Creative Writing: Life Writing

This course involves reading extracts from published life writing, generating your own responses to autobiographical angles using a range of stimulating writing prompts and discussing your memoir essays in the confidential space of the weekly seminars. You will be expected to upload weekly life writing in advance each week for tutor feedback and to share this writing aloud in the online class time. The weekly sessions give you a community of writers who are all mining their memories for in varying degrees: self-knowledge, healing, artistic structure and commercial output.

We will be exploring writing that is beautifully fluent, not a rant; that delves deep into the past and finds repeated patterns and causes; that has a mission in persuading readers in different ways, be it to overcoming and perseverance, to acceptance and endurance, or to effect change and reform.

There is a range of issues and themes life writing can embrace. Whether your main story is one of bereavement, illness, transgenerational trauma or injustice, at some point resilience and some form of recovery become a new chapter. Ultimately, all life writing is about glimpses of insight and about love in its many forms.