This post might make more sense if you read the ones below first – or at least An Arvon course and a poetry prize

It’s the half term break, but I was at work anyway – I know that lots of people would be envious of my 10 weeks annual leave, but to be honest, it was partly because of the long holidays that I went into teaching in the first place, and when I started working in Adult Education, I got 14 weeks, so having that reduced to 10 in the last few years, hit me quite hard – but at least I still get a certain amount of satisfaction from it, and I’m pretty sure that this is due to my other ‘career’ – my writing.

I’ve already mentioned that the Arvon course at Lumb Bank changed my life, but there was a lot more to it than winning first prize in the Envoi poetry competition, and being invited to be part of the poetry ensemble, Late Shift.

I’ll be saying more about Late Shift soon, but first, there are other opportunities that can also be traced back to that same course. Maybe the most important for my writing development was the fact that I became a life member of the Friends of Arvon, and this entailed a regular news letter. The first one I received mentioned that there were still a few places left for the M.A. writing course at Nottingham Trent. The part-time option would involve a two year commitment of two evenings per week during term times.

I rang for more details, and liked what I read: This didn’t seem like a strictly academic approach, involving huge amounts of research into Eng Lit. It sounded very practical – everything would be based on our own writing and on critiquing each other’s work, with guidance from a small team of lecturers. There was a compulsory core programme which comprised weekly lectures given by relevant members of the university staff, and by visiting published writers. The other evening of each week would be set aside for the chosen subject area, one for the first year, the other for the second. I chose to start with fiction and then move on to poetry.

Just as I had sensed the need for a poetry writing group that would offer me challenge as well as support, I had already realised that, for my fiction in particular, I needed to be mixing with other writers who had the same needs, and taught by those who had already enjoyed some level of public recognition for their work.

To start with, though, what I felt I needed was support. In bucket-loads.

I had become (gradually) a confident , outgoing, outspoken person in my workplace. I enjoyed my job, which brought me into daily contact with all sorts of people. In fact, one of the unforeseen benefits of enrolling on the MA course, was that it would force me to cut back on the ‘gift time’ I was donating to my job, often working four evenings a week, instead of the expected two, simply because I found it so stimulating working with the students, constantly trying out new ways of helping them to use the wealth of the English language to express their own ideas more effectively.

I knew who I was in that environment – but here, back at university after all those years, conscious of being one of the few, much older ‘mature students’, unsure of the quality of my own expressive skills and creativity, I was suddenly as vulnerable as my teenage self had been.