Evocative paintings, photographs and poetry can inspire and deepen your life writing skills. This six-week course will explore how visual imagery and wordplay can vividly evoke memories, reflections, musings and observations.
The course will spend two weeks on each medium – the first two sessions will explore our responses to works by painters including J.M.W. Turner, John Constable, Johannes Vermeer, David Hockney, William Kentridge and Penny Siopsis.
The fortnight on photography will include responding to works by Hockney, Cole and Goldblatt - we will also work with the photographs you choose to bring to the sessions.
In the final two weeks we will immerse ourselves in poems ranging from works by Gerald Manly Hopkins, E.E. Cummings, William Carlos Williams, Lemn Sissay, Leonard Cohen, David Whyte, Maya Angelou and Mary Oliver.
Your responses to these poems will inform your writing going forward and motivate you to think forensically about vocabulary and imagery choices.
Pam Cohen completed an MA in Creative Writing at The Open University where she specialised in Creative Non-Fiction and graduated with distinction. She was a print and television journalist in South Africa for some years, working for a women’s magazine, a national Sunday newspaper and British television, before coming to London. She has also worked as a teacher. She has a passion for both teaching and writing.
