Short Course: Writing Place: Telling Stories of Home and Landscape with George Eliot

Wednesdays, 6.30pm to 8.30pm, on 6, 13, 20 and 27 November and 4 December 2019

Birmingham and Midland Institute

PLEASE NOTE CHANGE OF DAY: THIS COURSE WILL NOW MEET ON WEDNESDAYS

How can our writing communicate a sense of home and belonging or bring to life a place that readers have never seen? This short course will offer writers based in the Midlands the opportunity to craft their skills in evoking settings – whether imagined, remembered, or the everyday.

The course draws on the radical example of the nineteenth-century writer, George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans), born two hundred years ago in North Warwickshire, to explore what it means to write in or about the Midlands now.

Works by course participants may be featured as part of the George Eliot bicentenary celebrations in 2019, with follow-on opportunities for publication.

This course is designed for emerging writers who are looking to develop their work further.

Biography: 

The course will be led by Anna Lawrence, with Ruth Livesey.

Anna teaches creative writing at Birmingham City University, and is particularly interested in how places shapes the experience of people living there, and the interaction of the magical and the mundane. Her novel Ruby’s Spoon is set in a fictional Black Country town where witches and mermaids may (or may not) reside.

Ruth Livesey is an Arts and Humanities Research Leadership Fellow 2019-20 and works at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her current Fellowship explores how Eliot’s legacies might give better ways of understanding the cultural life of the Midlands now.

Course dates:

Wednesdays, 6.30pm to 8.30pm, on 6, 13, 20 and 27 November and 4 December 2019

PLEASE NOTE CHANGE OF DAY: THIS COURSE WILL NOW MEET ON WEDNESDAYS

Tea & coffee available (donations welcome) from 6pm in the Members’ Lounge.

Please note: you must sign up for the full course even if you cannot attend all dates. No partial course ticket is available.

Short Courses are for over 18s. If you are a young writer, you can sign up for our Spark Young Writers Programme.

All Writing West Midlands short courses are collaborative, and you will learn as much from your fellow course attendees as from the tutor. You will be expected to play an active role in group tasks, and you will also have time to reflect on your own writing during sessions.

Course handouts are sometimes (but not always) available, and notes may be available in advance upon request. If you have any additional needs, please contact Writing West Midlands in advance of the course starting and we will try to assist you.

Presented in partnership with the Birmingham & Midland Institute.