Da Capo

The Arvon Foundation is an organisation dedicated to encouraging people to explore their creativity as novelists, playwrights, poets, songwriters, and much more. They run residential courses, workshops, from individuals, schools and more. And they’ve been doing this for 50 years.

To mark that anniversary, they’ve produced a book, gathering in short writings by some of their tutors to reflect on Arvon’s work and produce work inspired by it.

I’ve tutored six times for Arvon, running courses on Radio Drama, usually with Polly Thomas and Eloise Whitmore. These courses are a week long and we take our students through the process of developing a radio play idea, a short section of which is then recorded and professionally edited. It’s always a delightful week and a great, tough but rewarding process; the students come from all walks of life, are usually ferociously committed, and it’s a pleasure to work on, though I always come back exhausted. Last week I taught another course at the Arvon Centre at Totleigh Barton in Devon with a wonderfully creative and engaged group of students.

I was asked to contribute to the book and I wrote ‘Da Capo’, a short dramatic dialogue that is, on one level, about tutoring creative writing but also contains the instruction that it repeats at which point the piece becomes a kind of infinite Möbius Strip, and reflects something about the reciprocal and mutual nature of nurturing the imagination.

You can get hold of the book here: https://www.arvon.org/about/golden-book/