New Creative Writing Job at Edge Hill University

We are looking for a fiction writer at Edge Hill University.

Lecturer or Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing

Department or Faculty: Faculty of Arts and Sciences

Salary:  up to £40,430
Location:  Ormskirk
Hours:  Full Time
Duration:  Permanent 

Edge Hill University is one of the fastest growing universities in the United Kingdom and has been providing higher education for over 125 years, based on an ethos of opportunity through excellence. The past five years have seen student applications double, turnover increase at a rate of around 20% per annum, and an investment of £130m on campus.  Edge Hill is a dynamic and ambitious university with a clear sense of direction, and significant resources to invest in its future.  It is currently ranked in the top 20 of the Sunday Times 75 Best Companies to Work for in the Public Sector.

This is an opportunity for a fiction-writer with substantial experience in Higher Education. You will provide expert teaching in a variety of modes, including writing workshops, tutorials and online interaction, and facilitate student work in a range of different media.

The Department of English & History is home to a well-established Creative Writing section, in which students gain experience in all the major literary genres. The BA programme has recently been expanded to include a Single Honours route, and will continue to enable students to study Creative Writing in combination with a range of other subjects such as Drama, English, Film Studies, History and Media. The Department also runs the highly successful MA in Creative Writing, and has a growing number of doctoral students pursuing creative projects. The Department is committed to the practical career development of its Creative Writing students, and provides professional guidance as well as the development of literary skill.   There are opportunities to make substantial contributions to undergraduate and postgraduate curriculum design; the launch of the Single Honours route in 2011 makes this an ideal time for a new specialist writer to join the team. The successful candidate will be expected to generate publications suitable for submission to the Research Excellence Framework, and will also play an active role in the development of the university’s new interdisciplinary Centre for the Creative Industries.

Applications are invited from candidates with a proven record of published writing, as well as experience of university teaching. Candidates should be committed to innovation in Learning, Teaching and Assessment, and be reflective practitioners of HE teaching.

Informal enquiries may be addressed to Prof. Michael Bradshaw, Head of Department of English & History: 01695 650 942 / 944; michael.bradshaw@edgehill.ac.uk

DRIVE–Opening Credits

Mil Cretins

Language Activists | Endangered Language & Poetry in Mexico

The world is home to almost 7,000 languages, but some 90% of them will go extinct in the next 100 years. Isthmus Zapotec, spoken by about 100,000 indigenous Mexicans in Oaxaca, faces a dire threat: fewer and fewer children are learning it, favoring Spanish for a variety of reasons. 

Languages die incredibly quickly; within the span of three generations a language can be entirely gone. There are powerful socioeconomic reasons for abandoning indigenous languages, but often more practical issues contribute equally to their attrition. Imagine not being able to access entertainment in your mother tongue; not being able to read a book or listen to the radio or watch television in it. 

A brave community of Isthmus Zapotec poets and artists refuse to give up in their fight against linguistic attrition—they’re writing in their mother tongue, Diixda—Zapotec, maintaining its vitality and uniqueness in an increasingly homogenous world. Their solution is radical: they are Isthmus Zapotec poets. 

Los Angeles-based artists Ben Rodkin and David Shook are collaborating to document the life and work of contemporary Isthmus Zapotec artists and poets, by producing both a short-subject documentary film and a 5-chapbook set of indigenous Mexican poetry. 

RIP Thomas “T-Man” Daniel Leavines III

28 January 1949 – 16 January 2012

Günter Grass: On Christa Wolf

What had caused so much malicious will to destroy? A text written in the summer of 1979 whose themes were doubt, self-doubt, and the eavesdropping and overt surveillance of Christa Wolf and her husband by the State Security Service of theGDR. From the security of their own desks and intoxicated by the sort of gratuitous courage that seems to flourish in editorial offices like a potted plant, these critics accused her of having been too cowardly to publish her story as soon as she had written it. To do so, claimed Ulrich Greiner, “would surely have been the end of Christa Wolf as a state poet and probably have resulted in exile.” From his safe corner he asserted magnanimously that “she could easily have found shelter in the West.” And Frank Schirrmacher went so far as to accuse her in the plural: “Everyone recognizes that these are sentences from 1989, not 1979.” Neither acknowledged that it also took a decade for Sommerstück (“Summer Piece”), the novel she wrote after “What Remains,” to be published in the GDR.

What a prodigious amount of hypocritical outrage from the pens of journalists who had never been subject to state censorship, but who officiously and opportunistically served the zeitgeist.

Led by powerful and influential newspapers, the press campaign of 1990 continued on, again and again springing back to life. Echoes of it can even be heard in some of her obituaries. It was especially the term Gesinnungsästhetik [an aesthetics based on policial convictions], coined to describe the work of Wolf and many other post-war German authors, that to this day inspires the petty minds that want to lock up literature and its creators in a piece of real estate known as the Ivory Tower. Hard on its heels, the personalized neologism Gutmensch [do-gooder, politically correct person], an expression of the prevailing cheap cynicism, came into circulation and was posthumously applied to Heinrich Böll. At this late date, after Christa Wolf’s death, we should probably not expect that the spokesmen of that bygone campaign might apologize in print, if only to acknowledge the pain their odious behavior caused. They obviously lack the self-doubt that Christa Wolf evinced all her life—in excess, in my opinion.

(via the NYR Blog)

William S. Burroughs: A Man Within (Trailer)

Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void–Opening Title Sequence

Radiohead–Bloom (Live from the Basement)

Festival Robert Walser

Festival Robert Walser, 19-25 March 2012, Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK.