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February 7th 2023 - Workshop update and review struggles

I'm working on a short piece for my Goldsmiths course. It was prompted by a combination of a few things. We had a discussion about objects as a starting point for fiction. My first thought was Jon McGregor's book, So Many Ways To Begin where each chapter is titled with a different object such as 'Tobacco tin, cigarettes, Christmas card, 1914'. We'd also done a brief exercise in the class called 'I remember', where we simply started new sentences with 'I remember' and kept writing freely all of the things that came to mind. I've just finished reading Kathryn Scanlan's novella, Kick the Latch, which I adored but am struggling to review because it's so good and there's so much to say. Stylistically I've also taken some inspiration from that. I'm also leaning more into auto-fiction so a lot of what I'm putting down is coming straight from my life.


So the piece is a series of short vignettes (similar to Kick the Latch) prompted by memories (like the I remember exercise) titled with an object (similar to So Many Ways To Begin) that will hopefully culminate in a picture of a lifetime. The only difficulty is, Kick the Latch covered an entire life whereas I'm only 28 so instead of depicting a whole life I feel like it should depict some other common thing that threads through it. I think there's maybe something in there about relationships between fathers and sons, definitely some things around sexuality. We'll see what we end up with.


Otherwise the course is going well and I hope to get this review done by the end of the week ready to publish next weekend.

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