WRITING EXERCISES: PATRICIA ANN MCNAIR offers a strategy to bring structure to short stories: ‘When a student says they don’t have anything to write about, or when I get stumped myself, I know that it is not content we yearn for, it is structure…’
PODCAST: In the third instalment of this series of Short Story Masterclass podcasts, Zoe Gilbert interviews award-winning author Alison MacLeod. In the podcast they discuss fiction and the here and now, ‘what if’ scenarios and holding a short story together…
PODCAST: Jac Cattaneo talks with award-winning author Kevin Barry about the short story’s lack of room for maneuver, the timing and rhythm of stories, mystery in your writing, and the relationship of memory to imagination…
VIDEO INTERVIEW: Acclaimed Danish author DORTHE NORS in conversation with Professor Alison MacLeod, at the University of Chichester, 2016.
In this downloadable essay, Professor of Creative Writing VASILIS PAPAGEORGIOU discusses artistic research and the mechanisms that have grown around our work in the academic system.
HAYLEY N. JONES learns some valuable writing lessons from ‘The Lottery’ by Shirley Jackson: ‘Its brilliant subtlety draws me into a world that is both horrifying and horribly like my own…’
LYNDA NASH guides us through a selection of exercises to battle those writing demons: ‘It’s difficult to write when your inner critic is telling you that your ideas are stupid, that you couldn’t string a decent sentence together to save your life, and that if you were a ‘proper writer’ you wouldn’t get blocked in the first place…’
In her essay, GINA CHALLEN recommends Panos Karenzis’ collection of short stories Little Infamies: ‘a collection of nineteen gently interlinking tales all set in a fictional village in rural Greece…’
We’ve all experienced that awkward moment when someone asks, “So what is it you actually do?” THRESHOLDS intern and soon-to-be Creative Writing graduate MORGAINE DAVIDSON considers her answer.
‘There was once a woman who devoured stories. She read to enjoy; she read to escape the humdrum of her life.’ JANE HAYWARD weaves together a fairy tale and tells the story of a story.
