Rough Draft in Leicester

Here (below) is information from the organisers of "Rough Draft," a bi-monthly event for writers held in Leicester. MA Creative Writing student Anna Walsh says of the event: "I enjoy trying out my new writing at Rough Draft. It's such a supportive setting for connecting with other Creatives and getting feedback on developing ideas."

We love new stuff. We can’t get enough of it. From gut-wrenching theatre to side-splitting comedy, melodic music to punchy poetry, and all those arty bits in between, we love seeing all the new and exciting things that fall out of those creative brains. But more often than not, the first stumbling block when making something new is getting it seen, finding out if it works, and finding people to help you make it.

Enter Rough Draft. Put together by a handful of Leicester creatives, Rough Draft is a platform for artists to do just that.

Once every two months we hold our scratch nights, and programme three artists who each get fifteen minutes to share their work, be that script in hand or something more polished. We then chat with the audience, ask questions, get answers (or we have paper forms too).

Rough Draft is free to attend and open to all. If you would like to be involved, come along to one of the nights and chat to our team, or pop us an email at roughdraft.le@gmail.com

We'll be changing things up in 2025 by hosting our nights every other month! We'll be kicking off in January with our Leicester Comedy Festival Special and then we'll be back with you in March - which is already fully booked by the way. 

If you're working on anything new and would like constructive feedback from a supportive audience of peers, we next have availability at our May night - So get in touch to book your spot! Our upcoming nights are January 28th, March 25th, May 27th 2025. 

Find out more on our Facebook page 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. 

Jackie Wills, "On Poetry: Reading, Writing & Working with Poems"

Jackie Wills has worked for newspapers, magazines and several universities. A former journalist, she’s also worked in business, schools, arts and community organisations, including Unilever, London Underground, Shoreham Airport, the Surrey Hills, the London Symphony Orchestra and Aldeburgh Poetry Festival. She has been a Royal Literary Fund Fellow and run reading groups.

Over three decades, Wills has organised live poetry events and mentored many emerging writers, consolidating her experience in The Workshop Handbook for Writers (Arc, 2016). Her poems feature in several anthologies including Writing Motherhood (Seren, 2017) and Poems of the Decade: An Anthology of the Forward Books of Poetry (Forward Arts Foundation, 2015). Wills has collaborated over many years with visual artist Jane Fordham.

About On Poetry: Reading, Writing & Working with Poems, by Jackie Wills

We begin with a drive to write something that’s never been said before, to protest, to offload, to challenge or catch the zeitgeist. We imagine we write like the poets we admire. Slowly we learn the craft, understanding eventually that a writer’s indentured for life.

Drawing on decades of experience as a poet and tutor, this compelling book is part hands-on guide and part reflection on ways that poetry can make a difference to how we live. It is also a survey of many varied and inspirational writers, especially women poets, especially from the end of the twentieth century. Jackie Wills is herself a brilliantly insightful poets; and, as the sections on writing workshops show, she is also an outstanding teacher. The final section of this unique book offers starting points and resources that will prove essential for new and experienced poets alike.

You can see more details about On Poetry on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read a short excerpt from the Introduction. 

From On Poetry

In the decade I was a mother with young children I bought a calendar with a quote from a poem for each of the 365 days to come. Sometimes reading a couple of lines was about all I could manage but it meant that in the middle of making breakfast, finding shoes under the sofa, combing hair and packing up lunches, I’d hear Emily Dickinson speaking to me from another century and she’d set off a line of thought that walked with me up the hill and down to their primary school. I was juggling writing with earning a living and bringing up children, was often exhausted, but even so, those lines attached to dates were reminders of how lucky I was, and still am, to have the means to read, write, publish. In the old-fashioned way, I stuck some into an exercise book and my homemade anthology lives on a shelf next to my desk holding its pinpricks of thought.

For more than 20 years I’ve sat with groups of people at different stages of their writing lives, experiencing the liberation of metaphor – a child realising they can find words for the other worlds in their head, a man or woman released from the constraints of caring, illness or addiction, from fear of the past and the future, from the demands of work, for an hour or so by listening to a poem and writing their own. Poetry allowed me to do this. And when I read for myself, sometimes flicking through an anthology, sometimes concentrating on a collection for a book group, I am in awe of human invention.

When I began to earn a living running writing workshops, this work kept me reading widely, looking for new poets or poems to use as examples. It focused me on form, on what worked in a poem and it helped me understand how we use the tools of metaphor and language. I used model poems in writing exercises because a mechanic learns to put an engine together by taking it apart. I remembered a big old engine from my Morris Traveller suspended out of its rightful place when the head gasket blew. A poem has to be oily and heavy too. When I embarked on this work, though, I realised how little I’d read. I’ve come to terms with never catching up, but pledged to stretch as a reader. It’s humbling to face this truth about yourself, that however much you think you’ve read, it’s not enough. The flipside is to enjoy the many different ways people express the world, and to accept that there’s some writing you’ll get on with and some you’ll dislike.

Nicholas Royle, "White Spines"

 

Nicholas Royle is the author of four short story collections – Mortality, Ornithology, The Dummy and Other Uncanny Stories and London Gothic – and seven novels, including Counterparts, Antwerp and First Novel. He has edited more than twenty anthologies and is series editor of Best British Short Stories. He runs Nightjar Press, which publishes original short stories as signed, numbered chapbooks, and is head judge of the Manchester Fiction Prize. His English translation of Vincent de Swarte’s 1998 novel Pharricide is published by Confingo Publishing. He lives between London and Manchester and teaches creative writing at Manchester Metropolitan University.  For more information visit: @NicholasRoyle http://www.nicholasroyle.com/   

About White Spines

A mix of memoir and narrative non-fiction, White Spines is a book about Nicholas Royle’s passion for Picador’s fiction and non-fiction publishing from the 1970s to the end of the 1990s, when the publisher stopped its commitment to the distinctive white spine with black lettering.   

White Spines explores the bookshops and charity shops, the books themselves, and the way a unique collection grew and became a literary obsession. Above all, it is a love song to books, writers and writing.

You can find out more about White Spines on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the book. 

From White Spines, by Nicholas Royle

I have a sense that Clarendon Books, around the corner on Clarendon Park Road, could be the highlight of my afternoon and, indeed, when I get there the signs are good. In one of the boxes outside is a copy, albeit in poor condition, of Christopher Kenworthy’s short story collection Will You Hold Me? I’ve known Chris as long as I knew Graham Joyce, since the late 1980s. He has lived in Australia for many years now. His collection contains some of my favourite short stories. They are as affecting as they are odd. ‘Odd,’ in my opinion, or in this context anyway, is an entirely positive descriptor.

As I push open the door of Clarendon Books, the carpet beneath it rucks up. I poke my head around a pile of books and apologise to the proprietor. ‘It’s been happening all day,’ he tells me. Clarendon Books is similar to Tin Drum Books, although with more books crammed into less space. I find a Picador by John Cowper Powys that I don’t have – Weymouth Sands. When I get it home it will join five others of his books and the six of them will account for an impressive nine inches of shelf space. Cowper Powys, a writer of unusually long books, died the year I was born, our lives overlapping for only three months. It says on the back of Weymouth Sands, ‘… the stones of Chesil Beach are as much characters as the human beings.’ Some might have said something similar of a more recent novel by another author.

I reach, breathlessly, for what looks like an early Picador. It’s Peter Wahloo’s The Lorry, one of the first eight, which I don’t have and have never even seen. I look at the cover, which, when I get it home, will be one of only two Picador covers in my collection to feature the work of Salvador Dalí, the other being the artist’s own and only novel, Hidden Faces. Gingerly I open The Lorry to the flyleaf, expecting its scarcity to be reflected in the price, but it’s actually cheaper than the other books I’ve selected. I take four books to the till and remove a £10 note from my wallet that I hope will cover the cost (I should really be able to add four prices together in the time it takes to reach the till from any position in Clarendon Books). ‘Let’s call it £8,’ says the man. ‘Thank you very much,’ I say as a feeling of warmth similar to the one I had in Tin Drum Books starts to suffuse my entire being. I leave the shop and, as I walk back to Queen’s Road, I tot up what the books should have come to – £8.05 ...

Wyl Menmuir, "Fox Fires"

Wyl Menmuir is a novelist, editor and literary consultant based in Cornwall. He is the author of the Man-Booker nominated novel and Observer Best Fiction of the year pick, The Many, and Fox Fires. His short fiction has appeared in Best British Short Stories and he has been published by Nightjar Press, Kneehigh Theatre and the National Trust. He has written for Radio 4’s Open Book, The Guardian and The Observer, and is a regular contributor to the journal Elementum. Born in Stockport in 1979, Wyl now lives in Cornwall with his wife and two children. He is co-creator of the Cornish writing centre, The Writers’ Block, and works with Arvon Foundation, National Literacy Trust and Centre for Literacy in Primary Education on national literacy programmes, as well as Lecturer in Creative Writing at Falmouth University. His website is here.

About Fox Fires

Wren Lithgow has followed her concert pianist mother around the cities of Europe for almost two decades. When they arrive in the mysterious city-state of O, where Wren was conceived during a time of civil war, she resolves to find man she believes is her father.

As the city closes in around her, Wren gives herself over to a place of which she understands nothing, but to which she feels a profound connection, in a story of the watchers and the watched, the ways in which we conceive of home and, finally, the possibility of living on our own terms.

From Fox Fires

Here, you can watch a special reading of the opening scene by twenty novelists, poets and short story writers:

Everybody's Reviewing Passes 100,000 views

Everybody's Reviewing, the review blog run by the Centre for New Writing at the University of Leicester, has just passed 100,000 views! Its huge readership includes people from the East Midlands region, the UK and internationally. 

The site was set up in 2014, in conjunction with Everybody's Reading Festival in Leicester, aiming to provide a space for readers to share their enthusiasms. It's a democratic review website, where readers of all ages and experience can share positive reviews of books or events they have enjoyed. 

Since 2014, it has gone from strength to strength. It has published 100s of reviews.  It has provided a forum for 100s of new and experienced reviewers to publish their reviews. It has helped showcase commercially-published, independently-published and self-published books, as well as exhibitions and performances, by new, up-and-coming and established writers. There have been numerous guest editors, gaining work experience in editing and website curation.  

If you'd like to get involved with Everybody's Reviewing, you can read more about it, and find contact details here. 

Congratulations to all - readers, reviewers, authors, editors alike - on reaching this major landmark! 

The Dream I Held in My Hands

By Karen Argent

In October 2017 The Letterpress Project, a not-for-profit initiative that promotes the importance of the printed book, lost one of its founder members, the wonderful Jane Slowey. She died from a disease that she had fought off once but couldn’t keep at bay a second time, and she died far too young. 

As she had always brought her keen enthusiasm and skills to the project, we wanted to publish a tribute to Jane’s ability to inspire those she met. We asked people to honour her memory by thinking about which books had inspired their imaginations – and the response was exceptional. The result was an anthology of short pieces about reading called The Dream I Held in My Hands: Dedicated to the Memory of Jane Slowey.

The beautifully illustrated book is available as a free pdf from The Letterpress Project website here, and is also available as a limited printed publication by request. Please contact karen [dot] argent [at] btinternet [dot] com for further details.

Below you can read one of the essays from the book. 

An Enchantment: The Book That Made Me a Reader

By Leila Rasheed

I still have the book. I hold it in my forty-year-old hand, and the ghost of my seven-year-old hand holds it too: an enchantment, like those padlocks on bridges that mean two lovers clasp each other, hand in hand, forever. In 1980s Benghazi, where I grew up, there were no shops, or very few – a baker, a butcher, the souk, and one vast, concrete department store that had nothing inside it but a sack of flour, leaking and weevil-ridden on a pallet. Libya had its own enchantments, curses and hauntings, but for books we had to migrate. I would guess we bought this particular book at Galt or Early Learning, during one of our summer journeys back to England.

I’ll put it down here, so you can see it properly. The first thing you’ll note is the fragility. The pages are weathered yellow, and it comes in chunks, this book; sections splitting off from an osteoporotic spine from which the glue has long ago perished. The spine has been Sellotaped and re-Sellotaped until the tape shatters at the touch. Love spells sometimes look like this: like a padlock on a bridge, or an unskilled repair. Spells to keep things, like people, from coming apart. 

With a title like The Puffin Book of Magic Verse, you would expect a dark cover. But the cover is nothing as obvious as black. It’s deep purple, the colour of a Libyan-grown aubergine, burnished by a diet of sun. And now the other magic flickers into life, the magic fire of illustrations. This book may have made me a reader, but it was never just the words that did that. Look at the head on the cover. It must belong to a child, but what a child! The offspring of the Medusa and the Green Man - hair bristling thick with leaves, owls, cats, witches. Genderless, the face doesn’t look directly at the reader, but off to one side. The child’s eyes and mouth are a little open, not in glee or rage, but in wonder. As if it has just seen something astonishing - and this, mark you, when it, itself, is the strangest thing that any reader could ever have seen. From the very cover, the book isn’t inviting you to read it. It isn’t daring you to read it. Like the master magician’s spell book, it is just there, and you reading it or not is a matter of indifference to it. What child wouldn’t open a book on these tempting terms? What are you looking at? Can I come with you? 

Open the book, then, and step in. Immediately you are falling into poems, like Alice down the rabbit hole, woozy, twisting, slow and dreamlike. When you find your feet, the floor staggers, tilts you forward. The whole book is on the slant. It leads you onwards, draws you in, down long galleries of verse, past images that shine like stained glass windows. Through section after section; doors in a house haunted by poetry: Charms, Ghosts and Hauntings, Curses, and Changelings. Poem after poem enchants, provokes, intrigues, just like the shy, uncanny creatures on the cover that crept for protection into the accepting, warm and non-judgemental wild mind of a child.

Poetry, like lightning, isn’t meant to be grounded, but an anthology like this can act as a conductor. A stroll through the index of first lines demonstrates the range of poems included, from rattling, runaway comic verse - The Resident Djinn" and Colonel Fazackerly Butterworth Toast are two characters that will stay with me forever - to this tiny, unforgettable gem (translated from a Native American language, and presented, as was sadly common at the time of publication, without context) in the voice of a ghost:

          My friend

          this is a wide world we are travelling over

          walking on the moonlight

What all these poems, regardless of form or origin, have in common is that they describe, evoke or embody the mysterious and wonderful. This is a collection that honours the strange, that is wide and unwavering of gaze. Perhaps it could only have been produced in the 1970s, and by a poet of genius – Charles Causley - who was unafraid of childhood.

When we finally closed the wardrobe door on Libya, we gave away most of our toys and packed all our favourite books in our two suitcases. At that time, due to the political situation, there were no direct flights from Libya to the UK. We landed in Malta and changed to another airline. When we took off from Malta, most of our suitcases stayed where they were, with the books inside them. I arrived in Birmingham scattered; trailing words, like feathers, across the wide blue Mediterranean. My books, gone: my world, gone. I would spend a lifetime trying to find that lost world again, seeking pieces of my childhood like Isis looking for her love, through second-hand bookshops and later, online. The Puffin Book of Magic Verse was in the one suitcase that survived the journey.

It’s hard to know, if the rest of my books had made it through, whether The Puffin Book of Magic Verse would have been so important to me. Perhaps I would have taken the presence of books for granted. As it stands, it is one of the very few things – books or otherwise - I have from my childhood. It haunts me.

When I was young, I used to like to imagine that I would be buried with my books, so we’d biodegrade together, and archaeologists of the future wouldn’t be able to tell the ink from the flesh. Now I’m older, I think that’s a bit morbid, and I know how much burial plots cost. All the same, those pages are yellow with my handling. I have put myself into that book just as it has put itself into me. Bridges and love spells may rust and crumble, but a book can go all the way with you, holding your hand. 

Invitation to Joint Book Launch

You are cordially invited to a joint book launch on Wednesday 17 October 2018, from 6.30pm at the Exchange Bar in Leicester, LE1 1RD. Everyone is welcome, and the event is free. 

The event will celebrate the launch of two new books, both published this year by Shoestring Press, and both by lecturers at the University of Leicester - Sue Dymoke and Jonathan Taylor. 

What They Left Behind is Sue Dymoke’s third Shoestring Press collection after Moon at the Park and Ride (2012) and The New Girls – New and Selected Poems (2004). Sue is a Reader in Education at the University of Leicester. 

Jonathan Taylor's Cassandra Complex is a collection of poems, found poems, found translations, mis-translations, prophecies, pseudo-prophecies, apocalyptic visions and moments of retroactive clairvoyance. Jonathan directs the MA in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester.

If you are on Facebook, you can see the Facebook event here. If you would like further details about the event, please email Jonathan at the address shown on the poster above.

Hope to see you there!

3 Guest Speakers in Week 3

By Charis Buckingham

Leicester University welcomed three guest speakers this week to discuss various applications of Creating Writing: journalism, authorship and publishing.

On Monday, we heard from campaigning journalist Emma Howard. A previous graduate of the university, Emma has worked for The Guardian and currently writes for Unearthed, an investigative news platform launched by Greenpeace. Emma directed her talk primarily to those considering journalism, with the aim of providing information she wished she’d known. Topics ranging from on-the-desk stresses, her goal as a journalist and how influential the media can be; she held nothing back. She discussed not only her successes, but her mistakes along the way. It was open, honest, and utterly compelling.

On Tuesday, novelist Mahsuda Snaith gave a guest talk and reading. Mahsuda is a Leicester-based author, whose debut novel, The Things We Thought We Knew, was published in June 2017. She discussed her writing processes, her experience with editors, and, excitingly, read from her novel. Her advice was fascinating – she highlighted the importance of feedback, both online and from writers’ clubs, the necessity of being critical of your work, and assorted editing tips. For anyone looking to write or complete a novel, this talk was a must-see.

Cecilia Bennett from Sweet Cherry Publishing provided a very different insight into the creative world. Rather than being a writer herself, she edits others' books; and as Managing Editor of the company, she helps to decide which books are selected to be published. Much of the talk, therefore, focused on what Sweet Cherry Publishing looks for in books, the roles of the different publishing departments, and the things that authors should think about before submitting their work. Cecilia Bennett did a fantastic job of addressing the many different aspects and stages of publishing, and her passion for working with authors and putting their work into the world really shone through. The talk was a fitting end to a superb week. 


About the writer
Charis Buckingham is an aspiring novelist, and is studying for an MA in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester.

Reading in Loughborough Library

All welcome! At Loughborough Library, 7pm Tuesday 25 April: Four Authors, Kerry Hadley-Pryce, Deborah Tyler-Bennett, Maria Taylor and myself, will be reading from and talking about their novels and poetry. Booking details are on the poster, and there's a Facebook event here.