Tell us about your writing career so far
I have written for as long as I can remember and won a UNESCO medal when I was eighteen in 1979 for a book of poems on the Year of the Child.
I stopped writing when I went to Trinity, University of Dublin, to study English – the academic work on literature that I did for the next ten years silencing the writing side really. I took up writing again seriously in 2001 and took a three-year career break from teaching in that year and did the MA in Creative Writing in Queens.
My main work has always been teaching – English at secondary level and now Creative Writing with the OU also – and in a lot of that time as an English teacher I would see ‘gaps’ in texts – like the sixteen-year gap in the middle of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale – which I’d want to fill with story or narrative. That was one of the first projects I undertook when I started writing – to create a poem-sequence that would account for the lost years of Hermione!
How did Luscus come about?
I’ve worked mainly in poetry so far and now have a manuscript of poems that I hope to find a publisher for. I have just started to consider prose – partly because there is a strong narrative drive in the poems and I have an idea for a novel that I want to try.
The short memoir piece for the Fish is something I’ve wanted to try to write about for some time. I tend to use competitions as deadlines sometimes so that was the idea of this – to give me a date to aim to have a completed piece written by. It was something I knew I’d write at some time and I’d tried it in poetry but it didn’t work. This was my first memoir piece for print though I have written memoir pieces for radio – BBC Radio Ulster and RTE – which may have helped.
What are the rewards of teaching creative writing with the OU?
The thing I like about working with the OU is the close personal contact it affords with students through online teaching. If it works well it is a very intense and personal exchange of ideas and of practice. I love being part of the journey that writing can be for students – sometimes a journey just to finding a way to telling a story that needed to be told, but also when someone discovers a facility or love for a genre that has previously been closed to them – perhaps by negative learning experiences in the past. That often happens with poetry and being able to help in those discoveries and share in that excitement is what makes the work so enjoyable. It also adds to greater self-awareness in my own writing to be doing such close reading of other writers’ work in the course.
'I love being part of the journey that writing can be for students'
The benefits of OU study include the wonderful resources – I think they are exemplary – and the sense of inclusiveness of the institution and its structures of support which are of a different quality than anything I’ve seen in other universities where I studied myself. I think the structure, breadth and the feedback given on A215 is in some ways better than many MA courses since it matches reading, close written feedback and workshopping possibilities.
Why study creative writing?
In my own study the main benefit was in helping to take the writing seriously and to think of yourself as a writer, which is a hard thing to do sometimes. The other great plus is the contact with other writers and the interactions with them – of support and of ideas – that is very important. You need to have some people whose advice you trust and you begin to find that by studying Creative Writing.
I’m delighted to win the Fish. It is especially lovely when you win a prize chosen by a writer whose work you admire and Molly Mc Closkey’s feedback is perhaps the best part of it for me since I thought her memoir Circles Round the Sun was hugely impressive. I think winning it may make attractive the idea of doing more work in prose – in both memoir and fiction.
Any tips for students entering writing competitions?
Find a competition which suits something you already know you have or you want to work on. Make sure the work stands outside of any reference to a competition – that you have a sense of its quality yourself. Follow the rules carefully and avoid gimmicks – present the work carefully so that it is the writing alone that is being judged.
Maureen Boyle is based in Belfast and teaches A215 Creative Writing for the OU in Ireland. Luscus will appear in the 2013 Fish Anthology to be launched at the West Cork Literary Festival in July 2013, at which she is also invited to read.
Posted 29 April 2013
