Event overview
‘A First-Class Man’: looking for a structure
Kate Venables (Goldsmiths)
My PhD in Creative Writing began only in 2018. ‘A First-Class Man’ was a descriptive phrase used in a testimonial written about my father. He was not an important man, but he lived through important times as a schoolboy during the Great Depression and as a medical student in 1930s and 1940s Edinburgh when refugee doctors from Europe were re-qualifying at the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh. He qualified during the Second World War and joined the Royal Army Medical Corps, becoming an anaesthetist in a Mobile Surgical Unit at the front line of the Burma campaign when Allied forces drove the Japanese back from the borders of India through Burma and on to Malaya and Indonesia. After the War, in 1946, he returned to civilian life in his family home in Middlesbrough, Yorkshire and became a consultant in the new National Health Service. He died at the age of 1939, one death amongst many in the epidemic of coronary artery disease in the western world in the 1950s.
I also became a doctor but, because I was only a child when he died, we never had an adult conversation about medicine, family, or any significant issue. So, at a personal level, ‘A First-Class Man’ is a book which allows me to have that adult conversation. Thinking of a readership, the book is in a tradition both of medical biography and also of personal memoir of the quest for a missing father. After the War, there was a small flurry of auto/biography by doctors who had served in the Burma campaign, but none, to my knowledge, have been published recently.
At this early stage in the book and PhD, the main challenge for the creative component is to decide on a structure. Sections written so far are episodic, and I will read three short illustrative sections in the seminar and will discuss the three approaches that are open to me, as I see it: a collage approach structured around objects, a personal quest memoir, and a medical biography. The main challenge for the critical component is to decide how much to concentrate on an analysis of the genre of medical auto/biography, and how much on the historical research which is necessary to construct the creative component.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 24 Jan 2019 | 6:00pm - 8:00pm |
Accessibility
If you are attending an event and need the College to help with any mobility requirements you may have, please contact the event organiser in advance to ensure we can accommodate your needs.
