Great news! The course I’ve been asked to teach, and which I’ve been promoting like crazy, is going to go ahead. It was touch and go because quite a few courses at the City Lit have had to be cancelled due to people tightening their belts.

My course is a short (2.5 hours) taster of the wonderful world of Oulipo. It’s a system that uses constraints to ‘force’ you to tighten up your prose or suggest something you might not otherwise have thought of. Indeed, the word ‘Oulipo’ is an acronym of a French phrase translating, approximately, as ‘workshop of potential literature’.

Over the two and a half hours I will be covering five techniques, with some hands-on writing and workshopping thrown in. I’m also in the process of compiling an Oulipo reading list, which will include a monograph called Oulipo and Mathematics, which I was sent for reviewing recently.

Fortunately, I don’t have to plug the course any more, but having said that, the more the merrier. If you can be tempted to invest two and a half hours in your writing to see a few different approaches, you’ll find the course details here:

Writing the Oulipo: A Taster