After encountering and discussing a range of examples of neo-Victorian fiction in class, students could freely choose a nineteenth-century literary work, event, character, or cultural context to work with and formed groups accordingly. Students planned as well as designed three escape rooms that adapted Victorian literary and cultural texts and contexts: Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula, Arthur Conan Doyle’s character Sherlock Holmes, and the case of Jack the Ripper. They then started creating a narrative frame for their escape game. One afternoon at the end of term, all three escape rooms were then played by the other two groups of students in turns, while the group that designed it watched from another room via webcam. With bated breath each group watched as their fellow students explored the room they had set up and solved the puzzles they had created.
Having in the previous weeks examined a range of contemporary fiction, poetry, manifestos, scripts for plays, adaptations, etc. – we had a workshop session that expanded upon this by looking at female contemporary artists whose practice involves words. While there is a range of artists whose fine art includes this method, we looked particularly at Tracey Emin’s oeuvre, a practitioner whose career has consistently and centrally included words in themselves as an artistic medium. Inspired by her neon works in both public and private collections, the students had a go at imitating (as the sincerest form of flattery!) and emulating these. Through their own attempts at the ‘confessional’ and by employing wordplay – such as puns, subversion, playing with homonyms and homophones – in their own, distinct, handwriting making works of art by writing in their own right.
The inaugural cohort of creative writers decided to put together a selected anthology of the manifold works written by them over the university’s inaugural creative writing workshops series. After a number of additional editorial and design meetings they put together – Strawberry Sessions – the final title for a publication that includes a taste of the varied prose and poetry, fiction and non-fiction authored (and illustrated) by the students. The selection comprises: ekphrastic works, life writing pieces, contemporary fairy/folk-tales, the epistolary form, micro-fictions, haikus and performance scripts.
