The Writer as tutor and mentor:
'I fell on my feet when I chose a course entitled: 'Creative Writing for Women', tutor Dr. Miriam Hastings. If I had had one teacher of her calibre when I was at school, I would have been an academic. Imaginative, ever gentle but able to control a class with the inclination of her head, she drew out the talent in every single one of us. We practised devices to show a story rather than tell it. We had fun with Magic function, the 'voice' of a child, archetypal characters, parable, mythic and ancient fairy stories. We dipped into poetry, villanelle, and haiku, sonnets and some more modern free verse.'
Patsy Hickman, ‘Fanning the Writer’s Flame’, NAWE, www.nawe.co.uk/DB/projects
'I did two stimulating courses with Miriam at Birkbeck College, London. They were the best writing courses I have attended and I've been to many over the past 25 years. Miriam was also working as a therapist and her insight into personal development brought out excellent writing from us all. She was extremely creative with visual aids and photographs. She also spent extra time editing her students' homework and offering advice showing great interest in her students' work. I was very upset when the courses did not continue due to ill health. Miriam has inspired my own writing and facilitating. She is truly a mentor.'
Jilliana Ranicar-Breese, managing director of autobiography-therapy.com (autobiography/memoir workshops in Brighton, see In Touch page).
'it's all due to the brilliant and empowering courses you ran. I'm really, really grateful to you for enabling me to find my voice and not be so scared of using it.' P.
'Thank you for your enduring encouragement and support to me ... You've touched so many people in such positive ways, I'm so glad I'm one of them.' V.
'Your course changed my life! Thank you.' J.S.
The Writing:
On Writing Your Self, Myra Schneider & John Killick, (Continuum):
From a review by Rose Flint:
'It makes compelling, sometimes overwhelming reading and consistently offers insights into the writer's craft. So much courage is here. And the responsibility to state how life is - messy, terrifying, full of death perhaps - but also transcendent.
Miriam Hastings says: "I do think it's important to stress that creative writing can be beneficial and healing even when it isn't directly autobiographical. The very act of creation is therapeutic…taking the raw material of real life and shaping it into something different and powerful is a magical transformative process. In my personal experience I've found it can not only transform our writing, it can also transform our lives and selves."
Writing Your Self is a book about changes, about the responsibility some people chose, to dive deep into the events that shape their lives and bring to the surface greater understanding, not only of who they are - but what it means to be human, alive at this time'
(This review appeared in ARTEMISpoetry 4, May 2010. Rose Flint is a poet and art therapist who works with poetry in healthcare).
On The Minotaur Hunt, (Harvester):
An 'author of great talent and wit, the courage to lead us through purgatory and the tenderness to love and understand its inhabitants.' Monica Dickens.
Who is Miriam, what is . . .?
I have always found it difficult to write about myself but here are a few basic facts:
I left school at 14 when I was admitted on to an acute ward in an adult psychiatric hospital, this rather messed up my schooling! As a result I got all my qualifications through adult education (one of the main reasons I chose to teach at Birkbeck College, and to run courses for survivors of mental distress and childhood trauma).
Eventually I managed to get a BA (Middlesex Polytechnic), MA and PhD (Queen Mary College, University of London).
I'm now increasingly disabled by cervical spondylosis, congenital fusion and resulting degenerative disease of the spine, FMS and auto-immune problems, so I work from home. One day I would like to write something about living in chronic pain - something upbeat, not depressing - as there seems to be so little out there.
I live in Newham in east London, with my partner and Tortoise the cat.
About my writing:
My novel The Minotaur Hunt was published by the Harvester Press and won the MIND Book of the Year Award. Sadly Harvester were taken over soon after publication by Simon & Schuster who closed their fiction list and so the novel is now out of print, but it's often available secondhand from Amazon and other online stores.
I've published short fiction and poetry in anthologies and magazines, and literary reviews and essays, also theoretical and critical work on mental health.
Most recently I contributed to Writing Your Self, John Killick & Myra Schneider, London & New York: Continuum (2010).
And my collection of short stories, Demon Lovers, was shortlisted for the Scott Prize (SALT publishing) in January 2010. You will find a short story, 'Horns', from this collection on the Miriam's Monsters page.
Generally in my work I am concerned with exploring the position and experience of the outsider.
At the moment I'm in the process of redrafting a novel, Walking Shadow, about Edmund Shakespeare, younger brother of Will, set in the dungeons of the Tower at the time of the gunpowder plot.
I'm also writing a surreal fantasy, The Dowager's Dream.
A mermaid is central to The Dowager's Dream. For some years now I have been obsessed with mermaids and all they might signify: their similarity and their difference to human beings - they are other, alien and disturbing, yet familiar. Also they represent the ocean, that last great unknown frontier of this planet, which we understand so little and are destroying with pollution so relentlessly.
A mermaid also lies at the heart of The Burnings, a novel I wrote over many years about the highland clearances in Sutherland. This was inspired by an eye-witness account of a mermaid seen in Sandside Bay, Caithness, written in 1809 by the daughter of the minister in Reay, and by the (partly imagined) life of my great great grandmother, Margaret MacKenzie.
I left school at 14 when I was admitted on to an acute ward in an adult psychiatric hospital, this rather messed up my schooling! As a result I got all my qualifications through adult education (one of the main reasons I chose to teach at Birkbeck College, and to run courses for survivors of mental distress and childhood trauma).
Eventually I managed to get a BA (Middlesex Polytechnic), MA and PhD (Queen Mary College, University of London).
I'm now increasingly disabled by cervical spondylosis, congenital fusion and resulting degenerative disease of the spine, FMS and auto-immune problems, so I work from home. One day I would like to write something about living in chronic pain - something upbeat, not depressing - as there seems to be so little out there.
I live in Newham in east London, with my partner and Tortoise the cat.
About my writing:
My novel The Minotaur Hunt was published by the Harvester Press and won the MIND Book of the Year Award. Sadly Harvester were taken over soon after publication by Simon & Schuster who closed their fiction list and so the novel is now out of print, but it's often available secondhand from Amazon and other online stores.
I've published short fiction and poetry in anthologies and magazines, and literary reviews and essays, also theoretical and critical work on mental health.
Most recently I contributed to Writing Your Self, John Killick & Myra Schneider, London & New York: Continuum (2010).
And my collection of short stories, Demon Lovers, was shortlisted for the Scott Prize (SALT publishing) in January 2010. You will find a short story, 'Horns', from this collection on the Miriam's Monsters page.
Generally in my work I am concerned with exploring the position and experience of the outsider.
At the moment I'm in the process of redrafting a novel, Walking Shadow, about Edmund Shakespeare, younger brother of Will, set in the dungeons of the Tower at the time of the gunpowder plot.
I'm also writing a surreal fantasy, The Dowager's Dream.
A mermaid is central to The Dowager's Dream. For some years now I have been obsessed with mermaids and all they might signify: their similarity and their difference to human beings - they are other, alien and disturbing, yet familiar. Also they represent the ocean, that last great unknown frontier of this planet, which we understand so little and are destroying with pollution so relentlessly.
A mermaid also lies at the heart of The Burnings, a novel I wrote over many years about the highland clearances in Sutherland. This was inspired by an eye-witness account of a mermaid seen in Sandside Bay, Caithness, written in 1809 by the daughter of the minister in Reay, and by the (partly imagined) life of my great great grandmother, Margaret MacKenzie.