Gill Jackman -- Counsellor: Writers

WORKING WITH WRITERS

Image of a typewriter used on the Writers page of Gill Jackman, a counsellor working in the Chew Valley, North Somerset

Icompleted my MA in Creative Writing in 1988. At that time the only places which ran MAs were the Universities of Lancaster and East Anglia. I don't think I learned very much! Mostly I spent years beforehand wanting to write and then, failing to be a runaway success, I spent years after, wondering if I should give up! In that time I completed three novels, none of which were publishable, several dissertations, including those on George Eliot (1983), Virginia Woolf (1984), and Counselling and Methodology (1998) and a non-fiction book about counselling: Create Your Own Reality (One I Made Earlier.)

In 2004, still wondering whether or not to give up, I chanced upon a brochure for the Arvon Foundation and in it, discovered a week long course by the name of Myth and Fiction, run by a writer I had read a book by, and loved, in the early nineties. The book was called The Chymical Wedding (winner of the Whitbread prize 1989) and the writer was Lindsay Clarke. During that week, something I had been trying to learn but unable to really get, clicked and I've been working on that, and with Lindsay, ever since.

My strength as a facilitator of other writers lies in a cross fertilisation of the psychotherapeutic process and the craft of writing well. To really say something worth hearing, we must fully inhabit the perspective and the visceral experience of the character, mining our own experience to do this. Then we must (crucially) say clearly, in a language we all understand, exactly what we are trying to express. This can be a long and demanding process but is one of the most rewarding I know.

I charge thirty pounds an hour for reading, giving feedback and working with the raw material of fiction.

FURTHER READING
Other Women [185k] is a short story from the late 90s that was highly commended by the judges of the Asham Award. Catching Up [212k] is a more recent example of my writing.