‘Fusing creativity and craft to nurture the writer within.’
Established in 2016, the Kildare Writing Centre provides courses in creative writing in comfortable surroundings with small class sizes.
The Centre is offering three types of courses. A beginners/intermediate course one night a week for ten weeks, an advanced course also one night a week for ten weeks and a weekend course for all levels. The dates for the next courses are outlined below.
Dates
Ten Week Courses:
August 13th to October 22th (no class Sept 17th)(Writing the short story)
August 15th to October 24th (no class Sept. 19th) (Advanced Creative writing)
Weekend Courses:
Dates for the Autumn to be announced
Times & Location
Ten-week course: Classes run from 7pm – 10pm with a break of fifteen minutes for refreshments (supplied)
Weekend courses: Saturday 10am – 4pm with a morning break 11.30am -11.45am. Lunch 1pm-2pm. (both provided)
Sunday 10am – 1pm with a morning break 11.30am-11.45am. (Refreshments provided)
Accommodation is not provided for these courses but there are B&B’s, Inns and hotels in the vicinity.
Location:
23 Millford, Athgarvan, Newbridge, W12 YT51 Co. Kildare
Class sizes for all courses: Places are limited to eight.
Class content for the ten-week beginners/intermediate course:
Week one: Introduction: Getting started and openings.
Week Two: Characters: How to make them seem real.
Week Three: Plot: Beginning, middle, and end.
Week four: Point of view: Who tells the story?
Week Five: Setting: Exploring ways of using time and place.
Week six: Dialogue: Where there are people, there is talk.
Week seven: Description: Using the senses to bring your story to life.
Week eight: Voice/Style: Discovering your natural, narrative voice.
Week nine: Theme: What’s it all about…really?
Week ten: The writing life: Getting down to the nitty-gritty daily routines of writing and revision.
Class content for the weekend courses:
Saturday 10am-1pm: An introduction and exploration of the practice of creative writing paying particular attention to the short story form. Looking at how and where to begin a story. Examining the work of established writers to demonstrate what is best practice.
Saturday 2pm-4pm: An opportunity for the student to write and share and a detailed examination of characterisation, and how as a successful writer you can present fictive people in a way that makes them seem real.
Sunday 10am-1pm. A brief overview of the other major elements of a short story or novel and what it is you need to kick-start your writing life.
Class content for the advanced course:
Week one: Writing what you know and what you come to know.
Week two: The epiphany and anecdotal short story.
Week Three: Surprise, Suspense and Time in the short story.
Week four: Using Folktales and Fairytales in your writing.
Week five: John Gardner on the Art of Fiction.
Week Six: What we can learn from Raymond Carver and Flannery O’Connor.
Week seven: How to write like Chekhov.
Week eight: Redrafting and editing your own writing.
Week nine: Bringing it all together; an overview of the beginners/intermediate and advanced courses.
Week ten: Getting published.
Cost and registration
Fees: Cost for the ten-week courses is €300. A deposit of €30 is required to secure a place. The remainder €270 can be paid in full on the first night or in installments of €30 each night. Please note this is not a pay-as-you-go arrangement, regardless of whether or not you attend the ten weeks the fee is still €300. Refunds will only be available if the centre cancels a lesson.
The cost for the weekend courses is €85. You can pay a deposit of €30 and the remaining €55 will be due on the first day of the weekend.
You can pay the deposit through PayPal below. Cheques or postal orders made out to Pauline Clooney can be posted to the location address.
Option to pay the deposit with Paypal. Please specify in a follow-up email which course you are signing up to:
Testimonials: Click on the link.
Contact details
paulineclooney11@gmail.com, Phone. 087 6347377 or 045 442324
or via Facebook page: http://fb.me/kildarewritingcentre
Director: Pauline Clooney
Pauline Clooney grew up in the Midlands. She is an English, History and Creative Writing teacher. She holds an M.Litt on Charlotte Brontë from NUI Maynooth(2006), a 1st Class Honours Certificate in Creative Writing for Publication from NUI Maynooth (2013) and a 1st Class Honours MA in Creative Writing from UCD(2015). She is currently working on her debut novel.
She has organised the literary event as part of the Newbridge festival of Culture, June Fest since 2013 and its predecessor in the 1990s, Bealtaine.
Pauline has had her stories anthologised and shortlisted for the RTE Guide/Penguin Ireland Short Story competition and the Doolin Short Story competition in 2014. She has been longlisted for the inaugural Colm Tóibín Short Story Competition (2016), the Fish Short Memoir competition (2014) and the Fish Short Story Prize (2015 and 2018) and was placed second in the Doolin Short Story competition (2015).
She won the RTE Guide/Penguin Ireland Short Story competition in 2015.
