Marianne Wheelaghan BA (Hons) MA Creative Writing

I decided to set up writingclasses for two reasons: I love writing and wanted to share my passion for it with others. I believe to teach a skill is an honourable way to earn a living. In the words of Hanif Kureishi "I felt if I knew something, I should pass it on."

In January 2003, after a lot of research and much preparation, the first presentation of creative writing(1) began, with one tutor (me) and five students. Since then literally hundreds and hundreds of students have walked through our virtual doors. We now present four creative writing courses three times a year, including the brand new Magazine Article Writing (1), and are developing an Advanced Fiction writing course. We have four tutors, who are extremely experienced educators as well as accomplished writers. As for our students, they come from around the world and from all walks of life and are artists, builders, cleaners, doggy-walkers, nurses, journalists, teachers, hairdressers and tree surgeons (to name but a few).

I am often asked by these students if completion of one of our courses will help make him or her a famous writer. To this I have to say, probably not. It would be wrong to set up a false expectation of success. However, what is true is this: when you enrol on one of our courses you will discover that there is no mystery to being a good writer and that writing is not the prerogative of a chosen gifted few, but something all of us can learn to do, and do well – if we want to. For some of you, you will thoroughly enjoy your chosen course, take on board what you learn as part of a liberal education, and that will be enough for you. For others, however, it will be just the beginning, and as previous students have done, you will go on to do further courses. You may even eventually win a scholarship to pursue your writing further, and, yes, you may even publish your stories in magazines and/or elsewhere. And why do some of us keep writing while others do not? Because for some of us there is nothing more magical and wonderful than creating an engaging story from out of absolutely nothing. And luckily for us, there are hundreds and hundreds of people out there who want to read just such stories.

So what have I written? While I liked writing stories at school, it wasn't something I was necessarily very good at or started to think about taking seriously until I was in my thirties, when I started to write plays. Then I wrote short stories and now I write novels. The Blue Suitcase is my most recent novel. Partly based on a true-life story, it is the story of a teenage girl growing up in Nazi Germany. The Scottish novelist James Robertson says of it:

'We think by now that there can be no more untold stories from the 1930s and the Second World War. Then a book like this comes along and we are once again astonished by the capacity of some humans to do unspeakably cruel things, and of others to survive them. The simple, almost mundane tone of Antonia's diary makes The Blue Suitcase all the more shocking. It's hard to read, but harder to stop.'

What am I actually working on now? Two things: firstly, I am researching material for an other piece of historic fiction, which is set in Scotland and also partly based on a true-life story. Secondly, I am putting the finishing touches on 'Murder on Tarawa', a whodunit set on coral atoll in the middle of the Pacific. It will be out next year and I hope it to be the first in the Inspector Nata series. As they say, watch this space!

We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason why they write so little.

Anne Lammott