Institute of Continuing Education (ICE)
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Patricia Debney's forthcoming book, Learning to Survive, is about familial Child Sexual Abuse; work from this memoir received a Highly Commended prize in the Bridport Memoir Awards 2022. Her most recent publication is Baby (Liquorice Fish Books, 2016), a collection revolving around parental dysfunction and fragmentation. Other publications include Gestation (Shearsman Chapbooks, 2014) and a collection of prose poems written in a beach hut, Littoral (Shearsman Books, 2013), which grapples with her young son’s diagnosis of Type 1 diabetes. Her first collection (also prose poems), How to Be a Dragonfly (Smith Doorstop Books), won the 2004 Poetry Business Book & Pamphlet Competition. She has also published a novel (bluechrome, 2007) and written libretti for opera, chamber groups, and solo voices. A former Canterbury Laureate, she has over 25 years’ experience teaching creative writing across all forms and to all ages and stages of students. She is a seminar and workshop based tutor with a very broad aesthetic, one who focuses on collaborating with students, deepening and developing work, wherever it starts, and whatever its eventual form.
I remain interested in hybrid forms of writing, at the moment memoir/ fiction/ fact. I am always interested in how poetry and prose may work together but also function differently, and this seems to connect to ways prose works variously within itself too. My next project is (loosely) centred around two quests, and has as its geography the Deep South of the US.
