The new OU English and Creative Writing podcast is now live on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, PocketCasts, and other major providers.
The podcast, called ‘re: reading – The OU Literature Podcast’ features OU English and Creative Writing academics discussing books, reading, and creative writing. It’s designed to be informative and accessible for the general listener, while retaining academic rigour and offering insights into some of the most exciting research coming out of the English and Creative Writing department.
Episode 1: Much ado about Wuthering Heights features Dr Jennifer Shepherd and Dr Anna Clarke discussing Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, and Emerald Fennell’s recent adaptation, starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi.
There are also several bonus episodes of the ‘5 Books’ series which ran successfully on OU News over the last couple of years. This series has suggestions from ECW academics of the best books to read on a whole range of topics, from bereavement to football. Available now on the podcast are episodes featuring
five classic novels about Italy
five books of apocalyptic fiction
five recommendations of Nordic noir fiction.
Listen for fascinating discussions about reading, creative writing, literary theory, book recommendations, and much more!
What initially motivated you to reconsider notions of realism, reality and the novel?
I was interested in exploring a number of potentially inter-related phenomena: the rise of auto/biography and memoir; the seeming rejection, on the part of some writers, of the novel – or at least current novelistic forms and expectations; and a sense on the part of some critics and writers that post-modernism had run its course, and that it was necessary to turn elsewhere for a literature fit for the 21st century.
I was also intrigued by comments made by Karl Ove Knausgaard and Rachel Cusk that seemed to echo a desire for an end to fakery and fabrication, which they associated, rightly or wrongly, with novelistic conventions (the need for plot, a narrative arc, a focus on ‘showing’ rather than ‘telling’). I wanted to investigate their desire to find forms of writing more attentive to the realities and complexities of experience. There did, in some senses, seem to be what writer David Shields terms a reality hunger (2010).
I have spent the best part of 30 years engaging with literature and particularly the novel. So Knausgaard’s dissatisfaction with invention and rejection of the kind of novel writing in which he had previously engaged, alongside Cusk’s experiments in a new kind of writing following the ‘creative death’ (The New Statesman, 2021) she felt she had undergone in the aftermath of her memoirs, prompted me to consider what was happening on the fiction/auto/biography/memoir front.
I wanted to understand the motivations of some successful writers who appeared to have turned their backs on fiction and were keen to stay closer to the outline, if not the substance, of their own lives. Rather than make things up, writers such as Knausgaard and Cusk felt the need to engage with the particulars of the world around them, seeing writing as a way of thinking through some of the big questions such as the impact of death and/or divorce on family life, what it means to be in love, the toll that having children can take on one’s ambitions to be a writer, and what it means to be a man or a woman at a particular life-stage in the 21st century.
Can you tell us a bit more about the terms ‘radical realism’ and ‘autofiction’?
The term ‘radical realism’ derives from prior usage in other disciplinary contexts (eg. politics, philosophy and art). I was particularly interested in its application by Caroline Levine (2000) to the work of John Ruskin; and to an article by Philip Tew (2001) on the work of B. S. Johnson. Bringing together ideas about predominantly literary realism/s with a focus on what might be seen as ‘radical’ in relation, for example, to Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle series was of course tricky, given the already wide-ranging literature on various realisms (eg. social realism, psychological realism, hyper-realism, to mention but a few). However, in helping to situate Knausgaard’s seemingly radical attention to detail and to the minutiae, some would say trivia, of everyday life alongside his concern to overthrow conventionalized ideas about the novel and its investment in storied fictions, the term helped make sense of what otherwise seems like a contradiction in terms: the notion of ‘a non-fictional novel’, Knausgaard’s own description of his work which he deploys to confront and interrogate fiction as the creation and maintenance of a sustained illusion, while seeking to get as close as possible to the realities of lived experience.
The term ‘autofictional narratives’ in the book title was a way of flagging up current interest in ‘autofiction’, another contentious and increasingly widely used term that goes beyond its initial application by Serge Doubrovsky, academic, literary theorist, critic and writer, to his self-designated autofictional novel, Fils. I begin by rehearsing the history of autofiction as a primarily French phenomenon before looking briefly at the way in which its usage as a neologism in English has increased exponentially in the last 5 years. So, for example, if you plug the term autofiction into the library search function, you’ll find 4,506 entries across the period 1976 to 2023, a 47-year span. Of these, 3,464 entries span the last 10 years, while 2,421 relate to the just last 5 years. These figures constitute evidence of a boom in (talk about) autofiction and the autofictional.
Your monograph engages in detail with the work of four writers – Rachel Cusk, Xiaolu Guo, Karl Ove Knausgaard, and Jeanette Winterson. What led you to focus on these particular writers?
My case studies centred on writers who have written both novels and works either classified as memoirs or autobiographies or works that appear to ‘document’, at some level, aspects of their own lives.
Knausgaard and Cusk provide an interesting pairing as they share a rejection of conventionalized novel forms, and have each set out to get closer to lived experience in their work. They also share an interest in contesting societal and culturally sanctioned views of ‘masculinity’ in Knausgaard’s case and ‘femininity’ in Cusk’s case. And they have both managed to antagonize members of their own families as well as many readers through their painfully honest accounts, as they would see it, of aspects of their lives.
In the case of Jeanette Winterson and Xiaolu Guo, I didn’t anticipate many parallels, given their very different cultural and linguistic backgrounds. However, insofar as they both hail originally from humble origins and have had to forge their own literary paths, sometimes in the face of fierce opposition, and have both been, from the off, unconventional novel writers who have produced, unsurprisingly perhaps, unconventional ‘memoirs’, they turned out to have quite a bit in common. Indeed, their work as a whole can be seen to reflect a number of self-projections or versions of self along a fact-fiction continuum and their so-called memoirs unsettle ideas of what a memoir might be.
Fiona Doloughan
Fiona Doloughan’s research revolves around the development of the novel and on the forces (societal, cultural, technological, linguistic) shaping that development. She has published three monographs, the most recent of which is Radical Realism, Autofictional Narratives and the Reinvention of the Novel (Anthem Press, 2023).
On September 13, she’ll be delivering a lecture entitled Crisis? What crisis?: Rachel Cusk’s Reinvention of the Novel for the Twenty-first Century at Salve Regina University, Newport, Rhode Island.
On September 20, she’ll be at Agnes Scott College, Decatur, Georgia, giving a talk co-sponsored by the departments of English, French, and Spanish on what it means to be a female writer today.
In this bonus summer post, Jennifer Shepherd, Chair of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences team in Ireland, shares a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the Open University’s partnership with the John Hewitt Society’s annual Summer School.
What does summertime mean to you?
For me, it’s festival time.
Each summer, I find myself in the picturesque cathedral town of Armagh, Northern Ireland at the Marketplace Theatre, home to the annual John Hewitt International Summer School. Now in its 36th year, the festival is hosted by the John Hewitt Society, established to celebrate the legacy of local poet, art historian and social activist John Hewitt.
Hewitt’s legacy is everywhere in evidence here in Armagh in late July, as a diverse group of writers, visual artists, musicians, political commentators and social entrepreneurs gather to celebrate the power of story to explore some of the most pressing social issues we face today on the island of Ireland.
It’s warm and unpretentious and full of surprises.
One day the mainstage hosts eminent Irish playwright Frank McGuiness, sharing the wit and wisdom of a literary career spanning over 4 decades; another day finds bestselling crime writer Denise Mina discussing her take on hard-boiled crime fiction; still another, a round table of political commentators and journalists pitch ideas for engaging citizens meaningfully in the Northern Ireland political system.
Everywhere there’s story, whether it takes the form of images – such as Nigel Swann’s haunting photographs of the ‘Yellow Star’ houses of Budapest – or music, provided by award-winning folk artist Jack Warnock.
As an OU academic based in Northern Ireland, I have the pleasure of managing a partnership with the John Hewitt Society on the delivery of the Summer School. It’s a natural fit since the Open University has much to offer local conversations around politics, history, and creativity.
Collaborating with the John Hewitt Society for the last decade has allowed the Open University in Ireland to showcase the incredible quality of our teaching and research, particularly in the area of creative writing.
Heather Richardson, Nessa O’Mahony, and Siobhan Campbell
It’s a pleasure to meet festival-goers during the week who have signed up for workshops led by OU writers – this year, we were joined by novelist Heather Richardson, and poets Nessa O’Mahony and Siobhan Campbell. Festival-goers are full of praise for our teachers, noting that OU writers really ‘see’ each student and bring out the very best in them and their writing.
‘Oh, you’re with the OU,’ is how I’m often greeted when I introduce myself in the busy foyer between events—because if there’s a proverbial zero degrees of separation in Ireland, the same holds true here for the Open University.
Jennifer Shepherd (right) with former OU student
At the local book vendor’s festival stall, a man tells me his friend is studying on the new English Lit MA and really enjoying it. I encounter a woman at the OU pop-up stand who confides that she’s already got a place reserved on an MA programme and wonders if she can get further details. Another man lingers over the OU leaflets on display and tells me a long story about a professional life that took many unplanned turns. He always wanted to study law but never got the chance – did I think it was too late for him? A former OU student of my own waves from across the crowded foyer and makes her way over for a catchup and selfie.
She reminisces fondly about her first OU module and grins at the memory of her debut at an Open University open mic night, the first of many engagements over the years as an accomplished poet and flash-fiction writer.
And maybe this is what I like most about my annual pilgrimage to Armagh each summer: to see the power of story at work in unexpected places. While speakers on the mainstage are inspiring us with tips for master storytelling or compelling new visions for a shared future in Ireland, I’m seeing something just as exciting at my Open University pop-up stand. People talk about their daily lives and, when they do, I get a glimpse of the way in which OU study allows people to write new futures for themselves and shape the story of their own lives in fresh and exciting ways.
Jennifer Shepherd
Originally from Canada, Jennifer Shepherd completed her PhD at the University of Alberta and post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Hull. She is a Senior Lecturer and Staff Tutor in the Department of English Literature and Creative Writing at the OU. As chair of the FASS team in Ireland, she is responsible for facilitating local knowledge exchange and engagement opportunities, as well as maintaining partnerships with Ireland-based organisations which include the John Hewitt Society, the Belfast Book Festival, and Dublin/Belfast Culture Nights.
In recent months, several members of our Creative Writing team have been collaborating with our local bookish friends at Milton Keynes Literary Festival.
On Saturday 15th April, lecturer Lania Knight interviewed fellow novelist and life writer Kit de Waal about the extraordinary journey she has made since first voluntarily reading a novel at the age of 22.
Saturday was also be a big day for those writers who have been shortlisted for MKLitFest’s MinK2023 Writing Competition. In the leadup to tomorrow’s announcement of the winners, we caught up with Open University PhD graduand, Patrick Wright, who acted as a judge for the poetry categories.
Tell us a little about your first encounters with poetry and your journey to becoming a poet.
My mother used to recite quite a bit of poetry around the house when I was growing up — poems such as ‘Night Mail’ by W.H. Auden and William Wordsworth’s ‘Daffodils’. This was my first introduction to rhythm and rhyme. We also had a few anthologies lying around that I’d dip into. I recall studying poems by Norman Nicholson at school and I was especially taken by ‘Windscale’.
My interest was only really piqued though by my discovery as a teenager of Sylvia Plath. I saw then what poetry could do in terms of confessionalism and free verse. I began to experiment with writing my own poems at this time — without a clue about what I was doing. It wasn’t until I studied for an MA in Creative Writing, at the Centre for New Writing, University of Manchester, that I truly started to learn the craft and see myself as a poet.
How has winning awards and having poems selected for anthologies affected your writing life?
It’s given me encouragement. Poetry can be a solitary activity and there are times when I wonder if it’s worth the investment. Is it too rarefied or self-indulgent? However, moments of praise and recognition always make the sacrifice worthwhile. There can also be a tinge of glamour at times. Though I’ve learnt to not feel too intensely about the ups and the downs. I can’t rely on the fruits at the end of the process: writing must be enjoyed for its own sake; and yet there’s certainly a kick that comes with having work accepted by a magazine or anthology, and that feeling can be quite addictive. I’m now more confident too and willing to take additional risks: with form for example or having the courage to break the rules I was taught. With the success that’s come my way, I’m also persuaded that my poems can sit alongside the poets I admire.
You are an award-winning poet yourself, and now you have judged MK Litfest’s flash fiction competitions. From your experience on both sides of the process, what would you say makes for a prize-winning poem?
I suppose it must tick several boxes at once. Technical elements should be considered; but there’s also the theme, the way a poem strikes at the heart of something in the zeitgeist, or how it leaves an impression. There’s also the inevitable subjective aspect, and what I think works best at a given moment. It’s often fine margins — and I have no doubts that my thoughts as a judge might have changed if I’d read the same poems again another time or in a different mood. Taste and a complex set of characteristics that the reader values (some of which are hard to pin down) will often shape the final verdict. So, my message to poets is: Don’t be discouraged and keep writing. There’s every chance that next time you will have your work chosen.
Tell us a bit about some of the poems you shortlisted for MK Litfest.
In the 14-19 group I enjoyed ‘My Roots’, ‘To all you ash-grey men’, and ‘The Aftermath’. I thought that ‘My Roots’ was particularly impressive with the poet’s clear adherence to the theme (Milton Keynes and green spaces), awareness of form, organised stanzas, and memorable images.
In the 20-plus group, I liked ‘The Green’, ‘The Other One’, and ‘Covid Spring’. Each of these had a distinctive voice and demonstrated a striking or unusual use of language. ‘The Green’ stood out for me with its neat couplets and appreciation of sound.
How has your work and research at the OU shaped you as a poet?
Looking back, my PhD in Creative Writing (Exit Strategy: Ekphrasis through the lens of the abstract and the formless) was a way of going in another direction from my first collection (Full Sight of Her). I was clear from the start that I wanted to be open to new forms, constraints, and feedback — always in the hope of allowing me to find a new voice and not sound like myself. This striving to get away from what I’d done before is one reason the collection is called Exit Strategy. It was about having a book of poems that could be expressive of a new identity, and I achieved that. The critical part helped me become more aware of other poets and where my writing fits in the present landscape.
Aside from new ways of making a poem in response to modern art (the focus of my thesis), I’m particularly interested in aligning myself with the current trend of exploring hybrid forms, such as the prose poem or the lyric essay. My current project follows in this vein: a memoir that includes prose poems.
Patrick Wright has a poetry collection, Full Sight of Her, published by Eyewear and nominated for the John Pollard Prize. He has been twice shortlisted for the Bridport Prize and teaches English Literature and Creative Writing at the Open University. He has just completed a PhD in Creative Writing on the ekphrasis of modern and contemporary art, supervised by Jane Yeh and Siobhan Campbell.
In June 1885, three Frenchmen – the prince Edmond de Polignac, Count Robert de Montesquiou-Fezensac, and the ‘celebrity gynaecologist’ Dr Samuel Jean Pozzi – arrived in London. They went shopping, had dinner with Henry James, and went home. It’s a thin premise for a story, fictional or real, yet from it Julian Barnes has woven a typically rich and absorbing tapestry in The Man in the Red Coat (2019).
From A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters (1989) to Levels of Life (2013), Barnes has spent a long and garlanded career eluding categorisation and The Man in the Red Coat is no exception. Is it a group biography, a biography, or something else? As a portrait of its three protagonists it’s more than lopsided, since Barnes largely ignores Polignac in favour of Montesquiou and Pozzi, both of whom make fascinating subjects in their own right. Montesquiou was a snob with a taste for cruelty, picking up talented boyfriends and destroying them when he grew bored. The dark allure of his character was not lost on artists of the time, and the count appears in several novels, including Huysmans’ À rebours (1884) and Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913-27). He was also the model for Whistler’s Arrangement in Gold and Black (1891-2). It’s perhaps this artistic over-representation that encourages Barnes to focus on Pozzi, himself the subject of Sargent’s Dr Pozzi at Home (1881), a portrait that provides the cover, the title and the inspiration for this book.
Image of book cover for ‘The Man in the Red Coat’ by Julian Barnes.
If Barnes recounts Montesquiou’s bad behaviour with relish, his sympathies lie firmly with Pozzi, a pioneering surgeon whose innovations in hygiene and surgical technique radically improved survival rates, particularly for bullet wounds to the gut. He treated both public and private patients and was tireless in his promotion of high medical standards all over the world. He was also something of an international playboy, hobnobbing with celebrities and taking mistresses to Bayreuth. Nor did his professionalism prevent him from seducing his patients, and Barnes is careful to trace the impact of his behaviour on his long-suffering family through the journals of his outraged daughter Catherine.
Pozzi himself kept no journal, and it’s perhaps for this reason that The Man in the Red Coat sidesteps conventional biography. In fact, for long stretches the book neglects Pozzi in favour of a stroll through fin de siècle Paris, with Barnes as flâneur and guide. It’s a world populated by artists, including Oscar Wilde, Sarah Bernhardt, the Goncourt brothers, Huysmans, Proust and a host of less illustrious figures, like the Symbolist poet and novelist Jean Lorrain, who wasted his talent in endless feuds (he once fought a duel with Proust).
Writing in the fragmentary, episodic style familiar from his recent fiction (The Sense of an Ending, The Noise of Time), Barnes grants himself licence to stray into any area that takes his fancy – the Dreyfus affair, duelling culture, Oscar Wilde’s tour of the US – and in many ways The Man in the Red Coat reads as a compendium of familiar Barnesian enthusiasms, including Flaubert, literary style, the nature of biography and 19th-century France. As a result the book, while never less than entertaining, is more extended essay than biography, a companion piece to Something to Declare (2002), his essay collection on French culture, liberally sprinkled with colour plates and photo cards of fin de siècle celebrities. It meanders, with frequent detours, through Pozzi’s life in loose chronology, before eventually arriving at his demise.
One of Barnes’ preoccupations – here as elsewhere – is with the challenges of historical memory. ‘“We cannot know”’, he writes, ‘is one of the strongest phrases in the biographer’s language,’ and in a late section entitled ‘Things we cannot know’, Barnes lists some of the unanswerable questions that surround Pozzi’s life. Many novelists would view the gaps in the historical record as an opportunity, as Barnes is well aware: ‘All these matters could,’ he notes, ‘be solved in a novel.’ Which begs the question: why didn’t he weave a novel out of such rich – and tantalisingly incomplete – material? After all, he has done it before: both Flaubert’s Parrot (1984) and Arthur and George (2005) made fiction from nineteenth-century lives. It’s a question that only intensifies at the book’s denouement, when a disgruntled patient shoots Pozzi in the gut and the most celebrated surgeon of the age suddenly finds himself under the knife. Here Pozzi’s life assumes the pattern of art. For some novelists the symmetry would be irresistible (Ian McEwan made a similarly ironic plot twist the climax of Saturday). But Barnes is unmoved. As a novelist he is allergic to neat plotting and glib denouements and, as Sebastian Groes and Peter Childs have pointed out, ‘the unanswered and unresolved meanings of life and death suffuse all Barnes’s work’ (2011, p. 9). In Barnes’ view, it is not the job of fiction to stitch life into pleasing patterns and shapes. It’s only in non-fiction that ‘we have to allow things to happen – because they did – which are glib and implausible and moralistic’ (Barnes, 2019, p. 258). It’s this commitment to life’s complexity, and the limits of knowledge, that accounts for the book’s episodic structure, a structure that, through its gaps and silences, its detours and shifts in focus and tone, embraces mystery, leaves loose ends untied and offers more questions than answers. In Flaubert’s Parrot, Geoffrey Braithwaite likens biography to a fishing net, ‘a collection of holes tied together’ (Barnes, 1984, p. 38). Nearly 40 years on from that award-winning novel Barnes is still fishing in these philosophical waters, hauling lost treasures from the deep, inspecting the flotsam, and contemplating all the things lost at sea.
The Man in the Red Coat is available in hardback.
Barnes, J. (1984), Flaubert’s Parrot, London: Picador
Groes, S. & Childs, P. eds (2011), Julian Barnes: Contemporary Critical Perspectives, London: Continuum
For those first, intense weeks of lockdown, I seemed to be out of step with the rest of the world. Everyone was telling Twitter how much time they had to walk through nature and take up knitting, to make TikTok videos and bake bread (if they could track down yeast). Frankly it sounded wonderful but it was not my experience. Quite the contrary, I was chained to my desk trying to write a novel in four weeks – the most intense working challenge of my life.
It started when my agent rang me out of the blue to say that my publisher had ‘had an idea’ and thought I might be the writer to bring it to fruition. Piatkus publish my historical novels as Joanna Courtney. These are works set in 1066 and earlier that take at least a year to research and write, but what they wanted from me now was a contemporary novel, a lockdown love story. Needless to say, we had to move fast.
I was perhaps not as bizarre choice as that makes it sound. Two years ago I’d started writing contemporary fiction as Anna Stuart for another publisher, Trapeze. Both books (Bonnie and Stan and Four Minutes to Save a Life) had done well so hopefully that was some quality assurance for them. More importantly they knew that I’m quite efficient when it comes to writing – though none of us were sure if ‘efficient’ would add up to a 70,000-word novel in four weeks.
This, I was told, was an ‘IP (Intellectual Property) Project’ in which the core idea for the novel had been invented by the publisher – to be precise a lovely editor called Hannah – and I was the ‘hired pen’ to bring it to life. It’s not like ghost writing as I was simply given a handful of characters and a plot outline with the rest very much mine to bring to life. However, because it was her idea the editor was very bought in and very, very helpful in how we put it together. That was to be invaluable in the intense weeks that followed.
I loved the basic concept and the characters seemed to come to life for me instantly so I fleshed out Hannah’s core plans and within a week we had signed a deal. It was hard to credit. Having spent years and years trying to land a novel contract, I felt as if I was suddenly being handed one on a plate – now all I had to do was write it. Simples! Except that my normally empty house was now filled with a husband working from home, two kids who should have been doing GCSEs and A-levels, and a 23-year-old stepson who’d had to flee his lovely job in the ski-bars of Whistler. It was a worry. I like a quiet house to write in and I certainly wasn’t going to get that.
As it turns out, however, the young folk quickly went nocturnal, leaving things pretty quiet until at least midday and with my husband working with China we were both at our desks by 7am – my most productive time anyway. Plus, to be fair to the kids, they stepped up and took on both the cooking (enthusiastically) and the cleaning (less so!), so all I had to do was shut myself in my little office and write. To be honest, I loved it.
The novel is called Just the Two of Us and is about a middle-aged couple whose kids have left home and who are on the brink of divorce when they find themselves locked down together. All that enforced time in the house pushes them to explore the things that have messed up what was once a wonderful marriage and to see if, perhaps, there’s a way back to happiness. It cuts between the current story and flashbacks to their long, shared past and was fun to write, if a little tricky in terms of timelines.
That, however, is where my editor came in. I provided the first 28,000 words in a week (it was a hell of a week!) and she was back to me two days later – that’s almost unprecedented in the publishing world! It was the same again once the first draft was done three weeks later. We chatted on the phone and over email and tinkered with second and third drafts and, miraculously, six weeks after I signed the contract, we sent Just the Two of Us to copy edit at 80,000 words. It was a whirlwind but fantastic fun and, most importantly, early reviews from NetGalley readers suggest that people are really enjoying it.
How did we do it? I’ve no idea! I’m a planner. I always have a full chapter-by-chapter synopsis of my novels, historical or contemporary, before I start so that I can hit the ground running and I think that helped here. I have no idea how people manage to just start writing without knowing where the novel is going, but everyone has to write the way that suits them best. It seems that for me that is in a manic, concentrated run.
Lessons learned? The biggie is that traditional publishing houses can be more mobile and responsive than they usually let on and I think that’s the way they’re going to have to go with digital-first publishers producing books so nimbly these days. For myself, it confirmed that I like working under pressure – and that I really like not doing housework!!
My agent did scare me the other day by saying ‘I know how fast you can write books now, so I expect at least three next year.’ In this, she will be disappointed. Just the Two of Us was a one-off, driven by the strange coronavirus circumstances we all found ourselves in. I may not have learned to knit, or made TikTok videos (to my kids’ relief) but I did write a lockdown love story.
Jo Wilde is on twitter and facebook as @jowildeauthor
