We hope your summer holidays are getting off to a great start. Jennifer and I are looking forward to the Swanage Carnival next week. It looks as though there's a whole range of fun activities going on, including a sand art competition for adults. We'll be there for that one!
Next week also sees us running Creating Creatures at ArtSway in Hampshire, and Playing with Poetry at the Brittania Hotel in Bournemouth. Places are still available if you'd like to do some art and writing during the holidays - check our Upcoming courses page on our website for more information and more summer workshops.
We've had a busy few weeks preparing for our summer courses, and running two weekend courses at Kilve. The first was Tall Tales and Beautiful Beasts during which we had some wonderful stories, and junk models of fantasy creatures and imaginative worlds.
Two of my favourites stories were one set in a world that existed in a teardrop by Evan Turner, and the adventures of Henry Branch when he discovers a spaceship in an overcrowded attic by Lucy Osborne. I particualry like Evan's beginning:
'I bet you'd die of shock if I told you there are loads of worlds around us, hidden in clocks, books, rain drops and penlids. Today we are going to meet a man called Sid1 inside a child of two's teardrop.'
The idea that worlds exist inside teardrops and penlids really captures my imagination and intrigues me to read on.
Our second Kilve course was last weekend and it was a new course called Writing it Real. This course explores real-life fiction and historical writing and so is quite different to our more fantasy based workshops. We spent the weekend discussing the emotional hooks needed for such writing, as well as the imprtance of dialogue and description to really evoke our senses and make us believe in the story.
Students also got the chance to dress up as monks and wander about the ruins of Cleeve Abbey, imagining what life would have been like in the sixteenth century and thinking up ideas for historical stories. It was a great morning with lots of brilliant ideas. James Balai began a story about a young troublesome monk having difficulty keeping to the rules, and Christina Laird wrote about young monk who dreams about the destruction of the abbey by King Henry 8th and tries to save it. Both of these stories were inspired by an example of graffiti on the walls (done by monks hundreds of years ago), which shows how many different possibilities can spring from the same thing.
It was the first time we'd ever run the course and so we had to do lots of research in the weeks before hand, reading real-life fiction such as Jaqueline Wilson and Cathy Cassidy books, as well as other less-known authors such as Sally Nicholls who wrote Ways to Live Forever about a boy with Leukemia. It is a wonderful warm but heartbreaking book and I'd recommend reading it.
We had a lot of fun on the course, and all the students wrote engaging stories which they bound into booklets. Every student also made and kept their own diary for the duration of the weekend. Many, such as Ben Blackledge used their impressive artisitic skills to illustrate their writing.
Jennifer and I are both really excited about our summer workshops that are running over July and August and hope to see some of you on them. In the meantime, our third issue of the newsletter is out (see our website), and the winner of our second Poetry Competition was announced (Congratulations Alice Beresford!). Our next competition is for story beginnings. The opening pages of a story are sometimes the most important as those words can be the ones that entice readers further in, or repel them to slam the book shut. The story beginning should be at least two paragraphs long, and can be up to one A4 side. Send them to us by the end of September for the chance to see your story beginning on our webiste and win some Creative Creatures merchandise.
I went to see the new Harry Potter (Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince) film this week, and I really enjoyed it. I thought Draco Malfoy and Severus Snape were particulary well portrayed, but I would have liked to have seen a little more of Ron (he seemed to be stuck in the background for a lot of shots with Harry and Hermione). They had of course tweaked aspects of the book in order to fit so much into the film but mostly this worked, although the change at the beginning and an extra scene involving the Burrow seemed unneccessary. Anyone else seen the film yet? Let us know what you thought.
Well, that's it for now, Jennifer has just returned from the library with the final book in the Twilight Quartet: Breaking Dawn by Stephanie Meyer, and I want to have a look!
Have a good summer,
Rosie (and Jennifer)
Creative Creatures
'I bet you'd die of shock if I told you there are loads of worlds around us, hidden in clocks, books, rain drops and penlids. Today we are going to meet a man called Sid1 inside a child of two's teardrop.'
The idea that worlds exist inside teardrops and penlids really captures my imagination and intrigues me to read on.
Our second Kilve course was last weekend and it was a new course called Writing it Real. This course explores real-life fiction and historical writing and so is quite different to our more fantasy based workshops. We spent the weekend discussing the emotional hooks needed for such writing, as well as the imprtance of dialogue and description to really evoke our senses and make us believe in the story.
Students also got the chance to dress up as monks and wander about the ruins of Cleeve Abbey, imagining what life would have been like in the sixteenth century and thinking up ideas for historical stories. It was a great morning with lots of brilliant ideas. James Balai began a story about a young troublesome monk having difficulty keeping to the rules, and Christina Laird wrote about young monk who dreams about the destruction of the abbey by King Henry 8th and tries to save it. Both of these stories were inspired by an example of graffiti on the walls (done by monks hundreds of years ago), which shows how many different possibilities can spring from the same thing.
It was the first time we'd ever run the course and so we had to do lots of research in the weeks before hand, reading real-life fiction such as Jaqueline Wilson and Cathy Cassidy books, as well as other less-known authors such as Sally Nicholls who wrote Ways to Live Forever about a boy with Leukemia. It is a wonderful warm but heartbreaking book and I'd recommend reading it.
We had a lot of fun on the course, and all the students wrote engaging stories which they bound into booklets. Every student also made and kept their own diary for the duration of the weekend. Many, such as Ben Blackledge used their impressive artisitic skills to illustrate their writing.
Jennifer and I are both really excited about our summer workshops that are running over July and August and hope to see some of you on them. In the meantime, our third issue of the newsletter is out (see our website), and the winner of our second Poetry Competition was announced (Congratulations Alice Beresford!). Our next competition is for story beginnings. The opening pages of a story are sometimes the most important as those words can be the ones that entice readers further in, or repel them to slam the book shut. The story beginning should be at least two paragraphs long, and can be up to one A4 side. Send them to us by the end of September for the chance to see your story beginning on our webiste and win some Creative Creatures merchandise.
I went to see the new Harry Potter (Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince) film this week, and I really enjoyed it. I thought Draco Malfoy and Severus Snape were particulary well portrayed, but I would have liked to have seen a little more of Ron (he seemed to be stuck in the background for a lot of shots with Harry and Hermione). They had of course tweaked aspects of the book in order to fit so much into the film but mostly this worked, although the change at the beginning and an extra scene involving the Burrow seemed unneccessary. Anyone else seen the film yet? Let us know what you thought.
Well, that's it for now, Jennifer has just returned from the library with the final book in the Twilight Quartet: Breaking Dawn by Stephanie Meyer, and I want to have a look!
Have a good summer,
Rosie (and Jennifer)
Creative Creatures
