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Creative Writing Blog Posts - Page 71 of 72 - The Open College of the Arts

To find out more details about the transfer to The Open University see A New Chapter for OCA.

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Creative Writing


News from the OCA: A new degree and a new role thumb

News from the OCA: A new degree and a new role

Back in June we set out our plans for new courses for this academic year. Now following discussion with our Trustees and the Course Leader for Creative Writing Jane Rogers we have decided to seek validation for a named degree in Creative Writing. To do this we need to develop a third level one writing […]

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Radio Mifumi thumb

Radio Mifumi

OCA Creative Writing Course Leader Jane Rogers is off to Uganda next week. She will be working with the Director of the charity Mifumi, Atuki Turner to get some local Ugandan writers together to develop a pilot for a radio soap opera which could be broadcast in the Tororo area, and which would aim to […]

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The publishers' perspective thumb

The publishers' perspective

Continuing the OCA’s exploration of what it takes to get published, Livi Michael author of the OCA’s Writing for Children course talks to publisher Penny Morris on what gets read and what is being looked for. These videos should be watched in combination with earlier videos on the agent’s perspective

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Musical poetry: a creative arts collaboration…. thumb

Musical poetry: a creative arts collaboration….

Creative Writing tutor Joanna Ezekiel has been working with composer Pat Livingstone to set Joanna’s poems to music, using music technology that includes sound effects such as marimbas and a klezmer band! Joanna chose five poems from her poetry collections ‘A Braid of Words’, ‘Safe Passage’, and ‘Centuries of Skin’ that had been tried and […]

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'Art can be a way in…' thumb

'Art can be a way in…'

The Open College of the Arts works with the Prisoners’ Education Trust to enable students in prison to access our courses. It is an important part of our charitable purpose and student fees are met by a combination of OCA bursaries and grants from the Trust. As this work is largely invisible to other students […]

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Meet the OCA thumb

Meet the OCA

The OCA will be at the Ilkley Literature Festival on Saturday 9 October. There are two workshops. In the morning Jane Rogers is leading a workshop on ‘Character and Voice in the Short Story’ which sold out as soon as it went on the Festival website, and in the afternoon Livi Michael leads a workshop […]

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What publishers are looking for thumb

What publishers are looking for

As promised for all those budding authors at OCA we have part two of the interview with literary agent Philippa Milnes-Smith. In this installment Philippa talks about how to make your work standout from the 50 plus manuscripts her agency receives every week and what to expect from an agent should your work be strong […]

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The literary agent thumb

The literary agent

On the same day that we filmed the interview with Jacqueline Wilson, the intrepid duo of Livi Michael and myself braved the egg throwers of London (don’t ask!) once more to interview literary agent Philippa Milnes-Smith. Philippa has many years experience in the publishing industry including time as the Managing Director of Puffin books (the […]

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Jacqueline Wilson talks about her career thumb

Jacqueline Wilson talks about her career

As promised a few weeks ago here is another excerpt from the Jacqueline Wilson interview I filmed along with Livi Michael. Here Jacqueline talks about her career from writing in exercise books as a young girl through her Tracey Beaker success and beyond. By her own count she has now written almost 100 books!

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Liz Cashdan reading two of her Icelandic Poems thumb

Liz Cashdan reading two of her Icelandic Poems

Liz Cashdan reads from her Icelandic poetry from Open College of the Arts on Vimeo. OCA Creative Writing tutor Liz Cashdan was in the office a few weeks ago. and we took the opportunity to record her reading two of her poems. Of particular interest is that Liz traveled to Iceland Last year with another […]

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