Announcing our inaugural Online Writer-in-Residence

We’re delighted that June Caldwell will be our inaugural Online Writer-in-Residence. Stay tuned for updates from her in the coming months.

In the meantime she was in the Centre recently so we took the opportunity to chat with her about the moral elements of writing for Humans of No. 19. 

‘For years I thought I chose the wrong path because I was never happy with journalism, I hated it. Now I look back and I think that was really great grounding for my writing. To me creative writing is a moral form, it’s a way to look at the connection between human behaviour, events and how we perceive things. That’s what is so interesting about creative writing compared to journalism; you’re limited by what you can do in journalism, you’re only writing the facts but with creative writing you can take it a lot further. You can try and understand what the hell is going on in someone’s head and you can recreate the events around that, the drama which might give you a sense of horror, completion or whatever. My stories tend to have some kind of social element to them and they have a journalistic twist because the journalist in me is still so strong. I’ll take some of the facts, make them surreal in some way and play around with them. I think creative writing is way more powerful than journalism, I really do. You can find a new way to present the truth.’ 

And, we’re thrilled to announce the exciting news that June has just signed with New Island for a short story collection, due 2017.