Have you always wanted to write? Now is your chance!

Whether you want to write your life story, develop a useful second income or graduate to a full-time occupation as a feature writer and author of fiction, this course will encourage you to get started and answer the basics of the craft. The sessions will include everything you need to know about writing and help give it a professional polish. No previous experience required.

Course Dates:

Monday 9th September to 21st October (with half term break on 28th October) and 4th November to 16th December, 10am to 12pm

These courses are consecutive and can be paid for together if preferred.

Do you love great poetry? This is the course for you. It is designed to look at the work of ten great poets drawn from a range of periods in English Literature. Although this course follows on from the previous course, it offers an independent new course designed to heighten appreciation of the poetry to inspire further exploration. Five of the poets to be explored are John Keats, Emily Dickinson, William Butler Yeats, TS Elliot and Philip Larkin plus John Clare, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Christina Rossetti and RS Thomas together with a rich treasury of extracts from many other great poets.

Course Dates:

Thursday 26th September to 24th October, 9.30am to 11am

Five Week Course £80.00

This course continues the study of another five great poets but this time covering William Blake, Dylan Thomas, Samuel Tylor Coleridge, Andrew Marvell and Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Course Dates:

Thursday 7th November 2024 to 5th December 2024, 9.30am to 11am

Five Week Course £80.00

The Great Gatsby                           

Five-week Course £85 (including the book)

Thursday 26th Sept to Thursday 24th October 11.45am to 1.15pm

The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald is regarded as one of the greatest American Novels of the 20th Century. What is it that makes it so enduring and great? Using close reading techniques this course will study the novel in detail with the aim of answering that question and to discover how, the brilliant author managed to create a fictional character who seems so real that he persists powerfully in our imagination long after we finish reading the book.

 The Tempest

Five-week Course £85 (including the book)

Thursday 7th November to 5th December 11.45am to 1.15pm

The beauty of Shakespeare’s poetic genius will be looked at closely together with the dramatic context. The aim of this course is to read the play together in a group and to study some of the issues relevant to it. Much of what we will do as we investigate will be experimental, but it is designed so the process of reading and portrayal is enjoyed by all. This will be central to the method and central to the fun of exploration.

Johnnie is a published Bloomsbury Educational author with over thirty years of experience teaching English Literature. He makes the learning active and fun.