OK so this is news that stays news as they say…<\/p>\n
In 1963-4 Raymond Carver left the Iowa Writers Workshop..he drove to Sacramento.\u00c2\u00a0I have just metaphorically done the same only I don’t have a car and cannot drive (his was a battered Chevrolet not a Cadillac by the way).<\/p>\n
I hinted at this news in previous posts but now as the paperwork almost complete I can say it.<\/p>\n
I have left the NTU Creative Writing course. I completed one term.<\/p>\n
The previous Fine Art M.A.was too recently completed. Too many personal politics and career questions clouded my\u00c2\u00a0decision-making\u00c2\u00a0(a hangover from various complications within the School of Art and Design). Most of all I simply couldn’t face yet more modern educational tick-boxing (we call it learning outcome grids, I know I have written and marked hundreds of them) when all I wanted to do was write and make stuff. I didn’t feel like I had left work at all and I was paying for it. \u00c2\u00a0Not a good feeling. I really enjoyed David Belbin’s rigorous ‘prose poem’ classes and most of the core lectures.<\/p>\n
I simply made a mistake by pursuing yet another M.A. within my own institution but this decision was shaped by practicalities and mostly financial considerations to do with travel. I originally looked at Sheffield University and Hallam and even Lincoln. I didn’t consider Nottingham University because I felt that would be undermining NTU to go there.<\/p>\n
In the end I simply didn’t feel comfortable in a class mostly 30 years younger to be honest.\u00c2\u00a0I was swimming upstream in muddy water from the get-go a bit like one of Carver’s fish ( see a poem below written in 1989 before most in class were born!). I wish all the class and their tutors every success and look forward to the Anthology launch:-)<\/p>\n
The experience has helped\u00c2\u00a0me\u00c2\u00a0determine that I am not an ‘academic’ poet. Never was and never will be. I may be an academic art researcher we shall see.<\/p>\n
I now attend monthly poetry sessions at the Nottingham Writers Studio<\/a> and feel far more relaxed and creative. In all other respects things have been going very well and I could not be happier.<\/p>\n I intend to create as much ‘stuff’ as possible in the next few months I have left on ‘career break’ before returning to NTU SAD in July 2015.<\/p>\n There more than one way to catch a fish after all…<\/p>\n The image above is a cover of a self-made booklet of poems I made in 1990 when working at The London Poetry Library it is in their collection it is titled ‘Diesel on Gravel’<\/p>\n
![\"diesel\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/shaunbelcher.com\/writing\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/01\/diesel.jpg?resize=150%2C150&ssl=1\")
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