The Knowledge

We’re taking over the Albany for a whole day and bringing in the experts to give you the hard skills and the know-how to take forward your writing career. What you do outside of your writing room to get your work to publisher and audience can be as crucial as the words you put on the page. Whatever your genre and whether you are an aspiring writer or already published/produced this day of talks and workshops will equip you to make the most of your talent. To help Spread the Word celebrate our 15th anniversary and to bring you live writer inspiration we’ve commissioned the brilliant poet John Hegley to tell you all about ‘15’ as only he can, and author Bidisha will launch the day with her take on being 15 and what she wished she known when she was….

9:30am Registration
10am Welcome with Bidisha

Morning
In the morning sessions you can get an inside view of publishers’ decision-making and explore different routes for taking your creative practice forward.

You will have the chance to attend two of the sessions from the morning and one of the sessions from the afternoon. Places on the morning and afternoon sessions will be allocated on a 1st come 1st served basis. We suggest you arrive early to reserve your place on the day.

Creative Writing MA Exposé (Panel discussion and Q&A)
What will you gain from taking time out to do a creative writing MA? How will it help you develop your work? Which one is right for you? Your chance to discuss all this and more with City University and Birkbeck MA tutors and students.

Publishing Demystified (Talk with Q&A)
Why and how do publishers do what they do? Take a tour through the publishing process with professional editor Vanessa Neuling. Get the inside track on how publishers make decisions and negotiate offers, an overview of the editorial process, jacket decisions and the role of sales, marketing, publicity and rights.

Writers' Groups and How to Make Them Work…. (Workshop) Are you looking for a writers' group or thinking of setting one up yourself? Writers' groups can be a brilliant way for you to develop your work and get support, skilled critical feedback and deadlines to write to. Writer, facilitator and trainer Spike Warwick takes you through the steps of setting up a group, establishing ground-rules and essential tips for handling difficult situations.

Find me a Mentor! (Talk with Q&A)
Mentoring is often a powerful way to learn from professional writers. So how do you find a mentor? Who do you approach? What makes for a successful creative mentoring relationship? Also, if you are an established writer and would like to become a mentor, how do you go about this? These and many more questions will be discussed by artist, author and creative coach Michael Atavar, Nathalie Teitler, Project Manager of the Complete Works – Spread the Word’s two year mentoring programme.

1:15pm –2pm: Lunch Why not enjoy a relaxed and tasty lunch in the Albany Café?

2pm-2.20pm A post-prandial boost of poetry and ukelele from the inimitable John Hegley.

Afternoon
The afternoon is all about writers ‘getting out there – and staying out there’. Find out how to market yourself and your work from a publishing an industry expert or learn how to build up a practice delivering creative writing activities in education and community settings. Plus an opportunity for playwrights to look at what’s offered through playwriting MAs and career support beyond this.

You will have the chance to attend one of the sessions from the afternoon:

Spreading the Word and Reaching an Audience (Workshop)
How do you generate enthusiasm for your work – whether you’re getting an agent or publisher on board or promoting it post publication? In this workshop, author, and publishing marketing expert Alison Baverstock covers everything from submissions letters to launch and beyond. Her advice is imaginative, practical, pragmatic – and it works.

Making a Living as a Writer (Workshop)
Running creative writing activities in schools and community settings is not only a good way to earn money whilst your manuscript filters through literary departments and publishing houses, but it is also personally rewarding and creatively exciting. Playwright Fin Kennedy and novelist Jenneba Sie-Jalloh take you through the essential steps of developing your ideas, approaching organisations, delivering the workshops and reviewing what you have achieved.

Playwriting Futures (Talk)
The traditional route into playwriting has always been the sending of unsolicited scripts to producers, but what alternatives are there if you want to get started in this field? John Ginman, Course Convenor for Goldsmiths' College's MA in Writing for Performance and Sarah Woods who convened the Birmingham Playwriting MA for several years will look at other ways into the business in a discussion chaired by Ben Payne.

The Knowledge: the Competition
And whilst you're about it, why not take part in our Competition? Join Bidisha and John Hegley with your take on what you did and didn't know when you were 15. You can write it on the day or better still bring it with you and post it in the competition box. Poems: 15 lines, Prose/Playscripts: 150 words. The winning entry will be published on the Spread the Word website and featured in our newsletter.

And the winner is... Join John Hegley for the announcement of the winner of our Competition and hear the five finalists read their pieces!

Sunday 21 March
9.30am-5pm

The Albany
Douglas Way
London
SE8 4AG

£55/ £45(concessions)

The experts:

Alison Baverstock has been a publisher, is the author of 18 books, and now runs the MA in Publishing at Kingston University, where she also offers seminars on marketing to prospective writers. 

Vanessa Neuling has worked as a commissioning editor for Random House, acquiring literary and commercial fiction and memoirs and seeing books through from first draft manuscript to bookshop shelf.  Prior to that she was a junior editor at Virago, working alongside the publisher on bestselling, prize-winning authors including Sarah Waters, India Knight and Michèle Roberts. She now works as a freelance editor and literary consultant and her regular clients include Guardian Books, Random House and Little, Brown. 

Bidisha began her career at the age of 15, writing for numerous arts and style magazines and newspapers. She signed the deal for her first novel, Seahorses, at the age of 16. Her second novel, the thriller Too Fast To Live, followed when she was 21. She has had regular columns in The Big Issue, The Independent and the Guardian and is a radio and TV broadcaster, presenter and critic as well as a novelist and memoirist. Her third book, the travel memoir Venetian Masters, was published in 2008. A former Night Waves presenter, Bidisha currently presents The Strand on the World Service, Saturday Review and various documentaries for Radio 4.  She was one of the judges of the Orange Prize for Fiction 2009 and will be judging the John Rhys Llewellyn prize in 2010. She studied at Oxford University and the London School of Economics.

Spike Warwick is a qualified and experienced group trainer who has been working with writers at all levels for over fifteen years.  She has published articles ongroup dynamics and management, and specialises in using creative exercisesand laughter to enable participants to learn and develop. 

Michael Atavar has made over 30 professional pieces - galleries, live, digital, print. Output spaces include the ICA, the Hayward Gallery and the V&A. In 2000/1, as part of the Year of the Artist, he was artist in residence at the Guardian Newspaper. He has worked in many different contexts - as a coach, artists’ advisor and workshop leader. Recent clients include Rosemary Butcher, Lambeth Arts, Portland Green Cultural Projects and Stockholm City Council. He is a trained Transpersonal Psychotherapist (CCPE).  His book ‘How To Be An Artist’, published by Kiosk, is out now. 

Fin Kennedy is an award-winning playwright whose work has been produced in Britain and internationally and commissioned by BBC Radio. Plays include Protection  (Soho Theatre 2003), How to Disappear Completely & Never Be Found Out (Sheffield Crucible).  He has written several plays for the Half Moon Young People’s Theatre and for the past three years he has been writer in residence at Mulberry School in Tower Hamlets where he teaches playwriting to staff and students and writes plays for the students to perform at the Edinburgh Festival.  He is a visiting lecturer at Goldsmiths College, Central School of Speech and Drama and Boston University.

John Hegley was born in Newington Green, North London, and was educated in Luton, Bristol and Bradford University. His first public performance monies came from busking his songs, initially outside a shoeshop in Hull, in the late Seventies. He performed on the streets of London in the early Eighties, fronting the Popticians, with whom he also recorded two sessions for John Peel, and has since been a frequent performer of his words, sung and spoken, on both local and national radio. He has produced ten books of verse and prose pieces, two CDs and one mug, but his largest source of income is from stages on his native island. An Edinburgh Festival regular, he is noted for his exploration of such diverse topics as dog hair, potatoes, handkerchieves and the misery of human existence. He is an occasional DJ, dancer and workshop leader, using drawing, poetry and gesture. He has been awarded an honorary Doctorate of Arts from what is now the University of Bedfordshire, and once performed in a women's prison in Columbia.