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