Kermode’s "Freud’s Masterplot," the technical skill involved in creating, as opposed to observing, the building and thwarting of readerly satisfaction deserves more attention. We will explore how workshop exercises can help you to promote the thrill and satisfaction of readerly discovery in your work and, most excitingly, to flex your own puzzle-solving and code-cracking abilities. This workshop is part of the MA in Creative Writing. All are welcome to attend. Please email jt265@le.ac.uk to reserve a place if you are not on the MA.

Paul Taylor-McCartney, "Setting Up an Independent Publisher: Hermitage Press" (Guest Lecture)

Tuesday 14 May, 10am-11am, Attenborough Building, room 2.08.

This guest talk is part of the MA in Creative Writing. All are welcome to attend. Please email jt265@le.ac.uk to reserve a place if you are not on the MA. This event is made possible by Literary Leicester Festival. 

Joe Bedford, "From Dissertation to Publication to PhD" (Guest lecture)

Tuesday 14 May, 11.15am-12.15am, Attenborough Building, room 2.08. 

This guest talk is part of the MA in Creative Writing. All are welcome to attend. Please email jt265@le.ac.uk to reserve a place if you are not on the MA. This event is made possible by Literary Leicester Festival. 

Joe Bedford, "A Bad Decade for Good People"

Congratulations to Joe Bedford, University of Leicester PhD Creative Writing student, whose debut novel, A Bad Decade for Good People, is going to be published by Parthian Books in June 2023!

Joe Bedford, photograph by Deborah Thwaites

Joe Bedford is an award-winning author from Doncaster, UK. His short fiction has been published widely and has won numerous prizes including the Leicester Writes Prize 2022. He has an MA in Creative Writing from Lancaster University, and is currently undertaking a PhD at the University of Leicester. A complete history of his publications and awards, with links to published stories, is available on his website here. His debut novel A Bad Decade for Good People is available to pre-order now here.

About A Bad Decade for Good People

This is a fiercely hopeful novel about family, sexuality, grief and how we as individuals can rediscover our political agency in the face of continued uncertainty.

Brighton, 2016. Laurie wears the scar given to her by a policeman’s baton as a mark of pride among her circle of bright young activists. Her conscionable but sensitive brother George should be a part of that circle, until the appearance of enigmatic Spanish migrant Antonio threatens to divert him from his sister’s world of marches and moral accountability.

As the clouds gather over Brighton and the EU referendum accelerates both Laurie’s political zeal and Antonio’s ambiguous desires, George is faced with the fact that their city of parties and protests is suddenly a place where the possibility of saving the world – as well as the people around him – is in jeopardy of being lost forever.

At once a letter of support to everyone disillusioned by British politics, and a deeply perceptive snapshot of modern relationships, A Bad Decade for Good People is a captivating state-of-the-nation tale that begs the question: when it feels like the world is falling apart, how do you keep those you love from doing the same?

From A Bad Decade for Good People, by Joe Bedford

If the policeman’s baton had found Laurie half an inch lower she would be blind in one eye. Instead it left her with a long, crescent-shaped scar, which she wore like a medal, never hiding it and never knowing how it made my stomach flip. Every time I saw it I had to shake off the memory of her blood running down over her eyelids and onto her jacket, and afterwards the stitching and the gooey rivets it left behind and the halo of yellow bruising that hung around the socket for weeks. 

Her scar was all I could see while she pleaded with me by the side of the road, until we were lit in the headlights of Dad’s car and then running, slipping, gripping each other’s clothes in the ditch. I remember the sound of Dad’s voice carrying over the hum of the engine, the faint warmth coming through Laurie ’s jacket as she held me, the smell of mud and silage. The hills opposite looked like the silhouette of a man sleeping on his side, cut against the stars – the kind of thing you notice at midnight in the countryside, with someone who makes you feel as though things could be better. That and the raw feeling that your failure isn’t yet total but just another blip in time, waiting to pass.

From Organic Farm to a PhD in Creative Writing

By Joe Bedford

Joe Bedford, photograph by Deborah Thwaites

In some ways, I feel like an unlikely PhD candidate. My PhD journey began ten years ago in South Africa, on a commune run by a family of hippie Afrikaners. I went there to learn how to live outside of the usual parameters of society, and while this desire was probably just a product of living in central London, I was still starving for meaning. What I found in South Africa was a farm of a few dozen acres, planted in sandy ground about an hour’s drive from Cape Town and battling a tangle of invasive Port Jackson willow. The farm provided for two small families – both Afrikaner – and was worked according to the principles of permaculture (organic farming). Other than these three adults and four children, the only other visitors were farmers from other settlements, labourers from Cape Town and illegal economic migrants who lived in the nearby township. Within this limited community – off-grid and with little contact with the outside world – I thought I had found a version of the life I wanted to live.

In my experience, there are two things that motivate people to rearrange their relationship with society. In the simplest terms, the first is love of family, community and nature; the second is frustration with human behaviour. Speak to anyone who has made or wishes they could make radical changes in their relationship with society and you will often find expression of one of these two things, usually both. "I want my children to know the names of the plants in our garden." "I’m sick of the way politicians allow our environment to be trashed." "When I’m in nature, I find an inner-peace I can never find in the city." "The new development at the edge of town has destroyed that poppyfield." At its extremities, this kind of love produces people who are blissfully reconciled to their place in the natural world. But what is at the other extreme?

In South Africa, I found a group of people who had decided to escape the city, just as I had. They did so because they loved their children and wanted them to have a relationship with nature that had been unavailable to them in Cape Town. They also did so because they felt the life they were escaping from was degenerative, corrupt and void of meaning. While driving on the motorway between Cape Town and Malmesbury, we almost hit a resident of a township through which the motorway passes. Rather than walk several miles to the nearest footbridge, he had chosen to run between the highspeed traffic on his way to the other side – a common sight on that stretch of road. The farmer I was travelling with had to swerve, and without blinking shouted a common racist expletive at the top of his voice. What followed was a tirade about human stupidity, immorality, uncleanliness and poverty. This farmer’s anger came not just from the complex racial dynamics of post-apartheid South Africa but from a deep-seated frustration with how human beings cannot take care of themselves. "It is no surprise we are trashing the planet – we can’t even take care ourselves."

This might sound like the product of a damaged political system, but it may not be that simple. The seeds of misanthropy are sown widely in our cultural lexicon, including in our nature writing and nature fiction – at least, that is one argument of my thesis. In the ten years since my experiences in South Africa, I’ve seen countless examples of how the dual motivations of love and frustration drive our relationship with nature and its continued degradation. How can you not be angry when you see raw sewage contaminating our rivers? How can you not feel hatred when you see unnecessary rail projects tearing through the green-belt? When something you love is under threat, your instinct is to raise your fists to protect it. Which is exactly what activists on both the left-wing and right-wing are doing.

With the encouragement of my lead supervisor Jonathan Taylor I began to approach these themes with a creative and critical eye, which led me to Bernhard Forchtner’s work on the ecology of the far-right and to ecocritics like Jonathan Skinner. A year into working with this team has left me invigorated, writing more than ever and reading some of the most stimulating literature I’ve found in years. I write this blogpost from south London, the city I had wanted to escape from when first arriving in South Africa ten years ago. Outside the window there are schoolchildren walking back from the nearby academy and a man who circles the estate shouting in Jamaican patois. Beyond them is the corner of the park where luminescent ring-necked parakeets – a population of escapees who have thrived in the city – chase each other through the plane trees. From that corner you can see the Shard, rising up from the edge of the Thames. It is in every sense a thousand miles from Malmesbury, but it feels like a thousand times more where I am supposed to be today.  

About the author

Joe Bedford is a writer from Doncaster, UK. His short stories have been published widely, and have won various awards including the Leicester Writes Prize 2022. He is currently working on a composite novel focused on the intersections between English rural fiction and right-wing attitudes to nature, supervised by Dr Jonathan Taylor (Leicester), Dr Bernhard Forchtner (Leicester) and Dr Jonathan Skinner (Warwick). His debut novel A Bad Decade for Good People will be released by Parthian in Summer 2023. His website is here.