Teaching
Sally is an innovative teacher. She has worked as a tutor within the Oxford University collegiate system for years. She currently devises imaginative creative writing and arts education workshops for a range of educational, social and literary organisations. She often collaborates with the Oxford Life-Writing Centre and offers workshops for the general public on structuring and devising forms of creative and critical narrative.
She also regularly reads manuscripts for aspiring and established writers and offers careful feedback.
Sally leading a session on Sylvia Plath manuscripts at the ReLit Foundation Summer Course, Worcester College, 2017. The students created a call-and-response voice piece using the front and back of the Plath/Hughes manuscripts.
Mentoring
Sally has worked for several years with the ReLit Bibliotherapy Foundation devising workshops for teachers, therapists, students, and independent scholars and practitioners interested in learning how to use literature and the arts following a practice of close-reading and meditative observation. This summer she devised and ran a series of online workshops with Dr. Julie Sutherland focussing on small units of writing and visual imagery through poetry, painting and music.
Private Tuition and Mentoring
Sally offers individual bespoke tuition for private individuals who seek tutoring or mentoring. To each student Sally offers especially curated reading lists and detailed written and oral feedback. Currently she is:
Teaching Shakespeare to a retired Human Sciences Professor.
Mentoring a graduate student from Malta interested in setting up her own therapeutic literature and arts workshops.
Offering creative writing tutorials to a Chinese student interested in writing experimental fairytales.
Teaching the art of the short story to an acupuncturist.
Teaching several visiting American students a wide range of literature, including Shakespeare, Victorian and Modern literature and the contemporary novel.
Offering creative writing tuition on creative non-fiction to a young writer interested in forms of life writing.
Offering mentoring to a teacher working on a set of her own poems.
Offering feedback to a retired teacher and examiner starting out on a novel.
Mentoring a mature Canadian writer devise a series of short flash-fiction pieces based around his time working in the prison service.
Reading drafted manuscripts of novels, poetry collections, research essays and monographs including an essay on the culture of ring-giving in European Medieval culture and a monograph on the history of the Care system.
Reading the early draft of a novel set between Ireland, Wales and Spain during the Second World War. At the moment she is helping the writer build character and character and plot dynamics.
Helping a barrister who has always wanted to write begin a piece of longer fiction. We are working closely with the idea of prose as a form of visual and musical composition.
Editing a social history book manuscript on children committed to the care system in the nineteenth century.
Close-reading and discussing a variety of literature with a bright 17 year old interested in reading English at university. At the moment we are reading Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray and ‘Ariel’ by Sylvia Plath and thinking about the surface of language as a form of ornament versus the more transformative qualities of literary language.
Reading, editing and guiding a 17 year old through drafts of her theatrical monologue and dialogue.
Reading ‘Hamlet’ with a late teen to improve concentration, argumentation and analytical skills.
Teaching a teenager how to closely read paintings and photographs as texts alongside play-texts.