In the sun-bathed sitting room of an old English country house, Anne Enright, Booker Prize winner, is imparting her hard-won literary wisdom to a group of aspiring novelists. Her subject is dialogue – specifically, how to write it in a way that rings true, advances the plot and ultimately lands you an agent and a publishing contract.
“The trick is that, once you’ve written it, you have to hold the page back like this and squint,” she mimes the action of looking at her work from a distance. “And if all the lines are the same length all the way down, you know it’s either Samuel Beckett or it’s rubbish.”
A burst of laughter from the group, which dissipates quickly as Enright’s wry smile dissolves. She is being pleasant but she’s also speaking a literary truth.
In a sense, this sums up atmosphere at the Faber Academy Sussex – one of many courses offered by the storied British publishing house. A three-day course with a hefty price tag (admission is $640, including lunch and snacks), the “Academy” is intended to give aspiring writers a literary experience which, like a good book, both educates and delights. Part workshop, part retreat, part literary tourism, the Faber teaching model has proven so successful in Britain and Europe it is now expanding across the pond, starting with Canada.
The Faber Academy Toronto is slated to open this fall with two longer courses. Writing A Novel – taught by Miriam Toews (A Complicated Kindness, The Flying Troutmans) and featuring guest appearances by Michael Redhill, Anne Michaels and Margaret Atwood – will start classes in late September. How To Become a Poet – led by Ken Babstock with help from Darren Wershler, Al Moritz and Adam Sol – will start Oct. 11.
Part of Faber’s draw is what organizer Patrick Keogh describes as “inspirational venues.” In London, longer classes are held at the Faber offices in Bloomsbury (where T.S. Eliot met with his editors), while in Paris, the famed English-language bookstore Shakespeare and Company serves as venue. In Toronto, classes will be held at the University of Toronto’s Massey College, overseen by the spectre of founding master Robertson Davies.
Here in pastoral Sussex, near England’s south coast, the venue is no less impressive. The Faber weekend begins with a tour of Charleston, the former residence of painter Vanessa Bell
The course begins with a daylong workshop with one of the two hosting writers – in this case Anne Enright (The Gathering) and Faber’s own Andrew O’Hagan (The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog).
The group of 30-odd people is divided in two and ushered into separate rooms for our workshop. We go around the room introducing ourselves and saying a word or two about our writing experiences. The class, not surprisingly, is mostly female and on the older side (the average age is around 45), but the level of experience is quite diverse, from the friendly American tourist who announces he’s “never written a lick” to the couple of people who have agents but no book contract, or have a published story but no agent. This is likely thanks to Keogh’s insistence that the course be “selective” in its admission criteria, i.e. some applications are refused.
