I went round to Leila Segal’s for afternoon tea to talk about her contribution as a guest booker.

Leila's tea pot has the air of a rare find on Antiques Road Show. I think it really might be worth a thousand pounds. She bought it for next to nothing in a charity shop. We drank black Earl Grey and looked through her notebooks.

Leila and I met a few years ago when she came to a workshop I was facilitating. She was writing these fascinating stories about living in Cuba and I was captivated by them. We worked together on them for a while and now she has a publishing deal and is writing some new stories and editing old ones.

Leila’s going to take us through the process of editing one story over two weeks in February. In the meantime she’ll be reading through all the notebooks from that period. She said that she now wants to go back to some of the original notes she had, as that’s where the freshest, most impactful writing resides. Five years down the line she feels she knows more about creating stories and has the perspective to structure the material.

Her guest blogging may look something like this.

I’m excited to see how the editing/recasting process pans out and am glad she’ll be examining it here. It has a sense of coming full circle but ending up in a slightly different spot.

Tags: Cuba, Leila Segal, short stories

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 12th, 2010 at 1:25 am and is filed under Karen McCarthy, Leila Segal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.