The Knives, out for the night, at City Lit Talks Back

The City Literary Institute ('City Lit') in London's Covent Garden is one of the nation's great institutions for adult education, and I've been pleased to teach various short courses in Creative Writing there over recent years.

They also do a grand job of making a regular platform for their students to present work in a very public forum: namely the big Tottenham Court Road branch of Waterstone's, which plays host to a monthly City Lit Talks Back where tutors and learners alike can get up to read whatever they've been working on.

I took a turn there myself a few weeks ago, in a slot kindly created for me so as to mark the paperback publication of The Knives. I enjoyed myself, generally as a listener, and specifically when an MP's assistant told me she was buying a copy of the novel as he'd been told it was brilliant. But by whom? I'm still hoping for a chance to speak in the Commons, you see, even if it's only a meeting room...

My course in Non-Fiction Writing at The City Lit: April 24 - July 10 2015

From April 24 to July 10 I'm going to be teaching a class in Non-Fiction Writing at the City Lit in Covent Garden. Simply put, this will involve me and the students reading and appreciating the works of some high-order exponents of contemporary non-fiction, and the students producing their own written work for class discussion on a weekly basis. I think it'll be fun. Anyone is welcome to book a place, please do tell your friends etc.

Among the writers whose work I expect we will be looking at are:

Simon Armitage (Walking Home)

Gordon Burn (Somebody’s Husband, Somebody’s Son)

Ian Buruma (Murder in Amsterdam)

Roger Deakin (Waterlog)

Joan Didion (The Year of Magical Thinking)

Ian Hamilton (In Search of J.D. Salinger)

Robert Hughes (The Fatal Shore)

Janet Malcolm, (The Journalist and the Murderer)

Norman Mailer (Miami and the Siege of Chicago)

V.S. Naipaul (Area of Darkness)

Gitta Sereny (Cries Unheard)

Claire Tomalin (The Invisible Woman)

Among the issues I imagine I'll be exploring with the students:

- Structure, narration, point-of-view; 

- how to work up your inchoate ideas; 

- how to be honest on the page; 

- how to explain the way that a thing works; 

- how to describe what people and places look like; 

- how to convey the ways people speak; 

- how to explain a sequence of events interestingly; 

- how to fathom one’s memories accurately...;

- ... and how not to fabricate them; 

- how to bear witness to human misery;

- how to write about people and things of which you disapprove; 

- how to keep good notes, how to conduct interviews; 

- how to begin a piece of writing; 

- and, oh yes, how to end it.