Event overview
GLITS (Goldsmiths Literature Seminar)
For many people studying for a PhD in Creative Writing, producing the critical commentary is the most challenging part of the process and generates the most anxiety. How do you find a manageable project that both engages your interest and fits in with your novel, short stories, poems or life-writing? Is it better to work on the critical project alongside the creative writing, or leave it until the creative work is substantially complete? You are expected to ‘engage with relevant contemporary debates about theory and practice’ – what exactly does this mean? Critical writing is often very different from creative writing; how do you learn to write in these two distinct registers? Is the critical commentary a necessary evil, or can it actually support your creative work and help you to understand your writing process?
Three recent graduates of the Goldsmiths PhD in Creative Writing will tell the story of their critical projects: how they found a suitable topic; how they approached it; what the problems were; and how they overcame them.
We hope that this session will interest current PhD students and also anybody who is thinking about studying for a PhD in Creative Writing.
Tom Lee’s recently completed PhD in Creative Writing at Goldsmiths comprised a collection of thirteen short stories and a critical commentary entitled ‘The challenges of realism in the work of Tobias Wolff, Alice Munro and John Cheever, and in my own practice’. In it he combined close readings of Wolff, Munro and Cheever with reflections on his own creative work. Tom’s fiction has been published in the UK, Ireland, The United States, Portugal and Latin America, and his debut collection of short stories, Greenfly, was published by Harvill Secker. In 2012 he was shortlisted for The Sunday Times Short Story Award, the largest prize for a single short story in the world. His most recent publications, in The Dublin Review, have been non-fiction accounts of crises physical and mental.
Kate Miller completed her PhD at Goldsmiths in 2012. Her first full collection ‘The Observances’ was published in 2015 and was awarded the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize for first collection in June 2016. The essays in her critical thesis, ‘Observations of walks by the sea’ discuss the extent to which vision dominates or yields to an underlying physical or invisible response to place in three close readings of poems recounting walks by the sea.
Jocelyn Page completed her PhD, entitled 'Lawns of America and Other Poems & On My Mind: The Shared Vision of Collaboration in Absentia’ at Goldsmiths in 2015. Jocelyn is an American poet, originally from Connecticut, currently living in South East London. She has most recently published her work in The Spectator, Ambit, and The South Carolina Review. Her second pamphlet, ‘You’ve Got To Wait Till the Man You Trust Says Go’, was the winner of the 2015 Goldsmiths’ Writers’ Centre Poetry Pamphlet Prize in 2015.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 1 Dec 2016 | 6:30pm - 8:00pm |
Accessibility
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