A creative writing workshop will contain students whose ambitions and abilities, whose conceptions of literature itself, are so diverse that what they have in common - the desire to write - could almost be considered meaningless.

I have no sense of a model or predecessor when I write a memoir: For me, the form exists as a method of processing material that retains too many connections to life to be approached strictly and aesthetically. A memoir is a risk, a one-off, a bastard child.

Childhood, after all, is not an ending, but rather a state full of potent curiosity.

Christianity has kept itself going for centuries on hope alone, and has perpetrated all manner of naughtiness in the meantime.

My children are living, thinking human beings. It isn't in my power to regret them, for they belong to themselves.

Like the child, the creative writing student is posited as a centre of vulnerable creativity, needful of attention and authority.

Modern morality is all about perception.