On Writing Memoir about Growing up in Leicester in the 1960s

By Sharon Tyers

The Leicester Seamstress

My mother was a sock linker in a hosiery factory in Leicester for forty years. Sometimes she called herself an overlocker. As a child I had no idea what that meant and all I knew about socks was that she brought home the rejects from the factory floor, the ones that didn’t pass muster, for me to wear. As a result, when I was writing her story, there were many challenges along the way.

Firstly, the hosiery industry in Leicester doesn’t exist anymore but when I was growing up it was proud to say it was "a city that clothed the world." How was I to capture those times when the factories had disappeared from sight? Secondly, by the time I decided to write my mother’s story she was incapacitated and bedridden in the final throes of vascular dementia and had no voice – she could not share her memories with me. Thirdly, the moral dilemma as to whether I had the right to write about my mother’s life caused me much unrest and sleepless nights.

My first decision was to return to the city of my birth, which I left in 1979 at the age of nineteen, and retrace my steps, but that too was beset with problems. Leicester Market, a favourite haunt, where mum would drag me from stall to stall filling her shopping bag with unwashed potatoes, wet lettuces and muddy carrots, was being dug up. Huge, faceless, white boards hid its faded glory and bulldozers drowned out the shouts of the few remaining stall holders. Mum’s factory, where she started work on her fourteenth birthday in 1946, had been converted into student accommodation and was ironically called The Hosiery Factory. The chimney was still there, though, and I stood outside and imagined it smoking when mum arrived and disappeared through the enormous gates to spend the next forty years of her life. Her life may not have been glamorous but I would swear as I stood there, I could hear the giggles she shared with the other women.

Indeed, on Facebook, when I posted a picture of The Leicester Seamstress, who stands on the corner of Hotel Street, over 700 local people came forward to share their love of what she represented – the ordinary hard-working hosiery operator. I knew then I had to continue to write about not only my mother’s life but their recollections too.

So, I kept walking through the past, from Newarke where the Midland Red bus used to drop us off, through the Magazine arch and up into St Martin’s, where we never knew we were walking over the bones of Richard III who would be found thirty years later. Most importantly, I needed to stand in Fox Lane, that shortcut we took between Marks and Lewis’s where the strongman in a thin vest lifted weights for the entertainment of the shoppers and the accordion player squeezed out Lady of Spain.

Fox Lane, Leicester, 1965

These may not be the most sophisticated research methods employed by writers but I was there, you see, and I’ve realised the pictures are still in my head even if they are not still on the streets of Leicester. I completed my book in June of this year and called it The Wrong Socks.

About the author
Sharon Tyers taught English for many years at The Blue Coat School in Liverpool and now lives in North Wales where her first book, Linen and Rooks, is set. An essay, The Lost Dens of Leicester, was published by Little Toller/The Clearing in August 2025, again about her Leicester childhood. She is currently writing After the Fair, the untold story of Susan Henchard, from Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge. She gives talks in libraries and bookshops and campaigns for better oratory skills in schools. She misses Leicester. Her website is here. 

Tracey Foster, "Deep Diving the YA Market: My Creative Writing Dissertation"

For my MA Creative Writing Dissertation last year I intended to write for the Young Adult market, classified as readers of twelve to eighteen years-old. This was a target market I knew a lot about after working as a secondary school teacher for over thirty years. This group of readers has seen an explosion in choice content over the last decade with a range of formats and new authors to choose from, names that now fill the shelves at Waterstones: Malorie Blackman, John Green, Suzanne Collins. This diverse content has covered a huge range of challenging and controversial issues, from genocide (Boy in the Striped Pyjamas), racism (Ghost Boys), teen pregnancy (Boys Don’t Cry), transgender (The Art of Being Normal), and bereavement (Holding Up the Universe). The bar was set high for me to write a novel to sit along these ranks.

My first mission was to read all the classics, novels that were not always written with this market in mind but have since become a go-to for adolescents. The current top 100 list compiled by TIME magazine (see here) features Lord of the Flies, Little Women and The Catcher in the Rye, novels that we were encouraged to turn to as children and that formed our early understanding of the adult world. As I reread all the classics, I began to feel undercurrent themes of loss, hardship, and inevitability. This was understandable as many of these authors wrote in a period either between or after the wars, when there was an uncertainty about our future and a pervading sadness about the human condition. William Golding witnessed the horrors of the D-Day landings before writing Lord of the Flies, George Orwell served in the Spanish Civil war before penning Animal Farm, J.R.R. Tolkien had served in the trenches in the First World War before starting on the idea that would become Lord of The Rings. A melancholy that pervades these books stems from the experiences of the writers, but when read by the young it seems to resound with their yearnings to find a place in the world. 

Modern stories have moved more directly to tackle issues that are current and all-consuming. Many authors today often choose to shift the narrative away from third-person description to a first-person perspective, and this gives the tone an immediacy and intimacy that appeals to modern readers - a confidential tone that appeals to younger readers and is a quick let-in to the action. Some authors have chosen to employ alternative voices to narrate each chapter, showing the scene from different viewpoint and allowing the reader to choose their favourite. The YA audience likes this approach as it works on a few levels, moving the action along and showing prejudice and preferences. This has led to a series of online formats pushing similar novels written in the multiperspectival style (see some examples here). 

One of the biggest outputs in the YA market in recent years has been the multicultural novel. Like buses, you wait several decades for one and then you get a whole shelf full. This has been one of the most successful areas of writing as the market seems to lap up these newcomers with open arms. Read avidly by all YA readers, the multicultural novel has explored all aspects of multiculturalism in society from many different viewpoints (see some examples here). 

The Carnegie Medal, first established in 1936, sought to identify and celebrate the best in British children’s literature. Its aim is to publicise and reward those authors whose works stay in the imagination long after closing the cover, and while the content may be challenging for the audience, the readers must leave with a sense of closure and pleasure. These books are sometimes not written for the YA market but become championed by it. They are often a good starting point when beginning to dip into the field of YA material and are usually available in most libraries. (See Carnegie Medal Winners here).

After spending a long summer reading as much YA material as I could get my hands on, I wanted to consult the experts and, having the target market close to hand, I thought I could survey my pupils on their reading habits. This required a few careful steps before starting. I needed to approach the Ethics Committee at the University of Leicester and also seek permission from the principal of my school. Secondary education is already protected by many safeguarding measures, and students' information is secured within an IT safe wall. I was able to use these systems to create a survey that asked my pupils about their literature preferences and dislikes. The online nature of this survey meant that I had complete control over the collection of the data and could interact with it as needed but always keep the student’s data anonymous. The Ethics Committee had to check my questions and the school’s safeguarding measures before giving me the green light to go ahead. Working with the head of English, we selected the students according to their English sets, choosing the ones most likely to be avid readers and asked the pupils to complete the survey over the summer break. (The school already had a cluster of students that took part in shadowing the Carnegie medal every year and who read and reviewed the short list together). The survey was very informal and used a Loom video to introduce and to personalise the task. All the students knew me well and the questions embedded this approach as I asked, ‘tell me,’ rather than ‘tell the school.’ From this lengthy questionnaire I sought to determine a few things.

• What they would recommend as their favourite reads, genre, format, author
• What they had a dislike for, authors, genres, particular novels
• What were the key themes, topics that they found engaging or a turnoff
• What topics were controversial to them, how easily were they shocked

I had no preconceptions about the survey results as these were discussions we had never had, and, more importantly, neither had the English department. Given that curriculum syllabi have spoon-fed a diet of classics for years without asking the audience what they really want to read, I found it fascinating that nobody had talked to the students before. What I found was an articulate, vocal, perceptive audience who most definitely had something to say about what they really wanted. Responses included the following:

‘I think that in today’s generation, there are very little topics that can be classified as extremely controversial due to progress for LGTBQ+, black and female rights. YA is arguably one of the most controversial genres due to the varied ages of the readers, but this is simply the nature of YA.’ 

‘I think things are controversial when they aren’t spoken about correctly. If they are talked about in a way that highlights issues people go through, then I think it is important to speak about them.’ 

‘I do not mind "disturbing" content as in the right context, it’s interesting. If I’m reading murder mystery, I would obviously want more gruesome descriptions. As long as the author isn’t being offensive themselves, they are allowed to make their characters antagonistic.’

‘Women are still considered inferior and instead of reading books with misogyny and about patriarchal societies we should read books about matriarchal societies and support female authors.’

The students identified their biggest pet-hates in novels as misogyny, animal cruelty and racism and instead recommended stories that had spoken to them. Clustered with the obvious best sellers was a surprising gem, Sylvia Plath’s Bell Jar. The YA popularity of this novel about a young woman’s decent into mental breakdown, subsequent hospitalisation and suicide attempt has even sparked mimicry by other authors, like Meg Wolitzer’s Belzhar. The students also suggested a few other novels not originally intended for the YA audience, showing that that are happy to browse the shop shelves and be discerning buyers. All of these novels showed a similar use of an informal first-person narrator, a clear voice, quick pace and the use of good metaphors. 

One of the best of the bunch was The Lie Tree by Francis Hardinge, winner of the Costa award. My original intention for my novel was to culminate with a horrendous accident in which the father is killed, so this book proved to be good research for both in technique and content. Teens are very adept at handling mortality and death is a topic often explored in YA fiction. The classics often set out with an orphan’s perspective to elicit empathy right from the start - e.g. Secret Garden, Jane Eyre, Great Expectations. This enables a confidential tone to the narration as we become their sole confidant in a lonely world.

I also set up a shadowing group at school and gave students the early drafts of my story to read. This process was invaluable, asking the readers what they think whist creating the plot. Hearing first-hand opinions on the scenario, pace and voice was really exciting. I can recommend this process to everyone as it was fascinating to hear what the readers inferred from my words and finding new perceptions that I hadn’t even intended. I was initially concerned about my opening paragraph as it stemmed from a real incident that had affected me as a child. The teenagers of my focus group were much less disturbed by the incident and even found the idea amusing. A viewing diet of TV and films means that the YA market is much more likely to have been exposed to death at a tender age. The survey had identified that young readers have a fast filter that enables them to quickly identify good and bad content and make their own decisions.

Concluding from this experience, I would recommend reading as much relevant material as you can get your hands on. Seek out your audience and, if possible, open a dialogue with them. Ask pertinent questions to determine what likes and dislikes your readers have and be open to criticism. Show them first drafts and allow them to find their own way through the plot you will be amazed what others perceive from your words. Listen to your readers to become a better writer.

Some useful links include:

• https://nybookeditors.com/2017/08/5-tips-for-marketing-your-ya-novel/
• https://www.penguinteen.com/2023-ya-book-preview/
• https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/childrens/index.html
• https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/10/the-8-habits-of-highly-successful-young-adult-fiction-authors/280722/

About the author
Tracey Foster started off in a long career as an Art and Design teacher but wanted to refocus her creative energies into writing poetry and prose. After helping others find inspiration in the world around us, she took an MA course in Creative Writing at Leicester University and has not looked back. She finds inspiration in the past and the events that shape us. Previous work has been published by Comma Press, Ayaskala, Alternateroute, Fish Barrel Review, Mausoleum Press, Bus Poetry Magazine, Wayward Literature and The Arts Council. 

Reality Is Not What It Seems: My Creative Writing PhD

By Kirsten Arcadio

The philosopher Yuval Noah Harari claims that "our future is in the hands of the social and digital media giants" and decisions are being taken by "a small international caste of business people, entrepreneurs and engineers." Governments have become "managers," he says. They have no vision, "whereas meet the people in Google, in Facebook, they have tremendous visions about the future, about overcoming death, living for ever, merging humans with computers. I do find it worrying that the basis of the future, not only of humankind, the future of life, is now in the hands of a very small group of entrepreneurs" (see Harari’s recent interview with the Guardian here).

Suffice to say, I agree. The idea that new technology will open the door to control of the masses is what propelled me towards pitching a PhD proposal to my supervisor, Jonathan Taylor, in late 2018. After several years writing speculative fiction in what I tend to think of as an amateur capacity, I was ready to take my writing to the next level and this theme had the potential to take me there. I was thrilled to be accepted onto a six-year part-time PhD programme in early 2019 as a result. 

The creative section of my PhD is a novel, Thrown, a socio-political tech-thriller which tells the story of what happens when a computer scientist with an ambiguous past is recruited to build a virtual reality for government services. My creative project uses fiction to examine a possible near-future dystopian scenario where the competing forces of government and online media giants use technology to manipulate society.

The idea of virtual reality is not new. However, the idea that elements of our society may be taken over by virtual and/or augmented reality is much closer than many realise (I believe). In some ways, my thesis is a cautionary tale, in others, a creative exploration. It's based on the idea that government services and virtual reality might one day combine to take complete control of society. My intention was to present this idea in a creative work rather than a factual one. It is my desire - as is the case of many science fiction writers before me - to use storytelling to bring a dry, technological plausibility to life. 

How have I approached this throughout my PhD journey? Fast forward to 2023 and I feel like a marathon runner tackling the last six miles. I’ve drafted a novel Thrown and its accompanying critical reflective commentary. I’ve written all the words … all 100,000 of them in draft form. As a digital communications professional, I’m used to writing and editing. Writing at pace doesn’t phase me. But a PhD is a completely different beast. It’s a journey into my own subconscious, an exercise in perfecting the craft, on contextualising my ideas and developing them in an interesting and engaging way.  It’s a lot - yes, I’ve come a long way, but I’ve still probably got a year’s work left to get to the end of this road. My biggest challenge now is to get the hard-hitting human challenges of my concept across, and indeed, as my novel has progressed, my mind has turned from concept to character. After all, stories are about the journeys we take as human beings and the challenges we have to overcome. Over time, my protagonist and her small crew of friends and (mostly) enemies, have grown with the work. My focus in recent months has turned to the characters’ own journeys, on their hopes and fears, on the stories they tell about themselves, and the ones they want to hide. Thrown is a high concept novel, but it’s also a character study, a journey into the subconscious mind, laid bare by the blurred lines between reality and virtual reality. 

I don’t know what questions readers will ask themselves after reading my PhD. Maybe they might include: to what extent are we already living in a VR? With one foot in an artificial reality, are we already partially "meta" - more about the stories we tell about ourselves than our real selves? Could a VR, therefore, end up being more real than the real world? But whatever the questions the thesis raises, I’m having fun writing it. 

About the author

Kirsten Arcadio has written three novels, each with a different speculative theme, Borderliners, Split Symmetry and WorldCult. Her fourth novel, Zeitgeist, is a coming-of-age adventure set in Germany against the backdrop of the fall of the Berlin Wall. She’s also a part-time poet, digital communications nerd and frazzled head of an Anglo-Italian family. After working for over fifteen years in digital communications, she returned to her twin first loves, literature and philosophy, in 2011. She’s passionate about the big questions in life and how these can be explored using speculative fiction and, to this end, has been working on a PhD in Creative Writing since 2019. When she’s not writing she’s obsessing about science fiction, she loves all things Italian, including her husband, and she once taught English in the Italian senate.

Marshall Moore and Sam Meekings (ed.), "The Place and the Writer"

About The Place and the Writer, ed. Marshall Moore and Sam Meekings

The Place and the Writer: International Intersections of Teacher Lore and Creative Writing Pedagogy is the inaugural work in Bloomsbury’s Research in Creative Writing series. The motivation for creating this volume was the occasional disconnect between theorists, educators, and practitioners of Creative Writing. The chapters in the book examine the spread of Creative Writing around the world, and how this has led to lore manifesting in problematic areas, such as workshop structure; canon; issues of authenticity and appropriation; and pedagogical clichés (‘write what you know,’ ‘show, don’t tell,’ ‘find your voice’). The volume challenges many areas of the received wisdom that persist in the field, as well as refracting these through the perspectives of voices from outside the traditional poles of English-language scholarship. The book is full of diverse contributions from around the world (from South Africa to Brazil to Finland to Japan) and these decentre historically dominant views and voices in Creative Writing to focus on the connections between teaching practices and issues of identity, culture, and practice. 

The book includes a chapter on writing memoir, 'Scenes of Judgement: Genre and Narrative Form in Literary Memoir,' by Jonathan Taylor of Leicester University. 

You can see more details about the book on the publisher's website here. 

Below, you can read about the editors, and an excerpt from the 'Foreword' of the book. 

Marshall Moore is a Course Leader in English, Creative Writing & Publishing at Falmouth University in the UK. He is the co-editor of this volume. He is the author of several novels and collections of short fiction, the most recent being Inhospitable (Camphor Press, 2018). With Xu Xi, he is the co-editor of the anthology The Queen of Statue Square: New Short Fiction from Hong Kong. His short stories have appeared in Asia Literary Review, The Barcelona Review, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore (QLRS), and many other publications. He holds a PhD in Creative Writing from Aberystwyth University. His website is here.

Sam Meekings is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Northwestern University in Qatar. With Marshall Moore, is the co-editor of this volume. He is the author of Under Fishbone Clouds (called ‘a poetic evocation of the country and its people’ by the New York Times), The Book of Crows, and The Afterlives of Dr Gachet. He has a PhD in Creative Writing from Lancaster University and has taught writing at NYU and the University of Chichester in the UK. His website is here. You can read more about The Afterlives of Dr Gachet on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

From The Place and the Writer

Excerpt from the 'Foreword'

As one might expect from the title, Paul Engle’s landmark essay 'The Writer and the Place,' a meditation on the origins of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, proposes that the school's serene location in the American heartland has an inspiring, enlightening effect upon the students fortunate enough to be accepted to the program. This is not merely to do with the benign atmosphere created by mellow Iowa prairies and the lazy, muddy river running through them. Something greater is at work here: Engle's hypothetical young writer should find that Iowa offers—along with bracing criticism—an alternative to the hubbub of Hollywood and the noise of New York. Freed from big-city distractions, the young writer will have ample time and space to reflect upon their work. Also on offer is community, and Engle suggests this is one of the Workshop's greatest benefits: the company of other young writers with similar dreams, aspirations, and levels of talent creates a unique environment in which the work and the writer may flourish. However, it is the idea of place that propels Engel's thoughts on Iowa's mystique. There is an ineffable combination of solitude and down-home American goodness to be found there, he asserts. A creative singularity. Or an exceptionalism, if we are to view the matter through the lens of today's geopolitics.

While one can today read Engle's essay and appreciate the passion he felt for the program he helped establish and the bucolic location it occupies, a contemporary scholar-practitioner might raise an eyebrow at his assertion that '[w]e do not have that intense concentration of talent in one city, as certainly exists in Paris, London, or Rome, where writers either know each other or know a good deal about each other' (1961: 5). At least in the English-speaking world, New York must surely rival London in terms of literary output. Other North American cities boast respectable literary communities as well: Los Angeles, Toronto, Chicago, San Francisco, New Orleans, Portland, and Vancouver come readily to mind. Yet what remains unquestioned in the essay is the supposition—the article of lore, as it were, or perhaps the myth—that a location offering a combination of beauty, stillness, and cultural virtue is a writer's nirvana. In such a setting, Engle suggests, writerly reflection will lead to the process of self-discovery from which inspired creative ideas will flow.

As expatriate scholars and practitioners, our combined experience both confirms and confronts these notions of place. Moore is from the American South, a region with a strong literary tradition of its own, distinct from that of the country as a whole. Growing up in semi-rural eastern North Carolina, he was keenly aware of the difference that accompanies Southern identity in the United States. However, it took him moving to California for that regional identity to assert itself. Moving out of the country several years later, first to South Korea and then to Hong Kong, he found that the regional distinction mattered somewhat less than it had in the context. Overseas, he was simply American. Meanwhile, Meekings is from the south coast of England, yet it was only when he moved abroad, living and working first in China and then the Middle East, that he began to notice the peculiarities and idiosyncrasies of English and British identity and how these had manifested in his educational experiences. In short, both our international experiences led us to consider the complicated relationship between practice and place and consider what other lores might look like, as well as how and to what extent might cultural beliefs around writers in general manifest in the classroom? This book attempts to answer those questions.

Researching and Writing a Historical Dissertation

By Thilsana Gias

My MA Creative Writing dissertation consisted of the first few chapters of a Young Adult novel set around 1990, during the Sri Lankan Civil War. My protagonist is a teenager who becomes displaced from her hometown (Jaffna).

Naturally, one of the greatest challenges about managing this project was trying to obtain the correct kinds of historical information to progress the writing process. At first I was worried about there not being enough factual information about the war itself to write something that was accurate; but I soon realised that actually names and dates were not really what I should have been focussing on. The facts that I needed were things like brands of drinks that were sold, the names of radio stations operating at the time, types of cultural food, popular hairstyles, the materials used to make garments .... Including this sort of information in the description would make the story more vivid and true to its era.

The best way to obtain these sorts of details is to talk to someone from that place/era or use materials and resources from the era (e.g. letters written into newspapers, diary extracts, accounts from explorers and journalists, etc.). If you can go to the place you are writing about or visit a museum, that might help you construct your descriptions a little better as the labels of artefacts often include things like material names. I also found that analysing photographs of Sri Lanka helped me build an effective picture of the place in my head. But one thing I bore in mind is that sometimes you can easily get misled by your own sources. Here are some examples I came across of this kind of 'betrayal' by my own sources:

• Using current maps to work out travel routes was difficult because the Tsunami and the war itself changed road layouts a lot (because of army checkpoints, etc.)
• When I visited Sri Lanka, I wrote down some village names from the main war-torn areas to use in my writing. I later found out that these places didn't exist in 1990 because they were refugee camps that got converted into villages or they used to be areas of jungle. 
• Environmental destruction changed the perception of things as well. Certain plants and creatures would not have been seen in 1990 because the forest was denser. Some species in present-day Sri Lanka also didn't arrive until a few years after my story was set so I couldn't include them.
• Some products from that era were not actually available during war time because of food shortages/blockades, etc.

The easiest way to avoid encountering these problems, I suppose, is just to invent your own fictitious food brands, plants, villages, etc., or to rely on common objects and things that definitely exist (like elephants!). Sometimes being too specific about certain elements will lead you into inaccuracy. 

Also, your audience might not be familiar with some of the things you are referring to, so providing a glossary of terms is one way of helping them understand the context better. If you're struggling to establish what might need to go in the glossary, ask someone to read through your draft and find words they don't wholly understand.

Writing historical fiction might seem like a daunting task but so long as you're organised and aware of the most obvious pitfalls and misconceptions about the era you're writing about, you should be fine. Actually, the experience of researching for a dissertation based on true events was useful because it gave me a proper insight into what things really bring a story to life. It's very easy to get caught up in the high-octane moments of history and spend ages working out how to depict a Hollywood-style chase scene or an air-raid attack, but sometimes the moments that speak the most are the details that are talked about the least ....

The lingering scent of smoke from a steadily diminishing candle in a power cut. 

The silence of a once-busy street. 

A closed door ....

Sometimes, these are all the specific details you need to make your writing memorable.

About the author
Thilsana Gias is an MA Creative Writing graduate from the University of Leicester. She will start a PGCE in September to teach English in Secondary Schools. She hopes to extend her dissertation into a longer body of work for publication, and is currently wondering when she last watered her houseplants.

Sara Read, "The Gossips' Choice"

Dr Sara Read is a lecturer in English at Loughborough University. Her research area is the cultural representations of women, bodies, and health in the early modern era. Her first monograph was Menstruation and the Female Body in Early Modern England (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), which examined all aspects of female reproductive bleeding, from adolescence to menopause. She has subsequently published widely on matters related to reproduction, including miscarriage and pregnancy. Outside work she spends most of her time running round after her two-year-old granddaughter. The Gossips' Choice is her debut novel, published by Wild Pressed Books. Sara can be contacted on Twitter @saralread 

The Gossips’ Choice: Biofiction with a Twist

By Sara Read

My debut novel, The Gossips’ Choice, is an example of what I later learned is known as a ‘practice-as-research’ creative writing project, whereby a researcher uses her existing research as the point of departure for the fiction, but also uses her research training to add to the context of the story when it is in development. I knew a lot about how people were helped into the world by midwives, but how were people laid to rest in the late seventeenth century? The Gossips’ Choice is anchored in the writings of midwives Jane Sharp (fl. 1671) and Sarah Stone (fl. 1737). It uses some of the cures and practices described by Jane Sharp, the first named English woman to publish a midwifery guide, The Midwives Book, 1671, and the fictionalization of episodes documented Stone’s case notes, published in A Complete Practice of Midwifery, 1737. I use the language and expression of these real-life midwives in the creation of a fictional midwife, Lucie Smith, who is in some ways an amalgam of both women. Nothing is yet known about the biography of Jane Sharp, other than that she tell us she has been a midwife about thirty years, a timeframe she shares with Sarah Stone. More is known about Stone because she includes biographical details in her text, and details from the historical record have fleshed this out a little more: Stone was originally from Somerset where she trained under her own mother, a well-reputed midwife, Mistress Holmes, during a six-year apprenticeship. Sarah Holmes married apothecary Samuel Stone on 29 November 1700 in Bridgewater, and their first child, another Sarah, was baptized on 17 October 1702. 

Taking commonalities such as that both women practised for above 30 years, and were literate and forthright, as the point of departure, I invented a fictional world which allows readers to ‘see’ anew the world of professional women and families they attended in the early modern era. It imagines a world in which midwives Sharp and Stone could have existed, and, in a coincidence that I could not have imagined living through when I was writing the novel, it is set against the backdrop of an epidemic, as plague ravishes the population of England in 1665. So the twist I allude to in the title is that this is bio-fiction as it is based on the lives of real historical figures, but not ones which are present in the text in person. 

Cover of Jane Sharp's The Midwives Book, 1724 edition

Excerpt from The Gossips’ Choice 

As they walked the short distance to the shop, one of the traders, a farmer’s wife from a couple of miles outside the town, grabbed Lucie’s arm.

‘Might I have a moment of your time, Mistress Smith?’ she said. ‘I am with child again and need some advice.’

‘Of course, Goodwife Todd.’ Lucie recognised her as a gossip at the Townshend birth. ‘Why don’t you follow us back to the Three Doves, so I can see you immediately?’

Safely back in her kitchen, Lucie looked at Hannah Todd.

‘Judging by your bigness, I’d say you have but a month to your time. Is that right?’

‘Oh no, I yet want four months, Mistress Smith.’

Lucie was very surprised and asked Hannah to accompany her to her chamber, so that she might touch the woman’s belly while she lay flat on the bed. When Hannah removed her dress, Lucie was shocked at the tightness of the laces on her leather stays. By pinching her in from breasts to navel, her corset was forcing the lower part of her belly to jut out in a way that looked not only unnatural but unhealthy.

‘Why on earth are you laced so tightly?’ Lucie asked.

‘It’s my husband’s mother’s doing. She insists upon it,’ Hannah replied.

‘Damaris? I thought she would have known better.’ Lucie told her this was a great error, and that she ought to allow herself as much liberty as possible.

Hannah was very relieved and said, ‘That sounds like good counsel. I’m sick and faint three or four times a day, and that’s why I wished to consult you.’

Featured Author: Laurie Cusack

Congratulations to Laurie Cusack,who has just successfully completed his PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester. 

Laurie is Leicester-born and his parents hailed from western Ireland. He has recently completed a collection of short stories called The Mad Road about the Irish for his PhD. Cusack’s stories deal with the gritty reality of submerged existence which he portrays in new dark humorous ways. The underbelly of the Irish living in Britain is explored in provocative fashion throughout. His narratives often deal with the politics of the work place and the blood, sweat and tears of the everyday. He has several short stories in print. 'The Bottle and the Trowel' was recently published in the award-winning anthology, High Spirits: A Round of Drinking Stories, edited by Jonathan Taylor and Karen Stevens. Below, you can read an extract taken from that story. The piece deals with a young Irish working man in crisis talking to his hospitalised Irish friend, who is in a coma from an accident that happened through negligence on a construction site in London.


Extract from 'The Bottle and the Trowel'

That smarmy safety officer sidled up to me the other day, Jerry, as I was setting me profiles up. A firm’s man through and through: ‘Look, lad, we all know how you feel. It’s agreed that there was a glitch in McLain’s system, that wasn’t picked-up. Which has now been rectified. New stratagems are being put in to place for the next build. Is that OK, my old son? I don’t think recrimination is the way forward, do you?’

‘Yeah, and my mate’s up shit creek without a paddle. Will ye cop on for feck’s sake!’ I fired back at him.

He stormed off with the huff, ‘You just can’t talk to some people, you’ll never ...’ mutter, mutter, mutter, Jerry. Those yellow fecking jacket boys do your head in, don’t they?

Then a soft union skin came in to the canteen, as I was eating me scran, ‘Look, Lorcan, it’s not worth rocking the boat over this,’ he said, in a hushed sort of a way.

I know they’re shitting their knickers over the Health and Safety Executive’s visit next week, Jerry. They’ve got wind of my bolshie mutterings around site. I should’ve been keeping me head down. Now they’re really pressurising me to sign. What would you do, Jerry?

Hughie Cairns, my old tradesman used to slag our gaffers off to fuck: Mushrooms, that’s all we are to them. They like to keep us in the dark and feed us shit. Mushrooms. Then he’d laugh his head off, Jerry. I learnt stacks from Hughie. Super glue that in to your mind, gosser, he’d say, as we pointed our brickwork up. Hughie would have seen this coming a mile off.

I don’t want them to get away with this, I really don’t, but the way things are ...

MA Creative Writing Dissertation Day

By Lee Wright

On Wednesday 8th May 2019, the first ever "Dissertation Day" took place, as part of the MA in Creative Writing at Leicester. The day included workshops, presentations and roundtable discussions in which everyone shared ideas for projects. The day acted like a taster menu, featuring novels, short stories, poetry collections, non-fiction pieces, and plays. 

The day opened with a guest writing workshop by Sue Dymoke, poet and Reader in Education. This was followed by a presentation by PhD Creative Writing students Dan Powell and Karen Powell, who talked about how they managed and planned long creative research projects. Finally, all the MA students sat around a table and, in turn, spent time talking about their practice, research and explaining what they were trying to achieve in their dissertations. Everyone in the group shared ideas, reading suggestions and practical advice. The lecturers on the Creative Writing programme, Jonathan Taylor, Nick Everett and Kevan Manwaring, were on hand to listen and provide an idea of how students might proceed with their dissertation projects. They recognised that sometimes you need a person to point you in a different direction and say, “Try this other way” - making you think, or see something that wasn’t necessarily clear before. 

The day was an important addition to the course, based around a framework of encouragement. After all, a problem shared is a problem halved.

About the author:
Lee Wright’s short stories, articles and poetry have been published by Fairlight Books, Headstuff.com, The Black Country Arts Foundry, The New Luciad, Peeking Cat Anthology, Newmag and Burning House Press. Lee is in his final year of a part-time MA in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester. 

Call for Participants: Distributed Reader Study of Preclosure in the British Short Story

By Dan Powell

“The End is Nigh!" by Mikey, licensed under CC BY 2.0

Overview:

Preclosure sentences are those sentences within a story, prior to the story’s actual closing sentences where the reader feels the story could end. Preclosural method is an attempt to uncover what endings and the staging of closure can reveal about the cognitive processes experienced when reading a piece of short fiction. My research-led creative project examines how authors of short fiction employ preclosure in their work and investigates how preclosural method might inform the short story writing process.

Aims of this short research study:

• to gather preclosural sentence selection data from multiple readers of four stories
• to discover whether consensus exists between readers regarding the placement of closural sentences and the arrangement of putative stories within given stories.

As a participant in this short project, you will be asked to:

• attend an introductory lecture presentation on ‘preclosure theory’ where you will learn how preclosure theory can be used in textual analysis and as a pedagogical tool. You will discover how the data from this study will be used to help to identify closural staging in the British short story and develop frames for the writer/practitioner of short fiction.
• read four short stories (over a period of four-to-six weeks) – 'Tamagotchi' by Adam Marek; 'The Leafsweeper' by Muriel Spark; 'Markheim' by Robert Louis Stevenson; 'The Death Bed' by Amelia Opie.
• while reading each story you will be asked to identify any sentences prior to the story’s final sentence where you feel the story could end. Each sentence of each story will be numbered to facilitate a quick and easy response and you will only be required to list the number of each sentence you identify in each story on the simple response form provided.
• attend a closing presentation and discussion where the findings from your selections will be delivered. During this session you will have the opportunity to discuss the stories, your response to them, and the preclosural selections made by participants.

Attendance of the introductory session and your participation in the study will provide you with practical experience of and engagement with preclosure theory. Your participation in this project will develop and deepen your understanding of how authors structure narrative and how readers both perceive and interact with that structure. Experience of these ideas and their practical exploration will be of interest to all readers of fiction and useful to all students of narrative arts, in particular those studying literature and creative writing. 

The introductory session will be held on Weds 6 March at 11am in room CW2 BPA, Charles Wilson Second Floor LR Belvoir Park Annexe, University of Leicester, where the information above and other details of the Distributed Reader Study will be discussed to ensure you fully understand the aims and objectives of this short project, the narrative theory behind it, and your role in the gathering of the key data. Distance Learners at University of Leicester and participants from other institutions will be able to access the introductory session and the study materials digitally. 

If you are interested in taking part in this study, please contact Dan Powell: dcp10@leicester.ac.uk

Centre for New Writing Wins Impact Award

By Corinne Fowler

The Centre for New Writing (CNW) has been awarded Best Cultural Impact for its work on literary development. The CNW was established in 2013 as a practical response to the research findings of its founders, particularly in relation to the exclusion of British Black and Asian writers. The aim was to diversify literary voices beyond the metropolitan mainstream.
 
The CNW subsequently raised regional writers’ professional profiles through a series of funded projects: ‘Grassroutes’ (Arts Council), ‘Sole2Soul’ (about Harborough Museum’s shoe exhibit) and ‘Affective Digital Histories' (AHRC, http://affectivedigitalhistories.org.uk/). Our research identified creative commissions as a key support mechanism for promoting  writers outside London. Accordingly, the CNW has commissioned 74 pieces of writing since 2013. Among these are 6 major commissions for the Affective Digital Histories project, performed at The Phoenix, soon afterwards published as a book and accompanying smartphone app called Hidden Stories (2015). Two CNW commissions have won literary awards and another CNW-commissioned work is being made into a film. A further CNW commission is the subject of an article (authored by Corinne Fowler) in The Cambridge Companion to Black British Writing (2016) of which the writer SuAndi states ‘with steadfast determination, champions of the Black British voice … have stepped forward [to] recognise the value of our literature across all genres’.

A central CNW strategy has been to tap into infrastructural support for regional writers by using creative writing to enhance non-Arts research. As the managing director of the spoken word organisation Tilt observes, the Writing and Research initiative ‘makes a case for literature …This is something to be admired (and sustained).’ Some key collaborations include: ‘Women’s Writing in the Midlands’ (using creative writing to raise awareness of 18th women activists) and ‘Life Cycles’ (a commission to help the Diabetes Research Centre combat sedentary behaviour). A further CNW commission, ‘Artificial Intelligence,’ promotes the public benefits of new technologies. The CNW also commissioned a writer to produce a script for a short film, presented by Brett Matulis from Geography, to influence policy-making at the World Conservation Congress, a global environmental forum. In a 2015 survey of the region’s literary scene by The Asian Writer, anonymous respondents said of the CNW: ‘The Centre for New Writing is … leading the country and perhaps the world in its field, presenting a tremendous variety of literary events with an enormous scope and revolutionary discourse.’ Another respondent said: ‘Leicester is practically undergoing a renaissance! It has been galvanised by the Centre for New Writing ... as the centre has supported writers and the overall literary scene both page and stage’”. The free Literary Leicester Festival has been central to this strategy.

The CNW wishes to thank Leicester's literary community, and all its partners, for their consistently brilliant and constructive input.

 

Photos courtesy of Osborne Hollis Photography