Marianne Wheelaghan BA (Hons) MA

My first foray into creative writing got me a slap in the face from my then primary teacher, Miss Robertson. I was seven. She was a scrubbed-cheeked battle-axe, permanatly embraced in a shiny blue nylon overall. I told myself Miss Robertson picked on my creamed Smashed-mashed potato clouds because I was cheeky, and tried to ignore a nagging doubt that I’d brought the slap on myself for having thought my story could have deserved a gold star. It has to be said that she did put me off writing for quite some time, but, fortunately, not forever.
By the time I was thirty something (and various jobs later), I was happily working overseas in Kiribati, encouraging, rather than discouraging, young people to write their own dramatic stories. I was also working with the National Drama Company of Kiribati, and wrote my first full length play, INDEPENDENCE, which was premiered on Tarawa.
In 1996 I left the Pacific (after ten years or so in the area) and returned to live in Edinburgh, my home town. Since then I’ve written various plays/short stories as well as my first novel, ON TARAWA, which was also the major work for my masters degree (which I was awarded in 2002). I am presently working on my second novel - a literary thriller.
It was when I was overseas that I started my first (of many) distance learning courses, and became hooked. Distance learning gave me the opportunity to develop my writing skills, which would have otherwise been impossible at the time. However, it was not always easy “keeping going”. Not only could it take weeks, sometimes months, to receive a tutor’s “snail mail” response to my work, but with no other students to interact with, it was often a very lonely way to learn.
I believe in distance learning passionately, but don’t believe that feeling “isolated” is conducive to anyone’s creative development. Advances in online “conferencing” programs and the spread of the internet, mean that learning from a distance can now be fast and interactive. Writingclasses.co.uk has been set up to provide the kind of service that I would have appreciated pre-internet days. Nowadays, no one need learn in isolation.

As well as being director-tutor of writingclasses.co.uk, Marianne is an online creative writing tutor at the Open University and part-time creative writing tutor at the Office Of Lifelong Learning at Edinburgh University.