How do I work on my essay?
June 27, 2024
“Okay settle down everyone, I have an announcement to make! The assessments are now approaching. And the thought of essays is starting to haunt us,” Observer Yasmin declared as she sat at the big round table with all the other Yasmins. Yes, there was nothing else in the room except for that round table and …
Little beasts: experiments with nature writing
June 25, 2024
I discovered a love of lyric essays during my MA in Creative Writing at Nottingham. Before this, I wrote mostly fiction, and toiled on novels. But there was also a weird form of writing I couldn’t categorise, which was more instinctive. I would write these little stream-of-consciousness prose poems but I didn’t really know that’s …
Walking up the hill
May 14, 2024
It’s already feeling like winter, late October bites and drives its breath down the wide walkway. I’ve just got off the tram and I’m heading up to the Trent Building; onwards to the clock tower. The geese are a thick flock, stretching and strutting around on the lawns; the lake a black shimmer, occasional ducks …
Review: Dark Wonders by Joshua Helmer
February 12, 2021
Dark Wonders is a set of three linked dystopian short stories from Nottingham-based writer Joshua Helmer. Comparisons to Black Mirror are easy to make, as the three stories involve a dark insight into a near future in which different forms of technology have an impact on humans and the world. However, underneath this genre similarity, …
The Myth of Individualism
June 1, 2020
In the Dutch historian Rutger Bregman’s latest book Humankind, he researches a real-life version of Lord of the Flies. In June 1965, six boys from Tonga floated out to sea in a stolen boat, and found themselves washed up on a desert island for fifteen months. Unlike William Golding’s novel, however, which ends in brutality …
Lakeside Literacy Volunteers: The David Ross Collection
March 10, 2014
This blog post was written by third year Creative Writing student Matthew Lewis Miller from the School of Education. A few months ago, Clare Harvey and Ruth Lewis-Jones rudely interrupted one of my valuable university morning classes to tell me about the Lakeside Literacy Volunteers. I am very glad that they did. Over the last …
Just a Gigolo
October 15, 2012
A few years ago I wrote a play called EMPTY BED BLUES about D.H. Lawrence and his wife, Frieda, which centred around the “true” – if somewhat controversial – story that Lady Chatterley’s Lover was inspired by Lawrence’s painful discovery of his wife’s love affair with Angelo Ravagli, their gardener in a rented villa in …
Kerry Young: The Challenges of First-Person Narration
October 21, 2011
Kerry Young came to the university to read from her debut novel and to speak about writing and publishing. Originally from Kingston, Jamaica, she has spent much of her career focusing on the writing and editing of non-fiction such as The Art of Youth Work and other professional publications, as well as chapters and articles …
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