Faber Academy: Writing Day with Jessica Andrews

Full description

How can we render the pain, joy and expectations of our bodies in the world? How can we translate our physical experiences in language which will resonate with readers?

In this one-day masterclass on writing the body, novelist Jessica Andrews will guide you through a series of close readings, generative exercises and discussions to reimagine how you might write about the body.

The day will end with a Q&A with Jessica about her writing life and career as a novelist.

Whether you are a novelist, short-story writer, memoirist, essayist, poet – or a combination of these – this workshop will help you create compelling writing through an examination of sensory evocation, narrative action, tone, and structure, across both fiction and non-fiction.

Schedule
This course takes place over a full Saturday, at The Common Room in Newcastle city centre.

10.00–11.25
What is
embodied writing?
We will look at a brief history of embodied writing and put together a working definition which will inform our own writing going forwards. We will read and discuss representations of the body in literature and there will be guided exercises to try out some new techniques.

11.25–11.35
Break
11:35–13.00
Action, physicality
and emotion
We will consider the role of action, physicality and emotion in representing embodied experience. We will read and discuss the work of writers who do this in different ways and there will be guided writing exercises to try out some of these ideas in our own work.

13:00–14.00
Lunch
14:00–15.00
Formal and linguistic experiment
We will look at the ways in which different writers experiment with form, language and style to convey bodily experience. We will look at some examples of this and push the formal and stylistic boundaries of our own work through writing exercises.

15:00–16.00
Sharing ideas, work and Q&A
At the end of the day, there will be time to share work and discuss ideas, and an opportunity to ask Jessica questions about her own writing practice and journey.