To find out more details about the transfer to The Open University see A New Chapter for OCA.
Explore #WeAreOCA
Skip Navigation
In the last few years there have been an increased number of interactive films enter the mainstream film market, acclaimed by some as the new frontier of entertainment that will soon become the new normality. As a screenwriter and lover of “traditional” filmmaking, I had to dip my toe into this and find out what the appeal is all about.
Read More
Queues outside supermarkets have become strange symbols of this, epitomising how one of life’s most everyday activities has come to feel risky and dangerous. The usually unnoticed has become unsettlingly conspicuous.
Read More
From Vicky Mackenzie’s ‘Tutors thoughts’ through Steve Cusson’s work ‘Prison Cinema’ and onto Therese Livonne and her self portrait the 9th edition of Edge-zine is packed with thought provoking work and articles from across the Open College of the Arts range of disciplines.
Read More
Congratulations to OCA Level 2 (HE5) Creative Writing student Elaine Simmonds, who’s been long-listed in the second Comedy Women in Print Prize. The CWIP is the UK and Ireland’s only prize to shine a light on work by funny women. Elaine, who’s just completed her Life Writing unit with OCA, submitted her novel The Club For Mature Indulgence.
Read More
I recently took part in an OCA trial of a short course on Creative Education. I guess I was a jump ahead most of the time having been an English teacher in the seventies and eighties when English teachers were experimenting with creative ways into learning and teaching. One of the suggestions at that time was to move away from the idea of teaching being a transmission of information and think of it instead as transformation in the learner’s understanding
Read More
Choosing and continuing to be creative is a really important act of self-care. Whether you write, draw, sew, sculpt, paint, photograph or play an instrument, you can improve your mental wellbeing. Over the coming weeks OCA will post open, creative content that everyone can get involved in.
Read More
When you’re an adult, writing as a child is a sleight-of-hand exercise. Children stumble over their words, repeat things, stray from the point, come up with complete irrelevancies. You have to give this impression without losing your reader through boredom, or the effort of untangling a web of mispronunciations and deviations to get to the action. People’s behaviour may seem incomprehensible, because the child doesn’t have the background knowledge to interpret it correctly.
Read More
In fiction, ‘voice’ refers to the person who’s speaking, more commonly called ‘the narrator’ (it’s unusual to refer to the ‘narrator’ in poetry). The narrator may be a character in the story (as in first person narratives) or they may be someone telling the story but not actually present (as in third person narratives).
Read More
What is meant by ‘voice’ in poetry? Personally I don’t think it’s easy to distinguish between ‘voice’ and ‘style’. Both are abstract terms that are concerned with the overall effect of a piece of writing rather than any specific technique, so both are the sum of all the other parts of the writing craft. In both fiction and poetry, ‘voice’ and ‘style’ are created from word choice, tone, use of punctuation and grammar, rhythm, choice of subject matter, choice of point of view, use of imagery, and so on. In poetry, specific poetic techniques also contribute to voice, including line length, line breaks, use of stanzas, rhyme and meter.
Read More
Following on from my previous blog, I’m going to discuss my second residency in Finland. This was at Saari, which offers two-month residencies for artists of all description, not just writers. I applied to work on a very new project, Vegetal Souls, a book which I hope will consist of poems, short essays and short fiction, all exploring what it might be like to be a plant.
Read More
