This week I have been enjoying this writing life. If you follow me on social media you will have seen that I have started my Countdown to Publication using images and quotes from the novel, and I am trying hard to wet your appetite to read more.
I’ve been to West Dean College this week as well. That’s where I studied for my MA in Creative Writing and Publishing. I am one of their first students to be given a publishing deal, and at their anthology launch this week the course lead Mark Radcliffe mentioned that I am getting published soon. He also pointed out how long it takes to reach publication.
I have been working on this novel since March 2015, when I first started looking at the pictures that you can now see on my social media pages. I started writing the novel in September 2017; and it was finished in 2018… there were some blips, some disappointments, and some health problems in the interim and it was three years before I got the email offering to publish my first two novels on 18th May 2021. It has certainly taken time.
When I go to West Dean it feels like my creative home. I first went there in 1992 a couple of weeks after I met my husband. I went for a one week short course on Creative Writing run by a wonderful teacher called Dianne Doubtfire who mentored me after the course ended. Her encouragement made me believe that I was a writer, and gave me the courage and just enough self belief to enable me to apply for the BA in English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Kent, and then to apply to return on the Masters programme at West Dean. It is where I first believed I was a writer.
West Dean is a beautiful house set in the West Sussex countryside. The house is beautiful, and the man who endowed the College, Edward James, nurtured and supported the Surrealist Movement there. He was a poet who endowed the College in an attempt to sustain those creative crafts that are in danger of being forgotten. It is the most incredible place. And people smile there and stop to chat to strangers. I am always struck by the calmness of the place. The gentle creative energy in every corridor and every workshop.
I only spent two days there this week but I spent two days talking about writing and publishing. I was welcomed and made to feel at home once more. I’ve asked if I might be able to teach some short courses on Creative Writing and Creative Processes there. I have no idea what they will say; but it would be wonderful to be part of that process… of helping people to discover the writer in themselves and how to nurture that creativity so that they can be the fullest and most productive version of who they were always meant to be.
