Newtronic Newsletter 2

I’ve had a few enquiries about various administrative matters so the network is doing its job. A few bits of (good)news.

A Blog

I’ve set up a blog (or rather, I’ve used a blog, having got interested via Ian Davidson’s collaboration site, http://www.iandavidson.blogspot.com/ ) as a website for Newt. Unfortunately blogspot already has a NEWT site (could be Ken Livingstone’s?) so its URL is http://www.newtwork.blogspot.com/. All I’m going to do is put the newsletters online, but without the membership list. Blogspot is very easy to use, and I recommend it to students. (No one prescribes they must be used as an online Bridget Jones’ Diary, as Ian has proved, so I’m going to use mine to re-launch my magazine Pages. Click to check it out.)

Two Publications

ONE

Scott Thurston and I were asked, at short notice, to contribute to a fairly conventional Creative Writing handbook (a good one though). The chapter we wrote, ‘Try Something Different’ is based on the materials he and I have used at Edge Hill to coax nervous students to write poetry for the first time. Thus it presents a quite cautious approach, via haiku = imagism = objectivism, but it works.

The book is The Road to Somewhere: a creative writing companion, eds Robert Graham, Helen Newall, Heather Leach, John Singleton (Palgrave, 2005): isbn 1 4039 1640 3.

There is also a chapter on ‘Words and Images’, but it doesn’t really go far enough.

TWO

Hazel Smith’s book The Writing Experiment has just (16th February 2005) landed on my desk and I believe that everybody will want to know of it. Subtitled ‘Strategies for Innovative Creative Writing’, that’s exactly what it is, for poetry, fiction, hypertext, and all sorts in between. I suspect it overlaps with a lot that some of us do already, but there’s much I hadn’t thought of. I could do no better than quoting one of the blurbs: ‘This is an impressive book, because it covers areas of creative writing practice and theory that have not been covered in published form … it links radical practice with radical (but better-known) theory, and it will appeal to anyone looking for a different approach…’ (I know that’s true because I wrote it, interestingly as a publisher’s reader, another use for our network, of course). See the website of the publisher here, Allen and Unwin and the specific page for this book (still under construction I note): The Writing Experiment . Not sure how much it will cost in the UK>

A question

Perhaps this raises the question of what resources we use to teach the kinds of (different) writing we are into. For myself, I can say that the second volume of the Joris and Rothenberg, Poems for the Millennium has been invaluable as a teaching and inspirational source. The (good) students seem to like it; I’ve never seen one for sale second hand from a student! If any of you have suggestions, we could share. Or is everybody devising his or her own? Are we all re-inventing (again, a different) wheel? If anybody wants to share ideas, e mail me for the next newtletter. Perhaps some us could assemble a book?



Robert Sheppard: shepparr@edgehill.ac.uk

Newtronic Newsletter One (excerpt)

Newtronic Newsletter 1

Ouch! I just made that up. Having decided to set up the Network of Experimental Writing Tutors I haven’t done much about it, although I have now asked a number of people. The aim will be to collect all those involved in teaching ‘experimental’ writing (and I don’t want to get hung up on that word; the interests of those enlisted so far should be enough to define the field), who are interested in sharing experiences, etc. (See the original description, first posting.)

Network of Experimental Writing Tutors: Statement

NEWT
Network of Experimental Writing Tutors

c/o Dr Robert Sheppard
Writing Coordinator
Department of English
Edge Hill College of Higher Education
Ormskirk
Lancashire
L39 4QP

shepparr@edgehill.ac.uk


In Britain there has been an explosion of creative writing courses in higher education. On some of these, kinds of writing that might be described as ‘experimental’ are sometimes taught. (I’m hoping my neat acronym might obviate the necessity of having to argue over any other terms for this: linguistically innovative, performance writing, non-linear poetry, whatever….) Sometimes they are tolerated. There is no connection between the people who operate these courses, it seems to me, and a loose network of those involved in teaching such writing (and its poetics) might be useful. I am proposing to do little, other than inviting people to join and then hoping actions will follow. A list of who we are might provide a useful compendium of people to call upon for a variety of examination purposes (externals and PhD examiners), validation consultants, publishers’ readers and referrees, and conference attendance. I certainly know there are times when I have felt exposed doing the work I’m doing. Or even threatened. The latest trend in HE seems to be to appoint well-known writers to leading positions (regardless of whether they have any history of teaching writing). We might be able to pool teaching materials though this is not my immediate aim.
Please reply if you’d like to sign up. But don’t immediately tell others about it. Tutors who teach ‘free verse’ in week 12 of a 12 week semester have no need of the mutual contact we have the chance to develop. Just putting on your cv that you are a member of NEWT might be a protective move. I’ve only asked a few people so far: Scott Thurston, Patricia Farrell, Maggie O’ (‘I’ll join anything to do with reptiles’) Sullivan – people I’ve personally met over the last few weeks and days when I thought it might be the time to launch it.
I wonder how many there are of us? Can you suggest any other potential members?
Here’s hoping you will reply.

Robert Sheppard

(Provisional) Coordinator of NEWT