NATURE, WRITING AND PLACE - a new MA programme at Tremough
‘Nature, Writing and Place’ is a unique new premium MA at Tremough beginning this September. It is devoted to literature and imaginative writing, and publishing, in three strands of study: ‘Thinking Place’, ‘Writing Place’ – including a ten-day field trip to Connemara – and ‘Publishing Place’. You will study the literary and cultural history of the concepts concerned – ‘nature’, ‘place’, ‘picturesque’, ‘landscape’, ‘habitation’, ‘heritage’ and many others – from Early Modern times to the present across a wide range of texts, both literary and visual.
You will develop your imaginative writing skills with a practical view to producing work of professional and creative quality for publication in a variety of possible journalistic and other outlets, including a new course magazine PENINSULA, in the context of writing about place, as exemplified by the literary magazine ARCHIPELAGO. The course will be run by Professor Nick Groom and Professor Andrew McNeillie, founding editor of ARCHIPELAGO, in collaboration with other colleagues in the humanities and sciences. There will be masterclasses by visiting writers and artists and other practitioners involved in the fields of wilderness, landscape and nature at this environmentally critical period in the history of human interaction with the planet.
This is a course for our times, like no other, designed to take literary study out of the library and into the world. It will equip its students with marketable skills as writers, and in the fields of heritage and conservation, or equally enable them to embark on doctoral work.
To learn more in the immediate short term, contact Professor Nick Groom on or Professor Andrew McNeillie direct on . For full course information visit the University of Exeter website.
ARCHIPELAGO Issue Three
Announcing the forthcoming publication of ARCHIPELAGO Issue Three, available in late February / early March 2009
The third issue of ARCHIPELAGO embarks on rough seas in a troubled world. It does so once again in the spirit of Herman Melville’s character Ishmael, who shipped aboard the doomed Pequod, metaphor for America and the western enterprise. Ishmael called his whaling voyage ‘a sort of brief interlude and solo between more extensive performances’ : namely a presidential election and a ‘Bloody Battle in Afghanistan’. So it is for ARCHIPELAGO. Our voyage is a brief interlude, a cry in the wilderness, across the waste of waters, in the wake of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the luxury yacht Climate Change. Undaunted we offer celebratory interactions with landscape and nature, history and remembrance, by both writers and visual artists, including: Norman Ackroyd, Niamh Clancy, Tim Dee, Ivor Gurney (represented by five hitherto unpublished works), Michael Longley, Peter McDonald, Robert Macfarlane, Osip Mandelshtam, John Montague, Les Murray, David Nash, Bernard O’Donoghue, Heather O’Donoghue, Patrick Parrinder.
‘Praise God for Poetry – it is a good thing and fills up spaces in landscape and life with human interest and memory,’ wrote Ivor Gurney. Praise what or whomsoever you will. Ishmael speaks of ‘the great flood-gates of the wonder-world’. This issue’s ‘wonder-world’ reaches from Shetland in the Northern Hemisphere as far as the Southern Seas, to the biggest island of them all, as figured in the work of Les Murray. Once again the defiant lyric voice is heard in our pages, and it speaks volumes more than its proportions suggest, like the wren or the Shetland blackbird, as described in Tim Dee’s brilliant midnight rhapsody ‘Darkless Night’.
At more than 114 pages this third ARCHIPELAGO remains the best of bargains: £10.00 (including p&p for UK and Ireland), plus £5.00 p&p (rest of the world). To reserve a copy, click here to download the order form, and return it by post, complete with payment (sterling cheques only made out to CLUTAG PRESS), to the address shown: Clutag Press, PO Box 154, Thame, OX9 3RQ.
The Editor: Andrew McNeillie, 3 February 2009
ARCHIPELAGO Issue Two Has Arrived
We are pleased to advise you that copies of ARCHIPELAGO Issue Two have now arrived and that pre-orders are currently being dispatched.
