Author: Catherine Griffin

The HWS Critique Group will be holding a one-off in-person meeting at the Railway Inn, Winchester, at 7:30pm on the 19th of November.

This is an ideal opportunity for new members to get involved: bring a few printed copies of your work to share (up to 1,000 words), or simply come along to meet the group.

Critique Group meetings are ordinarily held online at 7:30pm on the third Tuesday of each month – to get involved, contact Damon at damon.l.wakes@gmail.com – but for this one you’re welcome to just walk in.

For our January meeting, we’re delighted to welcome Alice Jolly as our main speaker.

Alice Jolly has written novels, plays, short stories and a memoir. She taught fiction at Oxford University for 16 years. She has won the Ackerley Prize for memoir and the V.S.Pritchett Prize (awarded by The Royal Society of Literature) for a short story. 

Her historical novel ‘Mary Ann Sate, Imbecile’ is written in the voice of a nineteenth century servant girl and was runner up for the £30,000 Rathbones Folio Prize in 2018. It was also longlisted for the Ondaatje Prize and was a Walter Scott Prize recommended novel in 2018.

Alice’s talk will focus on voice in historical fiction. For the writer, what are the opportunities offered by extra-ordinary first-person voices? And also what are the risks? First person voices can obviously bring a character vividly to life but how do they also create a sense of place, even a whole world?  

How do we create and construct a voice that is not our own and how do we write that voice onto the page? What is the role of rhythm in such writing and how reliable (or unreliable) should our narrator be? Do please read ‘Mary Ann Sate, Imbecile’ in advance. Alice will be pleased to answer any questions on that book or on historical fiction more generally.

Our guest speaker for this evening will be local author David Hill. He’ll be talking about different approaches to writing about art and artworks.

David Hill is a Scottish author, currently based in England, whose work combines fiction and art history. He is a graduate of Edinburgh University’s Creative Writing Programme (MA Distinction). Whilst studying for an MA in Art History from Birkbeck College, University of London, for which he received a Distinction, he became fascinated with reclaiming exploited female voices that had been written out of art history. His debut novel tackles one of the most extreme examples of this and was longlisted for the 2023 Bridport Prize.

The meeting will be Tuesday January 14th, at the Tower Arts Centre. Come along from 7:00pm. Talks start at 7:30pm. Members free, non-member tickets £10, students £2 (no advance booking, payment on entry).

For our December meeting, our main speaker was to be psychological suspense author Christine Hammacott, talking about the business of writing and publishing, thinking about your book as a product and the author as a brand.

Unfortunately she is ill and has had to cancel at the last minute. Apologies to anyone who was hoping to hear her — we’ll try to reschedule for another time.

Because she can’t make it, the programme for the evening will be less planned than usual but hopefully entertaining, with contributions from the book fair authors and Damon Wakes.

Our guest speaker is Jean Owen, publisher and creative director of Naked Figleaf Press, who will also be judging this month’s competition.

The meeting will be Tuesday December 10th, at the Tower Arts Centre.

Before the talks, we’ll have our regular December Book Fair — a chance for published authors to show off their books, and maybe sell some copies. Come along from 6.30pm to check out the books and talk to the authors.

Talks start at 7:30pm. Members free, non-member tickets £10, students £2 (no advance booking, payment on entry).

In a change to our programme, Alice Jolly will now be our speaker in January, and for November we’re happy to see the return of the popular local author and teacher Joanna Barnard.

Joanna won the inaugural Bath Novel Award in 2014 with her first novel, Precocious. She considered entering that competition to be the ‘last throw of the dice’ for her manuscript, and the decision led to her securing an agent, a two-book publishing deal, and a new career. Since then, Joanna has participated as a reader and longlist judge for the competition, and this year gave her ‘golden vote’ to the eventual winner. In this talk, Joanna will share what she has learned about writing competitions, including: how to hook the reader with your opening pages; common mistakes new authors make; and how important the synopsis really is.

Joanna Barnard is a published author, workshop leader and writing mentor, based in Surrey. After winning the Bath Novel Award in 2014, Joanna’s first two books were published by Penguin Random House, and she subsequently also qualified as a counsellor. Joanna’s two main passions, therapy and words, led to her designing and facilitating a series of workshops in Writing for Wellbeing. She also works as a freelance editor and writing coach and teaches creative writing classes for adults. Joanna continues to write and is working on her next novel.

Our guest speaker is Wendy Couchman. Wendy is a Winchester based artist and a retired academic from health and social care education.  Her art practice is in telling human stories, informed by her professional background.

Wendy will talk about her book Flora Twort’s War: the wartime diary of a Hampshire artist.

Flora Twort was an artist in Petersfield, remembered for her sketches and paintings of the town before the Second World War.  In her talk, local author and artist Wendy Couchman will describe her research and production process, drawing on her own creative background in the choice of the graphic novel format – the powerful combination of pictures and text to communicate the story.

Wendy will also be setting this month’s competition. If you’ve entered, make sure to attend so you can hear the result in person (and if you’ve won, get your certificate!)

The meeting will be Tuesday November 12th, at the Tower Arts Centre. Come along from 7:00pm. Talks start at 7:30pm. Members free, non-member tickets £10, students £2 (no advance booking, payment on entry).

For our October meeting, the main speaker is John-Paul Flintoff. He comes at writing with an unusually wide range of ideas: he’s been a newspaper and magazine feature writer, he’s trained in improvisational theatre, and he illustrates his own books and other people’s. 

“What I love about these different disciplines is that they all bring riches to each other. I simply can’t imagine how I’d manage without that mix.”

He’s published non-fiction, fiction, poetry, how-to books and memoir, in 16 languages. One had the diffident title A Modest Book About How To Make An Adequate Speech. His bestseller sounds altogether more self-confident: How To Change The World. 

“I must remember always to use self-confident titles in future,” he says.

He lives in London but had the good fortune to live in Winchester when he was tiny. 

His topic for the evening is how to make our writing more delightful. “There’s no point being harshly self-critical. But how to avoid complacency without it? How to keep making it better?”

Our guest speaker is Lynn Farley-Rose — who is both an author of marvellous non-fiction and the Hampshire Writers’ Society newsletter editor. She’ll be talking about her book The Interview Chain (which you should read, it’s very good).

We’ll also have the results of the October competition, judged by John-Paul Flintoff.

The meeting will be Tuesday October 15th, at the Tower Arts Centre. Come along from 7:00pm. Talks start at 7:30pm. Members free, non-member tickets £10, students £2 (no advance booking, payment on entry).