Foreword The work in this anthology has been solicited from the part-‐time and full-‐time campus Creative Writing MA groups at Lancaster University and its two part-‐time distance learning MA cohorts. It therefore represents different stages of engagement for those students. Our programme at Lancaster remains distinctive because of its ‘open’ or student-‐centred approach to teaching and learning. We have no set curriculum and no modular structures. All students work together – face-‐to-‐face or online – whether they are writing poetry, prose or scripts. The course is taught by published writers who have strong interest in pedagogy and who are continually making new work. Students come to us with a project they’re keen to develop, and we help to develop that project through the workshop process, challenging and shaping the work, making a curriculum from the writing itself, drawing out rather than instilling. Such freedom can be exhilarating both as a student and a teacher – it is also deceptively demanding because the writing projects themselves have to gain strength and independence to sustain the students and their tutors in such an ambitious joint enterprise. The breadth and range of the work in this anthology is a testament to this working method – there is no hint here of the production-‐line literature that is sometimes attributed to creative writing courses. As I turned the pages I was continually surprised by the freshness of the work and the strength of individual voices (whether in prose or poetry) and by the range of geographies (physical and psychological), cultures, subject matter and techniques. The creative work itself is intriguingly varied and it is only when turning to the biographies of the contributing writers that the reasons for this really become clear: our MA students comprise a remarkably diverse cultural grouping who have chosen to work in the medium of English. For me this is one of the great strengths of the MA at Lancaster, which brings together students from all over the world to explore the creative act of writing, which opens up debates about the provenance and future of language itself, which negotiates a hard-‐won identity for each writer and each piece of work. I hope you enjoy reading the work here as much as I did. For me the experience was of finding writers whose work I thought I knew evading my expectations through new i
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