Visit by author Tamsin Winter

The author Tamsin Winter visited Channing on Tuesday to run a creative writing workshop for Year 7 and talk to Year 8 about her books and career. She also had lunch with the pupil librarians. Tamsin spoke about her journey to becoming an author, which started with some mixed feedback from her primary school teacher on her work (‘This is nonsense!’). However, Tamsin persevered and went on to study Creative Writing at university and become an English teacher and after a lot of hard work (we saw the stacks of typescripts for Bad Influence) she finished her first novel, Being Miss Nobody. She has now published four books and a new one – I Dare You – will be published in May.

Tamsin spoke about her four novels, which feature girls in their early teens struggling with the ups and downs of school, relationships, social media and more. Tamsin’s protagonists show courage and determination to overcome their problems, and the books are full of empathy and humour.

In her creative writing workshop, Tamsin Winter gave pupils tips and prompts for creating a believable fictional world and an intriguing opening to a story. You can read some of their work here.

Tamsin also announced the winner of the Year 8 creative writing competition. Tamsin received many fantastic entries to the competition and it was really hard to choose a winner. However, congratulations to Violet in 8CC for her fantastic opening chapter, which you can read below:

My memories of her fade in and out of my mind like waves washing up against the shore, only to be dragged back into its ocean of enigmas, coming and going as time passes, enveloping my thoughts and beleaguering me like phantoms in the night. I can barely remember anything at all after the ‘Incident’: no name, no home; just me. It’s an awful, isolating feeling, really.

Though that’s what the doctors call whatever happened to me anyway, the ‘Incident’. They refused to tell me anything at all every time I tried to ask what they meant by that, so eventually I just stopped trying. I hardly see them anyway, they only come into my room once a day at 5.00pm everyday, to give me a shot in my left arm. There’s a clock above a door, which is the only entrance and exit to this room, but they lock it every time they leave so there’s no way I can escape that way. Apart from that no one’s come to visit me yet in the hospital either, well as far as I know at least.

However, out of the few minute details that I think I can remember though, I remember a woman. I don’t remember who she was to me or what she looked like exactly but I remember that  she was kind, and forgiving. 

To me all these…. well, memories, these thoughts…. they feel so elusive to me, like I’ve just woken up from a dream, when you’ve known you dreamt something but you can’t remember what, almost like just because you know you’re colour blind it doesn’t mean you can see the colours; but for what I do know is this: That there was a chapter in my story, from before I was confined to this room; such a cold and unclothed place, with no toys, no windows, no humane people, and no real life.

But another matter is this mysterious woman, what else do I remember about her you might ask, well: I remember her playing the sweetest of melodies by pressing these white and black keys on this grand, polished machine, with every note she pressed being as light as a butterfly flapping its wings! And waking up to the raw morning sunshine, with the light seeping through a pair of floral curtains, and her caressing my cheeks and then falling into long, dreamless slumbers in the protection of her kind embrace during the humid summer nights.

I don’t even know if this has happened or if it’s just another figment of my imagination and my mind playing tricks on me as I slowly rot away in this bed, but either way I want that, I want that life and I can only hope that one day I will ever be able to live it.

Someday.