Blog – Page 2 – Valeria Vescina

May 30, 2025 valeriavescina Behind 'Habit of Disobedience', Blog, Reviews

Historical fiction – my top reads of the last 12 months

Berthe Morisot, *La Lecture* (*Reading*), 1888 (Public domain image. Source: Wikiart)

I’ve always loved historical fiction, so putting together a full list of titles I’d recommend would make for a very long post. The first novels to captivate me were Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard at secondary school. Soon after, I discovered Dacia Maraini’s The Silent Duchess. To these, over the years, I added books by Umberto Eco, Carol Shields, A.S. Byatt, Hilary Mantel, Rose Tremain, Tracy Chevalier, and many others.

What must historical fiction do, for it to stand out for me? First, it must be beautifully written. I’m very open to experimentation with form – perhaps a result of my own background as a novelist and creative writing tutor. I prize books strong in characterisation, sense of place, story structure and plot development, and other elements of the craft. Second, I’m thrilled when a novel teaches me something surprising. It could be an event central to the whole book, or a small, striking detail. I’m especially drawn to forgotten or silenced perspectives. Third, I value insights and themes that shed light on the past and the present: do they challenge harmful narratives or illuminate legacies we’re still contending with? And fourth, the story must be painstakingly researched and imagined, to possess the authenticity on which everything else rests. That includes a serious attempt at immersing me in the worldviews of the time and place depicted.

If any of this resonates with you, here are seven books I read in the past twelve months that I hope you’ll enjoy. They’re listed in alphabetical order.

Astraea – Kate Kruimink (2024, Weatherglass Books)

This powerful little volume (115 pages) won the 2024 Weatherglass Novella Prize. Set on a ship in the nineteenth century, it’s about a cargo of female convicts destined for Australia. We experience events from the point of view of fifteen-year-old Maryanne. It’s a haunting yet hopeful tale of resilience and camaraderie in the face of misery and brutality. The narration is viscerally immersive, anchored in Maryanne’s raw physical and mental perceptions. Look out for Kate Kruimink, who has already published two other novels.

Costanza – Rachel Blackmore (2024, Renegade/Dialogue Books)

Costanza Piccolomini, the woman at the centre of this novel, was the muse, lover and model of Gianlorenzo Bernini, the leading sculptor of seventeenth-century papal Rome. In a horrific act of violence, Bernini ordered a servant to disfigure her, in the belief she had been unfaithful to him with his younger brother. Basing herself on the facts that have come down to us about Costanza and the other protagonists, Rachel Blackmore has painstakingly reimagined her life. The reconstruction of the all-important social and cultural context is outstanding, and her conjectures about what happened highly plausible, while her portrayal of Costanza’s inner world is empathetic and engaging. The novel tackles enduring themes: double standards, the abuse of power, and coercive control.

For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy on My Little Pain – Victoria MacKenzie (2023, Bloomsbury)

This slim novel brings to life two well known English mystics, Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe. They are, respectively, the first woman to have written a book in English, and the first author of an autobiography in English. Victoria MacKenzie imagines their meeting in 1413. She draws on their writings and on her research into the medieval context to offer us vivid portrayals of both. Their personalities and circumstances differ greatly from each other: Julian, a reflective anchoress, and Margery, a chaotic mother of fourteen. And yet, their experiences and spirituality make for a strong connection between the two. MacKenzie balances their alternating voices with a poet’s precision and sensitivity. A luminous reading experience.

Once The Deed Is Done – Rachel Seiffert (2025, Virago)

This is the fifth novel by Rachel Seiffert, whose The Dark Room (historical fiction) was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Once The Deed Is Done opens in March 1945, as the collapse of the Reich draws near. A multi-point-of-view narration gives us access to the thoughts, choices, and personal histories of several inhabitants of a Northern German village. Ruth, a British Red Cross officer, is tasked with supervising and caring for displaced people in a camp the advancing Allied Forces have just set up on the village’s outskirts. Gradually, a dark, shocking secret harboured by some of the villagers emerges. The novel highlights an issue rarely covered in WW2 fiction: the fate of forced labourers during and after the war. With her moving, unsentimental prose, Seiffert poses tough questions about individual and collective responsibility.

The Painter’s Daughters – Emily Howes (2024, Simon & Schuster) Peggy and Molly Gainsborough are the charming objects of portraits by their father Thomas, one of eighteenth-century England’s most acclaimed painters. Emily Howes turns the two sisters into the subjects of her deeply moving debut novel. Molly suffers episodes of mental confusion from a young age and Peggy instinctively shields her. When the family moves from rural Ipswich to fashionable Bath, hiding Molly’s condition becomes harder. Add to this mix a beguiling composer who enters the sisters’ lives, disrupting their close bond and putting Molly’s fragile sanity at risk. Howes steeps the characters’ thinking firmly in the mentality of the era, rendering their feelings, actions, and dilemmas convincing and deeply affecting. The novel delicately examines themes of devotion, mental illness, sisterly love and rivalry, and other family dynamics. It thoughtfully explores the complex area between protectiveness and control in challenging circumstances, without casting judgment.

Vor Aller Augen – Martina Clavadetscher (2022, Unionsverlag) I’m afraid this one isn’t available in English yet. Martina Clavadetscher is a well-known author of books and plays, and the winner of the 2021 Swiss Book Prize. In Vor Aller Augen (In Plain Sight), she foregrounds nineteen women portrayed in iconic paintings: from Cecilia Gallerani in Leonardo’s Lady with an Ermine to Victorine-Louise Meurent and Laure in Edouard Manet’s Olympia, from Joanna Hiffernan in James Whistler’s Symphony In White no. 1 to Dagny Juel in Edvard Munch’s Madonna. Clavadetscher not only captures the moments immortalised on canvas, but, above all, lets each protagonist recount her life story in her own distinctive voice. The silenced object of the painter’s (and the viewer’s) gaze thus becomes the active subject, a real-life woman demanding recognition.

And finally, a bonus recommendation: not a novel, but a piece of historical life writing. Fiction can vividly evoke what it was like to live in another era, but so can micro-history and exceptionally well-crafted family memoirs like the one featured below. Originally published in German, it appears in a superb English translation by Jamie Bulloch.

Alice’s Book – by Karina Urbach, trans. Jamie Bulloch (2022, MacLehose Press)

The title refers to So kocht man in Wien!, a bestselling cookbook authored in 1935 by historian Karina Urbach’s Jewish grandmother, Alice. Forced to flee Austria for England in 1938, Alice survived, while her sisters perished in concentration camps. After the war, she discovered that her book had been reissued in 1939 in an ‘Aryanised’ edition: the author ostensibly a German man; and the names of Jewish and foreign recipes germanised. Despite her repeated appeals, the publisher refused for decades to acknowledge Alice as the true author; it returned the rights to her heirs only after being publicly exposed in 2020. In Alice’s Book, the cookbook is symbolic of loss. It offers a powerful vehicle for tracing the devastating impact of Nazi persecution on one Jewish family – dispersed across China, England, and the U.S. – and for honouring Alice’s spirit of resilience, generosity, and hope. It also sheds light on the disturbing reality of companies and individuals that continued to profit from crimes committed against Jews long after the war had ended.

About me: I’m Italian and British, and moved from England to Switzerland a few years ago. I hold an MA in Creative & Life Writing from Goldsmiths College (University of London). My debut novel, That Summer in Puglia, was published in 2018. I’ve just completed the manuscript of my second novel, Habit of Disobedience, set in Southern Italy in the late 1500s. Inspired by true events, this tale of nuns who stood up to the Church explores themes of power, control and female resistance that resonate today.

March 28, 2025 valeriavescina Behind 'Habit of Disobedience', Blog

Accuracy and authenticity in historical fiction

*Sofonisba Anguissola’s* The Chess Game (1555) is packed with meaning. Among other things, it’s a statement about women’s agency and about Sofonisba and her sisters’ exceptional education. The strategy game of chess was normally the preserve of men. Dama (le jeu de dames) was considered more appropriate for women.

Speak of accuracy and authenticity in historical fiction, and you’ll find writers agreeing on some things but not on others. “Shoulds” abound. Accuracy, you’ll often hear, is objective: it involves verifiable facts, from dates and places to furniture and dress. Authenticity, by contrast, is somewhat subjective: the reader must perceive the story’s world as faithful to the era in question.

Like many dichotomies, this clear-cut view of accuracy as objective and of authenticity as subjective is an over-simplification. The accurate details that authors of historical fiction work so hard to respect are unavoidably a selection, made from their own perspective and as a function of the story; conversely, readers may query the authenticity of well-documented elements that clash with widely held stereotypes and tropes. This matters because authors’ answers to these challenges lead to differing choices. It’s particularly important with respect to fictional re-imaginings of the female experience: recent decades of scholarly findings into ordinary women’s lives – whose legacy most impacts the present – now provide us with invaluable insights.

I’ve spent years researching and writing Habit of Disobedience, a novel inspired by real-life 16th-century women in Southern Italy. Scouring manuscripts, books, and articles in historical archives and libraries; attending history conferences; visiting museums of all kinds; corresponding with historians, in my search for missing details… You’ll gather my efforts at faithfulness – accuracy and authenticity – were not half-hearted. Still, since the key protagonists of my story are ordinary women, there are too many gaps to fully piece together the micro-history. I’m a novelist and tutor in creative writing, not a historian: my interest lay in attempting to inhabit the past until I could ‘see’ and ‘hear’ the characters in places that today convey only a faint echo of their struggles, joys, fears, and dilemmas. Where history left voids, I found doors I could open to fictional elements: characters and threads that capture people and the heartrending situations they experienced.

It’s the approach that felt right for this novel. The true events that inspired Habit of Disobedience are dramatic, and the fictional yarns I wove through them had to be highly consistent with their contemporary context. I’ve aimed to offer what Stephen Greenblatt expressed superbly in a 2009 article: for my protagonists to ‘carry the burden of a vast, unfolding historical process that is most fully realized in small, contingent, local gestures.’¹

*A realistic ‘women’s world’ in Gaudenzio Ferrari’s* Birth of the Virgin (1541-43). The water from a baby’s first bath was thrown into the hearth for a girl and outside the front door for a boy.

There’s an additional reason why I’ve strived for faithfulness: I wanted to give a voice to these unheard women because of their relevance to the present day. The novel highlights their acquiescence in a system they thought they could not change, the areas of agency they carved out for themselves, and the trigger for their resistance. It holds a mirror to our times, without anachronisms. That’s also why I’ve aimed to immerse readers in the mentality of the time (to the extent available to me, five centuries later) – our value system affects how we frame and express our emotions in different eras and cultures.² The more deeply readers let themselves be drawn into my protagonists’ worldview, the greater their surprise at how much of it persists today in changed forms.

Participants at a recent Women Writers Network discussion felt that most people today still live in a patriarchal society. The impact on women is obvious, but it is, ultimately, negative for everyone. It’s a framework of attitudes, beliefs, behaviours, and rules that most of us, no matter our gender, have absorbed and unwittingly sustain until we recognise them. Historical fiction can shine a powerful light on them.

As authors, we strive for accuracy and authenticity – seeking to shift perceptions, however slightly, away from stereotypes and tropes. In doing so, we can contribute much-needed nuance to the public discourse, making it more inclusive and less polarised.

In the words of Hilary Mantel: ‘What can historical fiction bring to the table? It doesn’t need to flatter. It can challenge and discomfort. If it’s done honestly, it doesn’t say, “believe this” – it says “consider this.” It can sit alongside the work of historians – not offering an alternative truth, or even a supplementary truth – but offering insight.’³

I look forward to telling you more about Habit of Disobedience as soon as it finds its publisher.

[1] https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2009/11/05/how-it-must-have-been/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NYR-081124-news&utm_content=NYR-081124-news+CID_075386c07c1251a015e3b5bd8741dede&utm_source=Newsletter&utm_term=Stephen%20GreenblattHow%20It%20Must%20Have%20Been

[2] The academic field of history of the emotions was eye-opening in this respect, as was Arlie Russell Hochschild’s concept of ‘emotional labour’.

[3] The BBC Reith Lectures. Hilary Mantel’s Reith Lecture 2 – The Iron Maiden. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08vkm52/episodes/player

Image credits:

Sofonisba Anguissola’s The Chess Game (1555). Photo by Mortendrak, reproduced under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 international license.

Gaudenzio Ferrari’s Birth of The Virgin (1541-43). Photo by the author, taken at the Pinacoteca di Brera.

January 27, 2025September 16, 2025 valeriavescina Blog

A writing retreat in the Swiss Alps

Here’s a post to give you a flavour of the writing retreats in the Bernese Oberland. I’ve run several retreats in this spectacular corner of the world, and it’s where I’ll be hosting future ones.

The days involve a mix of lectures, workshop exercises, feedback, and individual writing time. A maximum of three participants means your work receives a truly exceptional degree of attention – from me and from your fellow attendees. And then, of course, there’s a warm social side to it: meals and easy walks offer more opportunities for getting to know others who share your passion for writing, and for making friends. Participants often stay in touch with one another after the retreat, exchanging feedback on their writing projects on a regular basis. I’ll leave the word to them, through their testimonials!

First, a few words from attendees working on fiction projects:

Here, some testimonials from attendees working on life-writing projects:

Afterwards, I love hearing how everyone is progressing! One of the retreats this year will be for returning attendees, enabling them not only to find time and space for their projects, but also to grow their supportive writing community by meeting people from other cohorts. What a joy it will be to see them all again!

If you’d like to learn more about these writing retreats in the Swiss Alps, and to book, click here.

January 8, 2025 valeriavescina Behind 'Habit of Disobedience', Blog, Reviews

‘Medieval Women: In Their Own Words’ – a British Library exhibition

Whether you live in London or plan to visit, do not miss the ‘Medieval Women’ exhibition at the British Library. It has generated a phenomenal response, in terms of both praise and visitor numbers, and for good reason. The priceless documents on display offer a rare opportunity to view in one place the evidence of two long-term trends: the deep historical roots of women’s social and legal status; and women’s efforts to exercise agency despite them.

Some of the documents relate to famous figures: a letter signed by Joan of Arc, requesting munitions; the manuscripts of Julian of Norwich’s ‘Revelations of Divine Love’ and of Margery Kempe’s eponymous book; Christine de Pizan’s illuminated ‘Book of the City of Ladies’… The list is spectacular, but the context and detail provided by the items is what makes the whole an unmissable event – it’s not often that you get to ‘hear’ the words of ordinary women. The exhibits include books of treatments for women by women, texts on herbal cures and obstetrics manuals used by female practitioners, a petition by a female slave who refuses to be sold, embroidery and illuminated manuscripts signed by nuns, a woman’s treatise arguing that husbands and wives should enjoy equal rights, the first book printed by a woman… but also, a daughter disowned for marrying a family servant, nuns destined to the cloister since childhood, a queen who fends off male relatives’ attempts to dethrone her, the view of the female body as defective and disease-prone, the prayers to St Margaret for protection during childbirth, records showing women being paid less than men for the same work…

Through their selection of the items (around one hundred and forty), the curators have conjured a mosaic of medieval lives that is not only fascinating, but also offers insights into our own times, when women’s hard-won rights are coming under threat. As the curators explain: ‘Break free from traditional narratives and […] discover stories familiar to women today, from the gender pay gap and harmful stereotypes, to access to healthcare and education, as well as challenges faced by female leaders. Hear the words of medieval women from across the centuries, speaking powerfully for the thousands whose voices have not survived.’¹

This sentiment of giving a voice to the unheard spurred my long quest to inhabit the forgotten lives of a group of Southern Italian women from a different era: sixteenth-century nuns. My second novel, which I’ve just completed, is inspired by their remarkable true story. For me, the catalyst was a set of archival documents penned in iron-gall ink: they spoke to enduring issues of power, control, and female resistance. I hope the book will quickly find a publisher, so that my characters may move readers as deeply as the terror, dilemmas, and resilience of the women I encountered in those archival documents moved me. Certain objects in the exhibition – manuscripts copied by scholarly nuns, a cellaress’s notes that probably stay quiet about the politics she often had to navigate, embroidery, a written protest against restrictions on what women could wear, a letter showing the risks of ‘marrying beneath oneself’ – touched me particularly, as they evoked some of my characters and their situations.

Below, some manuscripts originating in Southern Italy and displayed in the exhibition: Tractatus de herbis (‘Treatise on Herbs’, Southern Italy, c. 1300); De Curis Mulierum (‘Treatments for Women’, in a 13th-century manuscript from England) by Trota, a 12th-century female physician at the medical school of Salerno; and De Ornatu Mulierum (‘On Women’s Cosmetics’, England or France, 13th century, from the original Southern Italian 12th-century compilation), another text forming part of the Trotula.

The ‘Medieval Women’ exhibition runs until 2 March 2025. Learn more here. To book tickets, click here.

Valeria Vescina is a novelist, reviewer, creative-writing tutor, and literary director of an arts festival. She is a graduate of the Goldsmiths MA in Creative & Life Writing. Born in Southern Italy, she studied and lived in the UK most of her life, before settling in Switzerland.

CREDITS

¹ Source: https://medievalwomen.seetickets.com/timeslots/filter/medieval-women-in-their-own-words

Images: author’s own photos of the exhibition.

November 26, 2023November 26, 2023 valeriavescina Blog, Reviews, The narrative potential of the arts

A tribute to A.S. Byatt

Author and critic A.S. Byatt died last week, leaving behind a priceless legacy of engaged, richly layered writing.

Byatt’s work stimulated readers to reflect on the stories she told and the complex questions she raised. A recurring one was the extent to which individuals can shape their own destinies and history, and vice-versa. In her fiction she interwove stories, history, material traces, fairy tales, myths, never afraid to cross the boundaries of disciplines: from literature to psychology, from philosophy to museum studies… Her books of literary criticism are treasure troves of dazzling insight.

The detailed material world in her novels and short stories was emblematic of her attempt to capture ‘the hard idea of truth’ – an attempt she believed all language is doomed to fail at, and which therefore demands accuracy, to achieve even qualified success. My mind jumps by association to pages in which Richard Holmes, whilst retracing Robert Louis Stevenson’s steps in the Cévennes, realises the passage of time makes the enterprise’s perfect success impossible – and yet it must be attempted, with passion and care.

The accuracy Byatt admired in George Eliot, who saw it as a moral imperative, was characteristic also of herself: she never aped nineteenth-century realism, however, but asserted the freedom to incorporate lessons from it in her work. Unsurprisingly, she praised Hilary Mantel’s or Pat Barker’s forms of realism as ‘almost an act of shocking rebellion.’ Byatt wouldn’t be slotted into categories, and instead pointed out that literature’s history is discontinuous – ‘there’s loss as well as gain’ even with Proust, she said, though she admired his ability to combine the ‘truth’ of things with conscious narrative form and though she learnt from him, too.

During my Creative and Life Writing MA at Goldsmiths years ago, we each had to produce a long essay on a topic relevant to our writing. I chose to research the use of art and artefacts in Byatt’s work. She utilised art and artefacts to produce and orchestrate an astonishing variety of effects: to render a description vivid and memorable; ground a story in time and place; define characters and relationships; shape and reflect character development; drive the action forward; illuminate key themes… She could even raise selected objects to the status of a near-character, for yet more purposes. Some artefacts offered the potential for motifs, which she exploited to various ends, including metafictional ones. The way she harnessed the taxonomy of gold, silver and lead in The Children’s Book is a virtuoso demonstration of how recurring metaphors can highlight and connect characters as much as issues.

I applied some of those lessons in my novels, and I’ve since taught for various institutions on the narrative potential of art and artefacts. At yet another – deeper – level, I’m grateful for the encouragement Byatt’s work gave me to never stop learning and experimenting.

Some sources behind this short blog post:

Antonia S. Byatt, Passions of the Mind (London: Vintage, 1993)

Antonia S. Byatt, On Histories and Stories (London: Chatto & Windus, 2000).

Jenny Newman and James Friel, An Interview with A.S. Byatt (Cercles.com, 2003), p. 7 from http://www.cercles.com/interviews/byatt.html

March 28, 2023March 28, 2023 valeriavescina Blog, Reviews

Review of Industrial Roots

‘Poor Uncle Mike,’ I say, slightly surprised at how easy it is to slip into Gramma Ruby’s ways.

So says Lucy, one of several narrators in a collection of stories about the lives of women across three generations of an extended family. We’re in an area of Ontario close to Detroit, ‘a great location […] equidistant from Chrysler’s (the engine plant) and Ford’s Foundry with its medium industrial blue smoke stacks that would one day be shut off for good.’ The protagonists live in cheap post-WW2 housing in need of fixing – ‘tight living, that’s for sure.’

The short stories in Industrial Roots can stand autonomously – indeed, several were published as single pieces – but, taken together, they achieve a coherent whole. Canadian writer Lisa Pike harnesses the potential of this literary form, which is often referred to by different labels (not all synonymous[1]), such as: integrated short-story collection, short-story cycle, inter-related stories, composite novel. Examples include Eudora Welty’s The Golden Apples, William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses and Alice Munro’s Who Do You Think You Are? / The Beggar Maid.

The author gives us a choral narration, through which we encounter repeatedly some of the characters at different points in their existence, filtered through various consciousnesses: their own and those of mothers, daughters, grand-daughters, nieces, and cousins, so that they acquire increasing depth and complexity. Their lives are linked by place and patterns of experience, starting with that of unhappy marriages to men who drink, gamble, and are violent towards their wives and children. ‘Some women took to drinking themselves, you know, to cope.’ Intergenerational trauma haunts the living: the first ‘Stella’ in the family was a little girl shot dead in 1920, in a pogrom during the Polish-Soviet War. She and other ancestors live on in the present, with ‘each branch of the family having at least two or three Stellas, Walters and Wandas among them.’

Roots grow deep, spread, and interlace; some surface, and become visible through oral and embodied memory. So, one of the characters drizzles North American dressings onto salads, but also makes pierogi the old-fashioned way her mother and grandmother taught her. She is a repository of the family’s history, one ‘who knew the stories. The one who bothered to hear them and remember them, fix them in her mind the same way the old woman [her grandmother] had them fixed in hers’. Cancer takes away several family members, including one who does not tell her colleagues she’s ill, because ‘They’re going to say: ‘See! And she was such a health nut! Just goes to show you!’ as if getting cancer were her fault, punishment for thinking she was so great, eating healthy and exercising and all.’ Funerals become occasions to grieve, make peace with, reflect on, and – in one case – even meet, relations for the first time.

Some in the younger generation seek to escape the pull of their industrial roots through education, but they grow disillusioned. One of them, debt-laden, recalls Chomsky’s ‘call for change, resistance’ during her university days and concludes she’s living ‘the pragmatics of his prophecy,’ ‘the wearing down of the intellectual, of those people who saw the bigger picture of things, […] how PhDs were now living on food stamps.’ Another earns more by writing essays for students than from her precarious post as a lecturer. She sees the higher-education system operating like an industry and treating her like a mere productive resource. Her outbursts against it, ‘ad-libbing about things like the psychology of advertising, the dismantling of the welfare state […]’], fall on students’ uncomprehending ears.

The book raises questions about numerous aspects of family connectedness. How does family impact us? How do we show care? Do we ever know those near us as well as we believe? Another major theme is mortality – and therefore the sense of a life’s meaning and purpose. ‘A death every few years. Coming to a certain point in life when you realise a funeral could arrive at any moment and it’s just better to have a designated outfit, there, hanging at the back of the closet, ready to go. […] You may as well pick out the outfit you want to be buried in, along with a photo […] A sense of hope for the family, the picture letting them believe that life had been good and happy and worthwhile.’ The quote which precedes the book seems doubly significant: it’s from Faulkner’s ‘As I Lay Dying’, which also handled these themes, while his ‘Go Down, Moses’ broke new ground in this literary form.

Lisa Pike’s characters and sense of place linger in the mind. Separate voices distinguish the protagonists, through their narration and dialogues across different tones and registers. Their environments and possessions are used to delineate them, their relationships, and circumstances with gripping specificity. So, a woman’s perception of her grandmother’s wish to leave a chipped platter to another granddaughter is quietly heart-breaking: ‘Wanda (daughter), of all people, did not deserve the worn, discoloured, beautiful, rose-patterned platter with the two deep chips on the right-hand side.’

Lisa Pike’s love of, and playfulness with, language enables her to pull off this ambitious work. She was awarded the Canada Council for the Arts Grant and received support from the Ontario Arts Council and the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity to complete the book. All credit to Heloïse Press for bringing this Canadian author and Industrial Roots to readers’ attention.

Industrial Roots is published on 11 April 2023.

[1] Dunn, M., Morris, A. (1995). The Composite Novel – The Short Story Cycle in Transition. New York : Twayne, Macmillan Publishing

December 5, 2022January 18, 2023 valeriavescina Blog

Rosenburg Writers

Whole-day creative writing workshops

at the Literaturhaus Zentralschweiz

Last Saturday, 3 December, we had the first in a series of creative-writing workshops at the Literaturhaus Zentralschweiz (‘lit.z’). Based in the historic Rosenburg in beautiful Stans, lit.z is Central Switzerland’s literature hub, offering a lively, high-calibre programme in the cantons of Lucerne, Nidwalden, Obwalden, Schwyz, Uri and Zug.

Dating back to the 14th century, the Rosenburg was restructured first during the Renaissance and again during the Baroque period. Its fortunes waned in the 19th and 20th centuries, until in 1969 the Canton of Nidwalden, the municipality of Stans and the Nidwalden Historical Society established the Höfli Foundation to acquire and restore this gem of Switzerland’s historical heritage.

Lit.z regularly hosts authors’ readings in various languages and runs workshops for adults as well as kids. The Rosenburg Writers workshops are the first to be taught in English. The initiative reflects a wish to address Switzerland’s sizeable international community and to draw together like-minded people.

It’s an honour for me to teach this series. The creative-writing workshops at the Rosenburg are taking place on three Saturdays: 3 December 2022 (Characterisation), 14 January (Plot Structure and Story Development) and 18 March 2023 (Sense of Place). The sessions are for anyone with an intermediate-to-advanced level of English, not just for native-English speakers.

I’ve structured the workshops in such a way as to address a wide variety of needs, by offering material and exercises which meet participants where they’re at. The group on 3 December was wonderful. Attendees ranged from beginners to professional authors. We had a stimulating and fun day. Swiss, American, German and Belgian participants of different ages got along really well and contributed great questions and insights throughout. They had come from all over Switzerland: Basel, St Gallen, Bern, Freiburg… and Central Switzerland! Lunch in the Wirtschaft zur Rosenburg on the ground floor of the building was delicious and an opportunity to get to know each other better and enjoy lively conversation.

Want to learn more and book your place on one of the workshops? Head over to the lit.z website here.

Image credits:

Mariann Bühler of lit.z (photos reproduced with her kind permission) and Valeria Vescina.

October 26, 2022January 23, 2023 valeriavescina Blog

A writing retreat in Switzerland

Flüeli-Ranft, with Gasthaus Paxmontana in the centre

What a wonderful six days on the writing retreat in Switzerland this October! Let me share the experience with you through this short write-up.

The participants were an absolute joy to teach: lovely and interesting people, enthusiastic about writing and about everything Switzerland has to offer! It seems right to give them the first word – so here are a couple of testimonials.

We stayed at the Gasthaus Paxmontana in the historic village of Flüeli-Ranft, which sits in enchanting landscape. Built in 1617, the intimate Gasthaus (only 16 rooms) belongs to the nearby Jugendstil-Hotel Paxmontana, an icon of Art Nouveau. The staff were unfailingly kind, attentive and ready to offer assistance with a genuine smile.

Breakfast at the Jugendstil-Hotel was a daily treat. How better to start our day than with the awe-inspiring views on our 1-minute stroll there, with the stunning Veranda Restaurant and a buffet rich in authentic local specialties?

The pergola walk to the Jugendstil-Hotel

Every morning we had a two-hour workshop on an element of the writing craft: characterisation, story structure and plot development, sense of place… Each session involved a mixture of lecture time, writing exercises, discussion and feedback. Though sharing one’s work was optional, participants were more than happy to do so in a safe and encouraging environment. This openness supercharged everyone’s leap forward, as people learnt from, and contributed to, each other’s work. Over the course of the week, participants acquired tools that helped them define important aspects of their projects.

For lunch we were provided with generous sandwiches to be consumed wherever we preferred on the day: either in the indoor restaurants of Gasthaus and Jugendstil-Hotel, or in their external dining spaces in the autumnal sunshine.

Originally, I planned to leave the afternoons free for independent writing time. However, in pre-retreat correspondence, this group expressed the wish to cover a range of topics which required workshops also on some afternoons. Below, you can see the accordingly customised schedule.

We loved our daily walks in the peaceful landscape around Flüeli-Ranft. Walking and talking in such glorious surroundings was relaxing and an all-round pleasure. As you’d expect, our conversations touched on all kinds of topics. The hikes stimulated effective problem-solving: they facilitated access to fresh perspectives and inspiration for our projects.

We spent an afternoon in the Bernese Oberland, with a stop-over on Lake Lungern and an easy hike on a breath-taking trail in the Hasliberg.

Panoramic path with view of Lake Lungern

We looked forward to the amazing three-course dinners served at the cosy Gasthaus restaurant, and, on two evenings, in the elegant Veranda restaurant. Both places boast superb cuisine. A vegetarian option was always available.

After dinner, we briefly read something together on an agreed topic, before breaking up for private time and a good night’s sleep!

Gasthaus - space for our evening reading and chats

We left the retreat not just with warm memories, but with new friendships. We can’t wait to see how everyone’s projects develop!

Why not join me on future retreats? The next ones will be:

28 May to 3 June 2023 – again at the Gasthaus Paxmontana in Flüeli-Ranft
24 to 30 September 2023 – at a chalet in the Alps of the Bernese Oberland.

You can check out this page to learn more. And you’re always welcome to drop me a line.

August 29, 2022August 29, 2022 valeriavescina Blog

Language as a writing prompt

Starting something ‘from scratches’? Not ‘from scratch’? For a split second, the sentence jarred. But its author, Iwona Fluda of Creative Switzerland (see her post, where she kindly mentions my writing retreats – thank you, Iwona!), had not made a mistake: perfectly aware of the correct idiomatic expression, she was being joyously playful with language.

That freedom to take apart idioms and clichés, to view them with new eyes, may come easier to non-native speakers of a language. Foreign students of English soon discover that ‘a pretty kettle of fish’ isn’t, actually, a good thing (no, not even if you love fish); that people can ‘fly off the handle’ (really? how?); and that you can ‘go Dutch’, whatever your nationality. You see what I’m getting at: taken literally, expressions we use every day can be a source of amusement, bemusement, discoveries, reflection… The same is true of single words: in my first novel, the protagonist deconstructs ‘nostalgia’, so that for him it means not the yearning to return home, but pain at that prospect.

The world around us offers countless sparks for our creativity. They’re everywhere: in landscapes, objects, fellow passengers on a train, overheard conversations in a café, a piece of music… And they’re ‘inside’ language(s), too, as Iwona highlighted. The trick is in spotting all these creative prompts hiding in plain sight, and transforming them into fruitful writing material. We can train our capacity to do that.

But how? An effective way is to attend creative-writing workshops. In the ones I teach, I combine prompts with the transmission of specific skills, so that participants may continue practising and perfecting them autonomously afterwards. For example, I’ll show you how to extract ideas for a story from a small object, in the context of how to create a three-dimensional character; or how to develop an engaging plot structure from a photo. You can free up your creativity and cover key elements of writing (characterisation, sense of place, etc.) on the retreat I’m running from 9 to 15 October 2022. Click here if you’d like to find out more about the venue, schedule, etc.

If you’re curious about what writing retreats are, what to look for, and how they might benefit you, here’s an article I wrote for Writing.ie Resources.

Any questions? Just get in touch via this short contact form or email me on mvaleriavw [at] outlook [dot] com.

Image credits:

‘Journaling over Coffee’ by Hannah Olinger on Unsplash.

July 25, 2022February 23, 2023 valeriavescina Blog

Top 10 reasons to go on a writing retreat

Ever wondered what a writing retreat is all about and whether it would benefit you? There are at least 10 reasons why writing retreats are invaluable. You’ll find them in my article (FREE to read on this link) for Writing.ie, the magazine for writers and readers.

Click HERE for the full article (a 5-minute read) to find out:

what writing retreats consist of

at what stage they’re helpful

whether they’re expensive

the top 10 reasons why they enable significant leaps forward.

Image of Writing.ie article: Why Go on a Writing Retreat?

Below is a super-brief summary of the ten reasons:

Allow yourself time and space for you and your writing, away from daily responsibilities
Stimulate inspiration and creativity
Hone your craft with workshops and discussions
Productivity: let full immersion boost the quantity and quality of your stories
Feel supported and make friends
Let quality feedback highlight your strengths and enable you to overcome weaknesses, in a supportive atmosphere
Learn from each other’s work and experiences
Gain motivation and confidence
Re-energise: through workshops, social occasions and time on your own, all in idyllic surroundings
Meet writing buddies and mentors.

I hope you’ve found this post helpful (and the full article even more). My next writing retreats take place in Switzerland from 9 to 15 October 2022, 28 May to 3 June 2023 and 24 to 30 September 2023: clicking here will take you to details of them and future writing events.

I’ve been teaching creative writing since 2013 to a variety of audiences: from secondary-school pupils to university BA and MA students and from Adult Education classes to individuals. I’m a novelist and the Literary Programme Director of the Hampstead Arts Festival in London.

Credits:

Images of Writing.ie website reproduced with kind permission.

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Whole-day creative writing workshops

at the Literaturhaus Zentralschweiz

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: