I.M. Sue Dymoke (1962-2023)

 

It is with great sadness that we have to report that Sue Dymoke, poet, lecturer, educator and researcher, died on 13 June 2023, after a long illness. 

Sue was Associate Professor of Education at Nottingham Trent University, and previously, for many years, Reader in Education at the University of Leicester. She was a well-known and well-loved figure on the literary scene, in universities, schools and the wider community, both in the East Midlands and nationally. She gave a fantastic guest masterclass on the MA in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester in 2019.

Sue wrote widely on the role of poetry in education, and was herself a wonderful poet. Her books include three poetry collections with Shoestring Press, including most recently What They Left Behind. She was co-editor of Making Poetry Happen: Transforming the Poetry Classroom and Making Poetry Matter: International Research on Poetry Pedagogy, and author of Drafting and Assessing Poetry. Sue regularly gave readings and talks across the UK and beyond.  

Sue was an inspirational teacher, a brilliant poet and a wonderful colleague and friend. She will be greatly missed. A few days before she died, she celebrated her civil partnership with her long-term partner, the novelist David Belbin. 

You can read a short article by Sue on Creative Writing at Leicester here. Below, you can watch a film by Rebecca Goldsmith, featuring a poem by Sue, "Roaming Range."

Our Future Storytellers: A Creative and Critical Writing Course

By Amirah Mohiddin

 

Over the past two years, I’ve worked as a tutor on several placements with The Brilliant Club, an organisation devoted to supporting less advantaged students to access higher education. More specifically, I have taught on The Scholars Programme, a programme designed for PhD students to share their subject knowledge to a small group of students to help them develop key skills, gain knowledge and the confidence to pursue higher education. The programme is structured around seven tutorials taught online or within schools alongside an opening and graduation ceremony at university. 

My PhD practice-based research interrogates on female storytelling as a form of salvation and heroism in Arabic literature with the aim of reconstructing formidable and empowering storytellers in a Young Adult fantasy novel. I was given the wonderful opportunity to design a Creative Writing course inspired by my PhD project. I called it ‘Our Future Storytellers: Reviving Old, Traditional, Classic Stories in a contemporary Form’ due to my hopes that it will serve as a starting point for future writers. 

During my time at each placement, I teach a university-style course to KS4 students for several-weeks at a time combining workshop and seminar-style methods. The course challenges and encourages the students to analyse Arabic literature as a springboard and interrogate elements of craft to hone their own Creative Writing. Further to this, the students are encouraged to reflect on their inspirations and the elements of craft they have used in their writing. At the end of the course, the students often have workshopped several or one enduring piece of writing to then use towards their final assignments which are marked on a university scale. Assessment marking follows three principal criteria: Subject Knowledge, Critical Thinking and Written Communication. 

It’s been a real pleasure to see students motivated, growing confident in their writing, and deepening their awareness as they hone their craft as the course progresses. It is especially rewarding to see the spark of inspiration and passion that the students carry forward to their final assignments, constantly striving to improve their creative pieces and understand their critical pieces. So many students grow in confidence and gain pride over the course and it’s so moving for me to see this reflected in their final assignments. 

My time on The Scholars Programme with The Brilliant Club has been invaluable. I’ve developed many skills and my motivation towards my own creative practice has been bolstered and renewed watching my students grow and enjoy themselves along the way. I initially titled my course ‘Our Future Storytellers’ because of my hopes for my students to grow as writers. It has been incredibly affirming to see that aspiration become a reality as my students continue to thrive with their new-found confidence. 

About the author

Amirah Mohiddin is a writer, a third-year PhD student in Creative Writing and a tutor with The Brilliant Club teaching her self-designed Creative Writing course ‘Our Future Storytellers.’ Her PhD research focuses on female storytelling as a form of salvation and heroism in Arabic literature with the aim of reconstructing formidable and empowering storytellers in a YA fantasy novel. Her short stories have been published in magazines, ebooks and physical books, including Dancing Bear Books, Litro Magazine, Post-mortem Press, The New Luciad and Sanroo Publishing. You can read more about Amirah's PhD on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

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.

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.