I am a highly approachable Independent Expert Private English/English Literature Tutor located in Greater Manchester with over twenty years teaching and tutoring experience from Secondary to Postgraduate Degree level.
”Sometimes our words are like our gardens and sat navs, they take strange routes/roots!” For Words take us places, they govern us because they transport us in directions and encourage feelings that root us elsewhere….they… Read More »English Tuition and Confidence Coaching Bolton Manchester: Jackie kay and Root/Route Word
I am still in the process of trawling through old bits and pieces of writing and seeing if there are any elements with any potential for transformation. As I noted… Read More »English Tuition Creative Writing Bolton Manchester Bury: Face in the Wall and Coldness of Plaster!
Once upon a time there was a woman who needed a change. She felt the need between her eyes. It was a heat, burning aside her all her cliches in her… Read More »Creative Writing Bolton Manchester: Lamia and the Change!
Over the weekend, during the wind, sleet and hail, I climbed up to Peel Tower near Ramsbottom, with Moira Eribenne who captured the extraordinary aliveness of the place with her camera,… Read More »Creative Writing Bolton Manchester: Peel Tower Walk with Hardy’s Two on a Tower!
If the past is a ‘foreign country’ and we do things ‘differently there’ ( L.P.Hartley) then reading this old piece about young George and his pen confirmed It! For even… Read More »English Tuition Bolton: Creative Writing- Loneliness -The Face in the Wall
A few years ago I wrote several fragments of writing entitled The Face in the Wall. I enjoyed the idea of a mean house being scrutinized by a sentient face imprinted… Read More »Creative Writing Bolton Manchester: Plasticine Revised!
I can listen no longer in silence. I must speak to you by such means as are within my reach. You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope.… Read More »Valentine’s Day Letter: Captain Wentworth in Austens’ Persuasion.( English Tuition Bolton Manchester)
As it drove up, we saw that there were two people inside. There alighted from it, with some cloaks and wrappers, first the Frenchwoman whom I had seen in church,… Read More »Hortense and Lady Dedlock in Bleak House: English Tutor Bolton Manchester
Chapter eighteen of Bleak House closes with a curious and brilliant image: Mademoiselle Hortense walking barefoot through the wet grass of Chesney Wold, after she has been publicly humiliated by… Read More »English tuition : Bleak House Chapter 18 Why does Hortense walk barefoot through the grass?
My lady’s maid is a Frenchwoman of two-and-thirty, from some- where in the southern country about Avignon and Marseilles- a large-eyed brown woman with black hair; who would be handsome,… Read More »English Tuition Bolton Manchester Bury: Bleak House-Lady Dedlock’s relationship with Hortense! Part ONE.
As I was looking over some creative writing tips for the Bolton School Entrance Examination, I found a series of bullet ideas arranged under the title ‘A Significant meeting.‘ It… Read More »English Tuition Bolton Manchester: Creative Writing Challenge ONE!
The house was three miles from the station, but before the dusty hired fly had rattled along for five minutes the children began to put their heads out of the… Read More »Creative Writing Bolton: E Nesbit Five Children and it- Bolton School Entrance Examination!
Not one other word did Bradley utter all that night. Not once did he change his attitude, or loosen his hold upon his wrist. Rigid before the fire, as if… Read More »Our Mutual Friend Book 4 Chapter 15: Water Water Everywhere- Headstone’s fated fall!
Creative writing in a hurry requires ideas and sometimes the pressure of examinations or need/desire to ‘produce’ a story kills off our creative flow! Lists though, can save us all!… Read More »Creative writing English TUITION Bolton Manchester : Stories in a HURRY!
My previous blog post shows how useful it is to model your openings on the successful openings of other published writers and this second illustration utilizes a ‘model’ from Pulman’s The Tin… Read More »Creative Writing English Tuition Bolton: Philip Pullman as a model!
David Almond is a superb writer. His novels Skellig and The Savage are humane, elegiac and compelling. Almond can always be relied upon to excite readers of all ages-no matter… Read More »Creative Writing tuition Bolton Manchester Bury: How to begin a story using David Almond.
For, unmistakably, the trees were shouting in the dark. These weresounds, too, like the flapping of great sails, a thousand at a time, andsometimes reports that resembled more than anything… Read More »English Tuition Bolton Manchester: Algeron Blackwood’s The Man whom the trees loved .
Now, the fact was, that both Mr and Mrs Squeers viewed the boys in the light of their proper and natural enemies; or, in other words, they held and considered… Read More »Creative Writing English Tuition Bolton Manchester: Dickens and Squeers.
This ‘memoir’ by Dylan Thomas has one of the most evocative openings I have ever read. It transports us truly away into the land of story and childhood when 2… Read More »English Tuition Bolton Manchester: Dylan Thomas and Christmas!
Robert Browning’s Dramatic Monologues are very much in evidence this teaching year and I have also enjoyed the excellent Grantchester on ITV recently. The combination of the latter’s hero ‘Sidney’… Read More »English Tuition Bolton Manchester Creative Writing: Sidney and the door.
Unreliable Narrators: What Larks Pip! ‘Never trust the artist. Trust the tale.'(DHLawrence) Narrators can be slippery creatures. Here are just a few reasons why the narraor may be unreliable: 1)… Read More »English Tuition Bolton Manchester Bury: Unreliable Narrators Galore!
Not unnaturally, the villagers were curious. And so on the night of July 26th, they flocked to the house. Each human being was clothed in the brightest colours of… Read More »Creative Writing Bolton Manchester Tuition : Ignite TWO!
Mercy is rarely mentioned in today’s feverishly hyperbolic world of media sound bites and distorting news copy. It is not noisy enough for editors who assume their readers are perpetually… Read More »English Tuition Bolton Manchester: Portia’s Quality of Mercy in The Merchant of Venice.
My study is overflowing: yet today in rediscovering an old collection of short stories called Black Water(Manguel), which all explore the ‘Fantastic’ in one way or another- be they… Read More »English tuition Bolton Manchester Bury: A Perfect Insight by Robert Louis Stevenson?
They told the world that they walked besides small lakes because they liked to observe their reflections. This could have been their public lie, yet neither carried a mirror in… Read More »English Tuition Manchester Bolton: Creative Writing ‘Taking the air.’
( This is partially inspired by Edith Wharton’s Ghost Stories, Stoker’s Dracula and Oxfam’s Mystery/Crime tales. It is still a work-in-progress and reminds me of the importance and difficulty of PLOT !… Read More »English Tuition Bolton Manchester Bury: ‘Ignite’ a strange tale in progress!
How perfectly acknowledged is this encounter. Every sense is awake to the moment and this moment endures ‘beyond’. Impossible to read without thinking of Seamus Heaney’s death 10 days later… Read More »Seamus Heaney’s Banks of a Canal: A soul unminding- English tuition Bolton Manchester bury
The other day I noticed something very positive happened to the energy and ‘spirit’ of a session, when a phrase used by a student was repeated first by ‘them’ and then… Read More »English Tuition Bolton Manchester: Confidence- Encouraging you to trust and ‘bask’ in your voice and words.
A snake came to my water-troughOn a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat, To drink there. In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob-tree I… Read More »D H Lawrence Snake-English Tuition Manchester Bolton Bury: Visiting Otherness?
To this, she returned: “Don’t be ridiculous, boy; I am not going in.” And scornfully walked away, and—what was worse—took the candle with her. This was very uncomfortable, and I… Read More »Great Expectations and The Great Gatsby: The importance of emotional halves!
