It’s been a busy couple of months since I last posted any news on this blog. Two recent pleasures for me were being involved with the New Writing Showcase by Novel Studio students at City University London, and making the shortlist for the Yeovil Literary Prize, judged this year by Tracy Chevalier.
Whilst I’m used to reading my own work in public, I’d never compered a readings event before the Novel Studio showcase, but I was helped by the fact that the students’ work was of such a good standard. The audience of family, friends and industry professionals all seemed to really enjoy the evening.
As for the short-listing – in the novel category, with my first book A Tiny Speck of Black and then Nothing – I’m obviously thrilled. I look forward to finding out the final results when they are announced.
As a current tutor at City University’s Novel Studio, I want to remind anyone interested that the deadline for applications is fast approaching.
The Novel Studio offers fifteen selected students the opportunity to work on their novels-in-progress in twice-weekly evening sessions that run over three terms. The course guides participants through the tricky terrain of novel writing, from plotting, planning and research through to character development, pacing, narrative voice and style, revisions and editing. The module I am teaching this term is “The Publishing Industry” and it culminates in an end-of-year reading event to friends of the students involved as well as invited industry guests.
As a tutor, I have been really impressed by the standard of work produced by the group this year, and also their serious level of commitment to the novels they are writing. If you are interested in applying for 2013/14, here’s what you need to do:
Email 2,000 words of your own fiction (short story or novel extract) and a copy of your CV to Emily.Pedder.1@city.ac.uk. Alternatively, you can post your work to the following address:
Emily Pedder
Course Director
The Novel Studio
City University London
Enterprise Office
Northampton Square
London EC1V OHB
The deadline is 30 May 2013. For more information, please see the applications page of the City website.
One of the outdoor writing nooks at Circle of Misse
I always enjoy my stays as a writer-in-residence at Circle of Missé, and so I was really pleased when Aaron and Wayne asked me to come back again in 2013.
I’ll be there in July, which I am really looking forward to because I haven’t experienced this month at Missé before. One of the pleasures of a writer’s stay in this converted old farmhouse in the Loire countryside is sitting outside with their writer’s notebook, or perhaps a cup of tea or a glass of good wine, and enjoying all the plants blooming in the garden at that time of year.
As usual, I’ll be teaching as well as writing while I’m there. My courses run from 22 July onwards, and lots of information about what you can expect if you sign up is available on the Circle of Missé website. There’ll be opportunities for one-to-one feedback and group workshopping, writing exercises, discussions about the craft of writing, and solitary writing time too. You can find out more about my approach to teaching here. The truth is, though, that I won’t know exactly how everything will run until I find out more about the particular writers in my group and their individual writing plans or projects.
And that’s the great thing about all the courses at Missé: that they allow for this kind of tailoring and flexibility. Because the maximum number of participants per course is always kept very low, tutors can gear their sessions specifically to what each writer needs.
If you know of someone who you think might be interested, I’d be really grateful if you could point them in the direction of the Circle of Missé.
I’m looking forward to finding out more about this year’s participants. Who knows, maybe you’ll be one of them.
An article by Emma Claire Sweeney and me appears in the new issue of Mslexia. Its theme is rivalry between female author friends – a subject that we became interested in through our wider research into writing friendships.
We’d touched on issues of friction within writers’ relationships in the talk we gave at the NAWE conference last year and also in a piece we wrote for The Times. But we felt it was an issue that could be explored in more detail, which was why we approached Mslexia with our idea for the feature.
Although rivalry is often regarded as only a detrimental force within a friendship, Emma Claire and I know from our own relationship that the competition between us has been good for us as writers, and good for our friendship too – since it’s encouraged greater honesty between us.
We wanted to find out whether other authors felt the same way. As well as investigating the historical friendship between rivals Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf, we sought the opinions of several modern-day writers to get their views on the subject too.
The Mslexia diary I’d ordered arrived this week. As usual, in addition to all the calendar-related stuff you’d expect, it contains inspiring words by writers, a useful directory and summary of The Writing Year ahead, and plenty of blank pages for scribbling down ideas.
The diary’s theme in 2013 is collaboration and the Inspirations page for August focuses on the writing friendship between Emma Claire Sweeney and I, which we talked about in our feature in The Times back in May and also in our recent discussion panel at the NAWE conference.
Having had such an enjoyable time at last year’s NAWE conference, I was really happy to take part in another panel discussion there this year. This time, Emma Claire Sweeney and I gave a presentation on the subject of friendships between writers along with two other “writing friends”, Emily Pedder and Monique Roffey.
Some people might remember that Emily and Monique were two of the writers we interviewed for our feature in The Times
Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney
back in May. Taking the newspaper article as a starting point, we used our session at the conference to ask Monique and Emily some questions inspired by what they’d told us the last time we met with them.
Emma and I were also able to delve a little further into the friendships of some of the historical writers that our research for the article had centred on – Brontë and Gaskell, Fitzgerald and Hemingway, Mansfield and Woolf to name but a few – as well as discussing practical tips with our audience of modern day writers for ways of sustaining a successful writing friendship through the good as well as the rockier times.
Having been friends with Emma for well over a decade now, I feel extremely lucky to have someone who’s been with me through my writing years. As we shared with the group at the conference, there have been ups and downs in the trajectories of our careers, disappointments as well as triumphs, but something I really do appreciate is that Emma’s been there for the whole of this period and that she’s still usually the first person I turn to if I have a difficult decision to make or a knotty plot problem that I’m struggling to untangle.
There are interviews with all the winning writers of the SI Leeds Literary Prize on the For Books’ Sake website: a great source of information about “Books By and For Independent Women”.
The website has lots of other really interesting feature articles as well as information about fiction and non-fiction books and writing-related events. I highly recommend it.
It’s been a busy week, what with the SI Leeds Literary Prize award ceremony to go to in Ilkley and the start of my new OU course, so I’ve only just found a moment to blog about The Silent History, a new kind of novel written especially for iPad and iPhone, which launched this week.
The story is presented in two forms, Testimonials and Field Reports, and tells the story of a generation of unusual children, their families and the communities that surround them. I am the author of one of the first London field reports and I am really looking forward to visiting the site where it takes place and experiencing my writing as part of the novel as a whole.
The Silent History, available for download from the App Store, is a collaboration between Kevin Moffett (author of Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events and Permanent Visitors), Matthew Derby (author of Super Flat Times), Russell Quinn (co-founder of digital studio Spoiled Milk), Eli Horowitz (former managing editor and publisher of McSweeney’s), and contributors on five continents.
I’m very glad to be a part of this great new project, and I look forward to seeing how it develops.
I’ve just returned home after a lovely twenty-four hours when I travelled down by train to the Ilkley Literature Festival with my good friend Sarah. I’ve known Sarah for years and having her there to accompany me to the inaugural SI Leeds Literary Prize award evening helped make the experience even more special.
Bonnie Greer and Margaret Busby opened the evening at the Ilkey Playhouse with a fascinating talk about their own personal histories as writers and some reflections on the publishing world of today and the spaces that Black and Asian writers occupy within it.
Then the prizes were announced, with Minoli Salgado being awarded the winner’s trophy, followed by Karen Onojaife in second place, and Jane Steele and I in joint third.
A high point of the evening for me was being able to hear the other winning writers reading their work aloud. I hope to hear lots more from them and the other shortlisted writers, Katy Massey and Anita Sivakumaran, in the future.
An update on the SI Leeds Literary Prize: I found out yesterday that my novel A Tiny Speck of Black and thenNothing has now made the short-list of six! I’m really looking forward to the award ceremony on 3 October at the Ilkley Literature Festival, and to meeting the other finalists, organisers and judges.
If you want to know more, further information can be found in the blog post below and also on the prize website.
Many thanks to everyone who has been in touch – your support is very much appreciated.
Emily Midorikawa 