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I’m at Peralta again, tutoring a residential writing course. Ten people, mainly from England and America have come to spend a week eating Tuscan food, drinking Tuscan wine and spending blissful free time just writing. They are all eager, passionate, all with different reasons for being here, but a common ambition - to put words down on paper and pick up as many tips as they can from professional authors.
My co-tutor is Mary-Rose Hayes, a British novelist who lives and publishes in America. She also teaches fiction at the University of Arizona. It’s an interesting combination, but I’m discovering that creative writing is taught in much the same way on both sides of the Atlantic. My approach is looser and more concerned with motivation and inspiration, sharing rather than 'teaching', but we both have the same respect for the ‘tools of the trade’ - narrative technique, the structuring of a plot, the creation of vivid characters.
Today I’m doing a workshop on life-writing, and it’s interesting for me to have to reflect on and analyse what I do for a living. My love of biography is easy to explain - I’m fascinated by people’s lives. But autobiography - or ‘Me-moir’ - is something I’ve always shied away from. Writing a blog is the nearest I’ve come to writing about ‘me’.
I know that I should - my grandfather wrote about his Irish family, passing on stories from far back into the 19th century, as well as keeping a World War I diary until he was blown up at Ypres and invalided home. Back in England, as a war hero, permanently disabled, he found it difficult to settle. Eventually he married my grandmother - another Irish immigrant family - and their first home was a small two room cottage in the old workhouse.
My father, when he came to write his memories down, wrote vividly about the elderly inmates, remnants of the old system, who stayed there until they died and the workhouse was bulldozed to the ground.
So I know I should be continuing this tradition of family history. One day, I keep telling myself, one day .... But maybe I should start soon? And why this reluctance to write the ‘I’ word?
My co-tutor is Mary-Rose Hayes, a British novelist who lives and publishes in America. She also teaches fiction at the University of Arizona. It’s an interesting combination, but I’m discovering that creative writing is taught in much the same way on both sides of the Atlantic. My approach is looser and more concerned with motivation and inspiration, sharing rather than 'teaching', but we both have the same respect for the ‘tools of the trade’ - narrative technique, the structuring of a plot, the creation of vivid characters.
Today I’m doing a workshop on life-writing, and it’s interesting for me to have to reflect on and analyse what I do for a living. My love of biography is easy to explain - I’m fascinated by people’s lives. But autobiography - or ‘Me-moir’ - is something I’ve always shied away from. Writing a blog is the nearest I’ve come to writing about ‘me’.
I know that I should - my grandfather wrote about his Irish family, passing on stories from far back into the 19th century, as well as keeping a World War I diary until he was blown up at Ypres and invalided home. Back in England, as a war hero, permanently disabled, he found it difficult to settle. Eventually he married my grandmother - another Irish immigrant family - and their first home was a small two room cottage in the old workhouse.
My father, when he came to write his memories down, wrote vividly about the elderly inmates, remnants of the old system, who stayed there until they died and the workhouse was bulldozed to the ground.
So I know I should be continuing this tradition of family history. One day, I keep telling myself, one day .... But maybe I should start soon? And why this reluctance to write the ‘I’ word?
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