In Pieces: A new writing course for those who need a form to write the brokenness of now.

A 5 x 2 hr session bi-weekly course

£55 conc and Early Bird

£60 Full

KEY DATES

Sunday Mornings 10am-12noon

Fragments are the only forms I trust,

Donald Barthelme’s

These fragments I shore against my ruin

TS Eliot

It doesn’t feel like we can finish a thought right now without an interruption. See I bet something pinged as you were reading this! Not even Dickens could write like Dickens in this era of overwhelm. So it feels not only impossible but dishonest somehow to write long. But is it cheating to write short? Is it somehow not proper writing. Well – fragmentary writing has been around since at least the AD 30s, with Marcus (yay another Marcus) Martial’s epigrams and the first novel didn’t really come along until a lady called Murasaki Shibuku wrote the Tale of Genji just 1000 years ago. I know! So big books were essentially the Tiktok of the 1100s! So I’ve written a course on how to make sense of the broken pieces, how to play with the way they attract and resist? With fragments it’s best to be unapologetic when Vivienne Westwood began to craft that punk aesthetic she showed the seams on the outside. That’s what fragmentary writing does – it shows the work on the outsides.

In this course we will create our own fragmentary style and piece of writing. By the end of the course you will have the beginnings of a fragmentary collection. We will also dedicate time to structuring what the whole collection will look like – so you will have a plan to take your concept forward.

We’ll look at the work of pioneers of pieces – Sappho, Martial, Virginia Woolf (yes again, yes I love her), Samuel Beckett (didn’t expect that did you?) Mary Robinson, Italo Calvino, Anne Carson, Jenny Offill, Carmen (Yay another Carmen) Maria Machado and many more I’ll try to squeeze in cos they’re only little.

Message me at carmenmarcuswriter@outlook.com