MA Creative, Digital and Professional Writing

Rehabbed is an electronic literature project designed for publication via the social media platform Twitter. The narrative is centred around the account of a recovering drug addict, spending 30 days in rehab and emerging into the real world following treatment. The short story is broken into diary entries consisting of no more than 280 characters, following the structural constraints of a standard Twitter post.

http://www.sophiekhan.net

The Silent Kingdom is an interactive story about activists who rose up against the Assad regime before the Syrian civil war. The reader must make choices on behalf of the protagonist as he becomes drawn into the resistance movement who are fighting to reveal the brutality of the regime to the world using films made on mobile phones. The story reflects that of other protest movements around the world who have used surveillance and social media to challenge the legitimacy of power. The story has been written on a platform called Twine which facilitates the telling of stories with multiple paths. 

Brendan Brosnan

This piece captures the universal feelings of helplessness and isolation as a result of COVID-19 from the perspective of a woman in the wild who, while physically free, is entrapped by media-induced fears and the gendered realities of violence. Over the past few months, our homes and safe havens became our offices, classrooms, and places we were not allowed to leave. Through a series of first-person film snippets and interior dialogue, this video essay similarly explores the duality of the remote countryside and its darker purpose: a place for women to be murdered. Voiceover, video and acting by Maggie Murphy.

Anna Murphy is on Instagram and Twitter
Anna Murphy Website

This piece was an assignment that I particularly enjoyed. Allowing the illness to become the narrator liberated me from the burden of my identity and allowed me to explore the memoir genre from a different, more powerful angle.

Module: Creative Nonfiction

“Yori enjoys living in a place with a window so much... it makes her feel she achieved something.” Eat. Repeat. is a dystopian short story set in the future, around 100 years after 2020, although this is also quite a straightforward and patent allegory of life. Humanity has always found a way to find an Other and design its Enemy. It matters little who a society opts to hate: people with another sexual orientation, skin colour, concept of God, political views or skull shape. For thousands of years, we as a species succeed in finding the Other among us and fighting them. We, the Good. They, the Bad. This is the basis of any system ever created by a Human. And now, since we triumphantly entered the post-truth epoch, there is no longer the same need to carry out atrocities or battles with the Other in the name of this system; it is enough to show footage of it on the evening news. What was real and what was not? Does it still matter?

www.facebook.com/julia.noname

The premise for this story came to me after a chilling visit to the Foundling Museum in London, one of many celebrated institutions created for good but built on the back of the evils of slavery. The crudely etched token bearing the name James Concannon, date 1757, and the word Jamaica stopped me in my tracks and held my attention immediately. An instant feeling of dread formed into a need to tell a story encompassing the token, Jamaica and the aftermath of slavery. This first part of ‘A Name In History’ is my way of joining the dots to a history that swims just below the surface of British society. I hope it strikes a cord with readers and, in light of recent events, gives us all pause for thought. → Read A Name in History

Module: Creative Nonfiction