Whether you are writing directly about your life or writing fiction, ultimately you base your stories on your experiences and those of others – the common human experience. This course will use life’s experiences as a source for your writing and will help you to bring them alive so that readers will want to keep reading.

Prose and poetry written about a work of art, known as ekphrastic writing, has a long tradition, from ‘The Iliad’ to Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ and Tracy Chevalier’s ‘Girl with a Pearl Earring’. This course will consider the many ways a painting can be used as the source of inspiration for a poem or story, including delving into setting, creating and deepening characters, generating atmosphere, investigating lyrical and figurative language, providing historical detail, and more. Previous knowledge of art or artists is not necessary, but where a student does have such knowledge, this can be called on.