A good week: third place in Yeovil Literary Prize and launch of the Tangled Roots project

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Having had to keep it quiet until now, it’s good to be able to start letting people know that my novel A Tiny Speck of Black and then Nothing has taken third place in the Yeovil Literary Prize, judged by Tracy Chevalier.

I’ve long been an admirer of Chevalier’s prose and her writerly eye for detail, and so her kind comments about the book make the experience extra special. You can read her words about all the novel prize winners, and find out more about the prize, here.

Another pleasure this week was being able to attend the launch night of Tangled Roots, a project documenting the experiences of multi-racial families from Yorkshire. I’ve blogged about it before here. There are currently seven writers involved with the project, set up by Katy Massey, and photos of six of us will be displayed at Seven in Leeds until the middle of October.

If you can’t make it to the exhibition, you can view the images, taken by photographer Anthony Farrimond, on the Tangled Roots website. There’s lots more information about the project there too.

Just Back travel piece in the Telegraph

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As some friends already know, my partner and I have recently returned from a motorcycle tour of Spain (with him doing the driving, me sitting on the back).

We saw all sorts of amazing sights: a school of jumping dolphins on the ferry crossing out and a whale on the return journey, a meteor shower on a cold mountain night, a magnificent sunset at mainland Europe’s southernmost point.

But one of the experiences I think we’ll look back on the most is a day we spent at a small motorcycle garage on the outskirts of Granada. I’ve written up what happened in this article, which won this week’s Just Back competition in the Daily Telegraph. This is my first piece of travel writing, so I’m really glad they chose it.

Early on in our travels, when the bike was still running perfectly...
Early on in our travels, when the bike was still running perfectly…

Tangled Roots project launch

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Tangled Roots flyer

I’m really happy that Katy Massey has asked me to play a part in her Arts Council-funded project, Tangled Roots – writing mixed-race Yorkshire. I first met Katy through last year’s SI Leeds Literary Prize. Jane Steele (another SI Leeds competitor, who ended up coming joint-third with me) will also be involved in Tangled Roots, which will include an anthology of work, to be published in early 2014.

Other contributing writers are Michelle Scally Clarke, Adam Lowe, Sai Murray and Seni Seneviratne. It was good to meet up with them and share stories about our families when we gathered to have our pictures taken by Anthony Farrimond.

I’m looking forward to viewing the results at the launch. If you live in or near Leeds, and are free on 19th, it would be great to see you there too.

Showcase and Yeovil Literary Prize short-listing

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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.

Calling aspiring novelists: deadline for applications to the Novel Studio

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Novel StudioAs 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.

Good luck!

Back at Circle of Missé again

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One of the outdoor writing nooks at Circle of Misse
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.

Article in Mslexia

~ Emily Midorikawa ~ 4 Comments

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.

Many thanks to Polly Coles, Amanda Craig, Jill Dawson, Louise Doughty, Liz Jensen and Madeline Miller for your insights.

Mslexia Issue 57 is out now.

Next year’s Mslexia Writer’s Diary

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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.

Also mentioned in our Mslexia entry are Jill Dawson, Louise Doughty, Emily Pedder and Monique Roffey, who were amongst the writers we interviewed for the Times article.

NAWE conference talk: The Writing Friendship

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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.