Snuggling into rolling hills, away from the cares of the world, Moniack Mhor in Inverness-shire is the most northerly Arvon residential writing centre. I'm just back from tutoring a course on Writing for Children with Cathy MacPhail.
I love the atmosphere at the Arvon centres, the air seems to buzz with creative ideas. Perhpas it is something to do with being so remote and far from the interruptions of our normal lives, no television, away from emails and the internet and amongst like-minded people who are all there to write.
Midweek our guest speaker was Kathryn Ross from Fraser Ross Associates who talked about the job of a literary agent. She gave the students lots of useful information and they grilled her all evening - with lots of interesting questions.
Our 16 students were keen and worked very hard over the week producing work that was at times quite dark but at others you could probably have heard the peals of laughter for miles around.
There were moments of sheer delight as they read the results of their 'homework' exercises with tales of fantasy, adventures, sadness and love.
Taking a break in the kitchen between sessions.
an intense debate
Discussing a class exercise
At the last session they excelled themselves and we even had one hilarious story about a rather disgruntled spider with literary aspirations who had secretly joined our group and fallen in love, only to find it was unrequited!
Well done everyone - for working so hard and thank you for being such good company.
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I was on the course and it was great. Highly recommended!
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