Writing

The Open College of the Arts works with the Prisoners’ Education Trust to enable students in prison to access our courses. It is an important part of our charitable purpose and student fees are met by a combination of OCA bursaries and grants from the Trust. As this work is largely invisible to other...
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The OCA will be at the Ilkley Literature Festival on Saturday 9 October. There are two workshops. In the morning Jane Rogers is leading a workshop on ‘Character and Voice in the Short Story‘ which sold out as soon as it went on the Festival website, and in the afternoon Livi Michael leads a...
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On the same day that we filmed the interview with Jacqueline Wilson, the intrepid duo of Livi Michael and myself braved the egg throwers of London (don’t ask!) once more to interview literary agent Philippa Milnes-Smith. Philippa has many years experience in the publishing industry including time as the Managing Director of Puffin books...
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As promised a few weeks ago here is another excerpt from the Jacqueline Wilson interview I filmed along with Livi Michael. Here Jacqueline talks about her career from writing in exercise books as a young girl through her Tracey Beaker success and beyond. By her own count she has now written almost 100 books! Share &...
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Recently I had the great pleasure of filming an interview with children’s author Jacqueline Wilson. Jacqueline has sold over 25 million books in the UK alone and was the most popular library book author of the last decade. You can see some of her 15,000 strong book collection behind her in the interview. Jacqueline was...
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OCA Creative Writing tutor Liz Cashdan was in the office a few weeks ago. and we took the opportunity to record her reading two of her poems. Of particular interest is that Liz traveled to Iceland Last year with another OCA Tutor, Pat Hodson whose Herbal Notebook was featured on WeAreOCA a couple of...
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OCA Creative Writing tutor Nina Milton talks about finding your voice. Paul Vincent and Gareth Dent discuss post-production. Share & be sociable... add this.
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Pat Borthwick, poet and creative writing tutor was in the office this week so we took the opportunity to record her reading Katya from her recent collection Admiral FitzRoy’s Barometer. Katya was the winner of an Amnesty International award in 2005. Share & be sociable... add this.
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Jane Rogers from Open College of the Arts on Vimeo. Jane Rogers, Course Leader for Creative Writing was in the office last week, so we took the opportunity to ask her what she was working on and what she was reading. She had some interesting tips on how to avoid your work being adapted for...
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Many writers walk to invent their stories. Dickens apparently wrote most mornings and walked every afternoon. I think his characters and their senarios walked with him, ready for their creation by pen the following morning. I’ve used this method for years. It doesn’t matter if the surrounds are urban or rural, but naturally it’s nicer...
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