Connections and Multiplicities with Afric McGlinchey

Course Summary

This course is designed for writers working in all genres, and those who have an interest in experimental writing.

Using a series of given prompts and innovative forms each week, we will arrive at new ways of processing our material to produce work that is alive and unexpected.

What I do in order to think is just take five things. It could be the five books on my desk or five words at random…and try to make the mind move from one to the other. Just the connection is where the thinking happens.

– Anne Carson

Course Outline

Week One: Convergence                                                         

We will respond to a series of prompts to play with the possibilities of connection and how this might produce unexpected outcomes.

Week Two: Coming at the secret slant

This week we will experiment with ways we can circle around a core issue, alluding to it without being overt.

Week Three: Free-associating

How do we reflect the prismatic nature of the world and our multiple selves in it? This week we will consider pieces in a jigsaw and see where they take us.

Week Four:  The power of lacunae and erasure

What’s left unsaid can be as powerful as the writing on the page. This week we’ll look at how to use the white space, what to put in and what to leave out.

Week Five: What’s the through-line?

This week, we’ll find ways of ensuring that out of many disparate elements, there’s a unifying theme.

Week Six: …and cut!

In the final week we’ll be using Elmore Leonard’s advice to ‘cut the parts that readers tend to skip over’ in a forensic editing session, with group feedback on our final work.

Course Outcomes

By week six, participants can expect to have up to three finished pieces of work, plus sufficient generative material and new tools from which to elicit future ideas.

Afric McGlinchey’s poetry collections, The lucky star of hidden things and Ghost of the Fisher Cat, were published by Salmon Press and in Italian translation by Casa Editrice L’Arcolaio. Her prose poetry memoir, Tied to the Wind, was published by Broken Sleep Books in 2021, and excerpts were broadcast over five nights on RTE’s The Book on One. A surrealist pamphlet, Invisible Insane (SurVision) appeared in 2019. Afric has twice been awarded a Literature Bursary by The Arts Council of Ireland and she was a recipient of the Kavanagh Fellowship in 2023. Her most recent publication is a second SurVision pamphlet, The Throat-Bird, published in 2024. A regular reviewer and workshop facilitator, Afric is also a freelance book editor and a mentor with the Munster Literature Centre. www.africmcglinchey.com.

Booked out? To be added to the waiting list for this course, please email info@irishwriterscentre.ie.