Guests & Readers
Andy Brown, Lulah Ellender, Julie Evans, Peter Fiennes, David Gange, Kari Gillespie, Genevieve Grant-Thompson, Beth Miller, Jacq Molloy, Jane Puddicombe & Monica Suswin
Workshops
Getting Started with Creative Non-Fiction
10:30am-12:00pm
Jacq Molloy
In this workshop we’ll discuss the bones of Creative Non-Fiction writing and look at some of the forms, like the personal or lyrical essay, memoir, biography and the journal article. Creative Non-Fiction is a capacious form, open to invention: a fusion of styles which is part of its attraction. The one rule is the truth cannot be dishonoured. We will explore how to tell true stories making full use of creative writing techniques. The goal is to make creative non-fiction as compelling as any fictional story.
Read To Me, Giving Voice to Your Work
11:15am-12:00pm
Genevieve Grant-Thompson
In this workshop, we will work together to discover and practice some ways for you to read your work out so that your audience – your readers – can receive the work as you intended. Once you’ve achieved your well-wrought words, you may face the challenge of sharing your writing aloud. Many of us don’t really understand what it is that allows an audience to really hear our work. Our nervousness and misplaced concerns can kill the joy of speaking and the joy, for others, of listening to us. Allow me to walk you into the practice of giving your voice to your work. Join us as we play with the reality of embodied speaking, and the possibilities of crafting your reading voice.
Writing for Wellbeing, An Exploration
13:45-14:45pm
Monica Suswin
This workshop will introduce the ideas behind creative and therapeutic writing. Writing for your own wellbeing can be adapted to suit both factual and fictional writing. We will engage with practical exercises, involving writing and sharing with a wind-up of discussion and maybe some brief reading aloud. These exercises will demonstrate a process that will address both difficult and positive feelings and explore how fictional devices may be used for personal narratives – yet stay true to the emotional input of writing. There will be writing, sharing and discussion in this taster session.
Masterclasses
Masterclasses are ticketed separately. Book early as these tend to sell out.
Prose Masterclass: Writing Sizzling Sex Scenes
14:00-16:00pm
Beth Miller
There’s more to sex in books than Fifty Shades. Most contemporary novels have at least one sex scene; readers and publishers may even expect them. Reviewers have said of the sex scenes in Beth Miller’s novels that they are ‘delightfully filthy’, and ‘seemed to be written by a horny teen.’ Drawing on the experience of writing those, as well as her previous experience as a sexual health trainer, she will walk you through writing your own. If you’ve already written one that you’d like to revise, please bring it along. Giggling, blushing, and terrible double-entendres are likely to be part of this workshop.
Poetry Masterclass: Poetry & Life Writing
17:00-18:30pm
Andy Brown
How have writers used short prose poem anecdotes to capture fragments of experience or, as Heaney called them “spots of time”…. those revelatory moments in which life changes, or a door opens momentarily onto a space of mystery and revelation. Verse poems, of course, deal with memory and experience in a different way, using rhetorical techniques and patterns and creating implied narrative through ellipsis and suggestion. We will read examples and experiment with both forms of writing.
Surrey New Writers Festival 