Subject Spotlight

The Senior School Creative Writing class have been fortunate to have a second round of workshops for 2024 with writer Tony Birch. This has been the fifth workshop our Year 12 students have taken part in since 2023. 

The students submitted extracts of their own creative writing projects to Tony prior to the workshop, who then provided the students with feedback. Tony then opened up discussion to invite students to share in strategies and stories about their writing practice.

These discussions spanned experiences about being open to change, how to fail (‘seven times falling, eight times standing’) and finding the conviction to pursue what matters to you, and what you love. Tony’s guidance was imparted with the generosity, warmth and humour that we have come to know and deeply appreciate from these sessions. 

We look forward to continuing with our workshops in Term 3, along with our In Conversation with Tony Birch evening, where Tony will speak about his latest novel, Women and Children, with the wider Preston High School community. 

The Junior School experience

This term the Junior School Creative Writing enhancement have engaged in thoughtful discussions of each other’s pieces, workshopping ideas, and developing their works. In our first mentoring workshop with Tony Birch, he asked each student: “what is a story that your parent tell about you?” and “who is the storyteller in your family?”. This opened discussion about the importance of stories and how we, and those close to us, make sense of our identities through the stories we tell. 

The juniors engaged with various writing exercisespoetry about found objects, place writing, describing people and writing a story about a scar. Each student wrote a postcard-sized story to develop over the course of the term. 

Students were told to “write with the freedom that they won’t be sharing and that they want to enjoy the writing”. Our small group of writers all shared their pieces in our final workshop, in an act of celebration and vulnerability. It has a been a gift to watch their growth both as writers and as people.

A student reflection

by Charlotte Gilmore, Tawny House, Cohort 2024

The senior creative writing students (Cohorts 2026, 2025 and 2024) started their term with a rich, interactive writing workshop with seasoned writer and friend of Preston High School, Tony Birch. We started with a roundtable discussing each of the writing projects we were working on, Tony chipping in with his own advice towards our endeavours. Although weekly meetings on Tuesday afternoons have proved successful in developing our personal works, we were all grateful to be guided by an experienced writer who gave us his best words of wisdom for developing a project. 

My favourite nugget of advice was "Ten people, ten colours", which sounded a bit mysterious to us at first, but actually contends that everyone has a different way of interpreting a prompt or a piece of art! 

We aren't done yet though, with a second workshop scheduled for Week 5. In the meantime, students will prepare five minutes of their writing to read out and gain words of encouragement and constructive criticism from Tony and their peers. Overall, us aspiring writers highly enjoyed the workshop, and can't wait to keep clacking on our keyboards towards our finished products.