To find out more details about the transfer to The Open University see A New Chapter for OCA.
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We human beings love to try and predict the future, from the football scores to the next world conflict. Authors including Margaret Atwood, George Orwell and Kurt Vonnegut are amongst those who have famously done so. Futuristic, speculative fiction is big business, especially at a time when even the news can sound dystopian.
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I hope you’ve all been getting your work out into the world following my short blog series on ‘Getting Your Poetry Out There’ but it seems only fair to come back with some tips for dealing with the one inevitability of a writer’s life: rejection.
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As well as being a large New World monkey, a werewolf in full cry, or an unpleasant letter in a red envelope sent to someone at Hogwarts, the other definition of howler is a stupid mistake or ludicrous blunder.
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OCA tutor Nina Milton in conversation with student Gigi about her Foundation in Creative Writing course experience.
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Remembrance Sunday falls this year on Armistice Day itself. This year also marks 100 years since the end of the First World War which saw an estimated 10 million people lose their lives. The conflict spawned many artistic outputs as people sought to express the horror, and the suffering of it all. Poetry in particular is exceedingly well known through the works of Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, Ivor Gurney, Wilfred Owen, and David Blunden to name but a few of the more famous examples.
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I was intrigued reading some of the visual arts, students and tutors, writing about the materials and techniques at their disposal. It made me realise that all the writer has is very little in comparison: words and nothing more. We can splash them across the page, join them into sentences, paragraphs, lines, stanzas, novellas, chapters, scripts; or we can sound them out at performances, readings, and online, visually and orally.
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National Novel Writing Month – November 1 – 30
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…and as part of this we asked OCA programme leaders to share some important practitioners to point students towards and remember artists and events in the history of the African diaspora. This is list is just the beginning of a longer one we hope, please add to it in the comments below.
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The UK publishing industry has not moved fast enough to reflect our current society. And when you’re talking about children’s fiction, it’s particularly white.
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October is Black History Month and I am not black. And as far as I know, the OCA has no black Creative Writing Tutors. So how do we write about Black History Month?
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