The Writing School

A creative writing course is a chance for reinvention. When author Miranda France sets off to teach at a residential writing school in a remote valley, she expects to meet a group of aspiring writers with the usual mix of hope and unrealised ambitions, talents and motivation.

Tensions are bound to emerge over the course of the week they spend together: personalities will clash, egos will need to be tamed or gently encouraged. What France doesn't expect, as she takes her tutees through a series of exercises designed to help them explore different aspects of their writing, is that a ghost from her own life will join them.

As the daily drama of the writing school unfurls, so memories resurface concerning a death that profoundly shaped the author's world when she was a teenager. Soon France's memories interweave with her present task of thinking about writing and storytelling, and she too becomes a student: asking, what is to be done with our memories of those we have lost? What is behind the urge to put lives into words? And is it ever right to tell another person's story?

A delightful and unusual blend of storytelling and memoir, packed full of literary anecdote and insight from the author's own experience as well as that of other writers and poets, The Writing School is a moving and often very funny book about why people write, as well as being a uniquely generous masterclass on the art of writing itself.