WRITING
The Creative Step: Creative Writing for Beginners
AUTUMN WN106
Mondays
Tutor: Mark Granier
To write creatively is to think creatively, and thinking creatively can help us make sense of our lives. Sometimes all it takes is one small but decisive step. This course is designed to help people take that step; people who are keen to begin writing but remain intimidated by the blank page. Rather than critiquing students’ older work, emphasis will be on producing something new: crafting effective and imaginative sentences, learning how to be attentive to words and finding ways to surprise readers (including ourselves). As one former student put it, ‘the variety of literary forms really helped to stretch me and brought out different people’s strengths.’ A selection of short stories, poems and various ice-breaking and triggering exercises will offer ways for exploring language and distilling experience. Group discussion will play an important part in these classes.
Author Joan McBreen writes: “In 2004 I attended the Listowel Poetry Workshop led by the Mark Granier. He was a wonderful and insightful mentor and helped bring the very best out of each and every participant in a sensitive and imaginative way. I brought a very early draft of a poem of mine to the Workshop. With the help of Mark and the other members of the group this poem became one of the strongest I had ever written and later appeared in the Irish Times and in my 2005 collection "Heather Island", published by Salmon.”
| BELFIELD | ||
| 8 Mondays |
Sep 24, Oct 1, 8, 15, 22, Nov 5, 12, 19 (No class Oct 29) |
7.30pm - 9.30pm |
| FEE €155 |
Print Open Learning Application Form 2012.13 or ring (01) 716-7123 for Laser/credit card payment |
Tutor Details:
Mark Granier was born in London in 1957. He completed an MA in Poetry/Creative Writing with Lancaster University and has been teaching creative writing for UCD’s Adult Education Centre for several years. He has published two collections with Salmon Poetry, Airborne (2001) and The Sky Road (2007) and his third collection, Fade Street, was published by Salt in 2010. His awards include the 1997 New Writer Prize, two Arts Council Bursaries (2002 and 2008), First Prize in the 2002 Féile Filíochta, The Vincent Buckley Poetry Prize in 2004 and a Patrick and Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship in 2011.
Provisional list of topics to be covered:
- Making a beginning
- writing and memory
- receiving feedback
- keeping a commonplace book
- what makes a story a story?
- some poetic forms and tools (imagery, metaphor, etc.)
Who is the course for?
People who want to take that step, begin writing and find a direction for themselves.
