Five creative writing courses to get your creative juices flowing
Pic: Lisa Fotios/Pexels
- Creativewriting.ie (online)
- Starts Wednesday November 4, 2020
- €130
- Beginners
Designed for complete novices to the world of creative writing, Creative Writing Ink’s email-driven beginner’s course is perfect for making a start on your budding writing routine, or for lapsed scribes coming back to the pursuit.
Rather than work over online video streaming or Zoom calls, the course is carried out through email correspondence, so class notes, while a bit more detailed than usual, can be read whenever suits, with weekly notes and assignments over the course of six weeks.
Tutor Doreen Duffy will read each assignment and provide written feedback: having studied creative writing online herself with Oxford University, as well as in UCD and NUI Maynooth, she’s no stranger to approaching writing as a learner, while her body of work includes appearances in Flash Fiction Magazine (USA), Live Encounters (Indonesia), The Incubator Journal, Woman’s Way and The Irish Times.
- Irish Writer’s Centre (online)
- Starts Wednesday October 14, 2020
- €165
- Beginners/Intermediate
Burgeoning verse-writers will do well to take a look at this six-week course led by poetry veteran Enda Wyley, taught online. Learners will be guided through poems by established writers, as a prompt to get you into your own poetry headspace, Simple writing prompts will also be given in class, with the aim of getting into the routine of writing on a regular basis, and to create new poems. There will be no pressure on anyone to share new work in the sessions, says Wyley – but if you’re willing to share, this course will be a warm house for your first outings.
Longtime admirers of poetry will be familiar with Aosdána member Wyley: she’s published six collections of poetry – most recently The Painter on his Bike, via Dedalus Press last year. Accolades include The Vincent Buckley Poetry Prize, Melbourne University, and she has been widely broadcast, translated and anthologised, including in The Harvard Anthology of Modern Irish Poetry.
- CreativeWriting.ie (online)
- Starts Wednesday November 4, 2020
- €150
- Intermediate
Picking up where Creative Writing Ink’s beginner’s course leaves off, Intermediate Creative Writing continues on an email-driven model, the perfect antidote for those of us thoroughly Zoomed out of it.
Plunging headfirst into further detail, this course examines more involved aspects of creative writing, from character creation and story structure, to the implementation of emotion and expression in narrative.
Picking up the mantle for progressing writers is Kerry Hadley-Pryce. Her first novel, The Black Country, published by Salt Publishing in 2015, was part of her MA Creative Writing, for which she gained a distinction and was awarded the Michael Schmidt Prize for Outstanding Achievement 2013–14, before follow-up novel Gamble also impressed, including a shortlisting for the Encore Second Novel prize.
- Irish Writers’ Centre (online)
- Starts Monday November 2, 2020
- €165
- Beginners/Intermediate
Over the course of six weeks, ‘On Writing Home’ caters specifically for writers discussing their homeland while presently or formerly living abroad - speaking to the emigrant experience and channeling the learner’s own experiences into narrative, style, characterisation and aspects of the craft.
Each participant should send up to 3,000 words of fiction or non-fiction to be workshopped, including a brief synopsis for context, while workshops will go through submitted work with reference to a selection of standout literary works.
Born in Baltimore, Maryland and resident in Barcelona, Spain, tutor Madeline Beach Carey is the author of the story collection Les filles dels altres. Her essays and stories have appeared in speciality publications El Món d’Ahir, de/rail, The Alameda, The Sultan’s Seal, and RIC Journal.
- Irish Writers’ Centre (online)
- Starts Thursday November 5, 2020
- €350
- Advanced/Published
If perhaps you’re a published writer, or a writer on the brink of something new in terms of longform storytelling, the Irish Writers’ Centre is providing a special course with award-winning novelist Belinda McKeon.
This course will take skilled writers through the possibilities of early drafting, taking on ideas as they come, and looking toward shaping them into a finished product; “looking at story and backstory, voice and interiority, context and subtext, and at the formal and stylistic decisions which will bring a piece of fiction to its most powerful shape”, according to the course outline.
McKeon is the author of the novels Solace and Tender, which won and were nominated for awards including the Irish Book of the Year 2011, and the Encore Prize 2016. Her short fiction has been published in several anthologies and journals, including literary magazine Granta and Being Various: Faber New Irish Stories, while her experience in teaching fiction at Rutgers University in New Jersey will more than stand to participants.
