Writing the Troubles with Fiona O’Rourke

Course Summary:

Writing the Troubles is an inclusive community for writers wishing to focus on the North of Ireland in their work in a safe and exploratory course that facilitates your right to write. Course content will explore how there is more than one experience of the Troubles and will include recommended reading for in-class discussion. Literature focused on the Troubles will include extracts from short stories, novels, memoir, essays and poetry, providing inspiration to generate new work and to develop works-in-progress.

Suitable for writers of fiction, poetry, memoir, and creative non-fiction.

Course Outline:

Week 1: Your right to write the Troubles

Week 2: Write your lived experience and/or inherited experience

Week 3: Learning another’s beliefs through literature

Week 4: Emerging voices

Week 5: Poetic champions

Week 6: Ceasefire babies, troubles of the mind

Course Outcomes:

Writers will have the opportunity to share their work in a safe and confidential writing community for peer appreciation and constructive feedback.

Through course exercises and homework (not compulsory) participants will have progressed their work and firmed up an existing or new writing project.

Fiona O’Rourke’s short stories, autofiction, and essays have been published, broadcast, and translated, and her debut novel was selected for the Irish Writers Centre Novel Fair. Since earning an MPhil in Creative Writing at Trinity College Dublin, she has facilitated courses in community, libraries and festivals, and provided mentorships for individuals. She was the curator and facilitator for Creative Responses to The Political Collection at the Linen Hall Library Belfast, and Northern Soul Roadshow for Irish Writers Centre supported by Arts Council Northern Ireland.

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