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ASE Summer Schools in Bath
June 7 - July 13, 2025
Limited places are available on each course to preserve the small, interactive class experience, and places will be allocated to suitably qualified applicants on a first-come-first-served basis.
The deadline for initial applications is February 15, 2025.
Writing Creative Nonfiction: Shaping Experience and the British Essay
Virginia Woolf describes the essay as a transformative literary form: ‘you can say in this shape,’ Woolf writes, ‘what you cannot with equal fitness say in any other.’ In this course, students will explore and amplify their own transformative personal experiences of living and studying abroad by an in-depth reading of British essayists, and through practical experimentation with the various forms these writers used.
Ecstatic Ekphrastics: Poems Alongside Visual Art
We will explore the power, allure, contradiction, and mystery of this ancient approach to writing poetry. We will read everything from classics of ekphrasis by John Keats and WH Auden to recent work by contemporary poets like Sarah Howe and Diane Seuss. We will take inspiration from these writers to create our own ekphrastic poems in response to the beautiful works of art—real and imagined—that we will explore together in Bath and beyond!
Writing the Weird
We will write weird stories: transgressive stories that defy genre convention; stories that navigate the slipstream between horror, fantasy, science fiction and ‘literature’; stories that might contain monsters or ghosts, or at the very least threaten our sense of what is real.