The teaching has finished, the final assignments are in, and suddenly all that remains of the MA is the dissertation. (Admittedly, that’s 15 thousand words, so no small challenge). But, as if by magic, my brave new year is nearly complete!
So, when we met for an event to read some of our work and show the short film that I and five other students had made, I think we were all a bit shell-shocked.
The combined nerves of around 15 people, in a small space, is a powerful thing. The evening was so charged you could have lit your fag by waving it around a bit carelessly.
And then it was my turn to step onto the makeshift ‘stage’ and stand, clutching my photocopied bits of paper, and read ‘my novel’.
I had argued to everyone that it was imperative that we all took part. I felt that reading our work out would somehow cement the status of ‘writer’ that we had been learning how to adopt all year.
But when it came to it, I was terrified. I now see that reading your ‘creation’ to a live audience is not the same as reading a news script – however much that felt like a creation at the time.
Of course it was all grand. I didn’t lose my voice; people were interested and kind – and then we all went off and got horribly drunk! And briefly it felt again like we were ‘real’ students!