Thursday 16 July 2015

Summer Scribes: An Educational Journey

Students at Central College today released Summer Scribes, an anthology of their short stories and poetry, following a seven week creative writing and e-publishing programme.



It is available on e-book at just 99p and will be available on Friday 17th July as a paperback at £4.59




All profits go to Alzheimer Research.

The course - Creative Writing and e-publishing - is one of the few nationwide tertiary education courses which teaches e-publishing and very possibly the only one in which the students leave with their work published in a live anthology. 

This term's Creative Writing and e-publishing students.
One student (whose dark,  despairing Plath-influenced poems are a highlight)
was unable to attend last night's session and is therefore missing from this photograph.


We publish the piece LIVE on the last session (before, ahum, repairing for a celebratory pint at one of the oldest Inns in the world, Ye Old Trip to Jerusalem, in the shadows of Nottingham Castle).

The "Trip"

The students are in total control. They choose the topic of their short stories (there is no theme). It could be fiction, non-fiction or poetry, (increasingly popular and well represented here). 

They choose the cover (from Green Wizard's partner cover designer Dark Dawn Creations) and they choose the title and price. 

As most of the students have aspirations to create, we introduce them to the work of many of the Indie scene's top authors, including Terry Tyler, Georgia Rose, Lorraine Devon Wilke, Brenda Perlin and EL Lindley. 

We take a look at their novels and e-books. We watch them work live on Twitter. We talk about how they do it and assess what's possible for an Indie in the modern e-publishing world.

The students receive training and experience in key skills such as social media, blogging, bio-writing, blurb writing, SEO tagging and understanding the mindset of the modern e-reader.

It is their anthology. One of the students also presses the button to publish the final document. Here's Lynne Morley, one of the course students, publishing Summer Scribes live at 7.30pm last night.  


The programme is co-designed and delivered by social enterprise director and lecturer, Phil Pidluznyj, with technical support from Mark Barry, Nottingham-based author of six novels. 

The programme runs four times a year at Central College on Maid Marian Way and the next one starts in September. 

If you are interested in joining, contact Central College and they will book you on over the phone. 


Mission: Along with Brilliant Books, we are dedicated to making sure that everyone in the community has the opportunity to discover their authorial potential and, most of all, to love reading books 



Other work by students: All work here is available on Amazon in a variety of formats.

Winter 201




Spring 2014

And also Brilliant Books - anthologies written by "reluctant" readers at Seely Primary School, Sherwood, Nottingham



Brilliant Books 2014





Brilliant Books 2014







4 comments:

  1. Awesome work, guys! I love this project and can't wait to read (and review!) this one.

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  2. Brilliant course. Would highly recommend it. Mark and Phil were inspirations. Looking forward to reading the everyone's work in this new book.

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  3. This sounds like a terrific course to take, creative and with the practical element in there as well - what all writers need nowadays. Top stuff Mark and Phil :-)

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  4. This sounds wonderful, a great course to which there should be more like it.

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