Dear Diary,
Having finished my dissertation in creative writing in September, I had 4 months to spend before my winter graduation in December. Anticipating this in June – when I had made the decision to take a break from teaching – I applied for a student placement at The Letters Page, the literary journal in letters published by the School of English and edited by novelist and staff member Jon McGregor.
The deadline for applications being no sooner than September, I had to wait all summer to receive Jon’s liberating words: “We’d like to offer you a role as Web Editor, if you would still be happy to take that up?”
Was I still happy…?? Let’s say I would’ve have been very unhappy should the verdict have gone the other way!
Living in Brussels with my husband and teenage daughter, Jon assured me I could perfectly participate in the weekly editorial meetings via Teams, but I wanted to meet him and the other students I’d be working with at least once, so I got on the Eurostar to London and turned the occasion into a trip to Nottingham. Now there’s a reason to apply for a placement: travel!
After that first meeting, the real work started. Every Wednesday I met the team online. Being a web editor, the posting of smaller pieces by the publicity team members on our webpage fell to me, but I also wrote more substantial features myself.
In 'Autofiction: The Letter Writing of Our Time?' I connected the letter we had chosen for publication to ideas about the gendered reception of contemporary women writers of autofiction, such as Rachel Cusk and Sheila Heti.
During the second cycle of the placement, I swapped roles with my co-web-editor, which meant that now I had to interview the writer of our selected letter.
The 2 hours I spent talking to poet Rolf Venner for that purpose were an absolute treat. Capturing ‘all that verbal foam’ - as Rolf put it afterwards - into a 1500-word piece took me, well, more than a few hours, but the conversation about literature, life, the scream of nature and the noise of the world made it a job well worth doing.
At the end of the term the team all decided to stay on for the spring term, but as I was graduating from my master’s course in December, my days at The Letters Page would soon come to an end. Not to mention I would be back at work after the festive season, teaching secondary English in Brussels.
And now, in between preparing classes and grading papers, I’m longing for these hours of reading and selecting submissions for publication, writing web features and interviewing authors about their work. And I worry. About how I should go about my future writing plans.
If all goes well, I’ll be back at Nottingham in September to start a PhD in Creative Writing, focusing on feminist poetry and legal archives. But what will I do with my teaching job? It takes up all my mental space for the moment. So something’s gotta give, that much has become clear this past month. And I would be lying – or fooling myself – if I didn’t know what that something will have to be.
I want to write, and I want to do it at Nottingham, where thoughts that before had been mere daydreams slowly became tangible routes, taking shape over the course of my studies.
Just think about how empowering it is to be able to include your writing and editing experience at a literary magazine in your PhD application – and how receiving appreciative feedback from an acclaimed novelist like Jon after finishing a piece helps to build confidence.
Surprisingly, I never thought the placement took up too much of my time – our tasks were well described and perfectly doable within the set time span. Can’t say that about teaching, mind you. But one has to make a living, especially if one has ambitious plans for the not so far away future.
I don’t know yet how the puzzle will be laid. But I do know that my time at The Letters Page will be one of those tentative first pieces that make up the frame, from where everything takes hold.
Carolien Wielockx
Master in English Literature
School of English
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A student placement like no other, ten years in the making.
