In the context of the recent conference ‘Short Fiction as Humble Fiction’, organised by the Paul Valéry research centre EMMA and the European Network for Short Fiction Research, a short story writing competition in English, An opportunity for new voices, was organised for foreign language students. Invited to be one of the jury members I…
In a sorry week that heard the German president of the EU quoting George Eliot to the departing British and a prominent German politician reassuring them with the French words au revoir not adieu, it seemed apt to have French EFL creative writing students reflect upon how they sound in the foreign language. This semester’s…
A burnt orange month with mellow sienna shades of fruitfulness. La rentrée is over. Classes are settling down and we are all starting to learn each other’s names. Students who follow the second-year undergraduate distance learning class in creative writing at Paul-Valéry University have been introducing themselves via the first MOODLE forum by discussing their…
Before the holidays, in a rather heated meeting (it was already starting to get hot by then) a colleague asked me if a text I had written and used for an oral comprehension exercise was authentic. For a moment I was flummoxed. How to answer? My immediate reaction was of course it is. I wrote…
Well, as summer continues fiercely hot, I’m reading Color, A Natural History of the Palette by Victoria Finlay (2002). This is a fascinating book of colour adventures, histories, facts and stories. As you know, I’ve recently been thinking about colour and writing and so was intrigued when Finlay made a reference to a poem Dance…