A summer of tales

Among dreams, hopes and fears, Lecturer II Amy Frazier traveled by herself for the first time to England to attend the three-week Creative Writing Summer School 2017 program this summer in Oxford University.

“I am an English teacher, I know the skills and how to write compositions, research, academic papers, but that’s very different,” Frazier said. “I did not know what to expect.”

The program, from July 23 to Aug. 12, hosted talented students from different countries such as China, India, Nigeria, New Zealand, Russia, Germany and Mexico.

“There was about 23 students from around the world,” she said. “The majority were like 19 or 20.”

Frazier said she enjoyed and learned a lot from the program.

“The places they took us, the classes they taught us … it was a phenomenal experience,” she said. “I was probably the oldest one,” she said with a laugh.

The program offers creative writing seminars such as Young Adult Fiction, Fine-Tune Your Fiction and others.

“I finally encountered an opportunity to go and so I went not knowing what to expect,” Frazier said. “The first day, my first class was called ‘Young Adult Fiction,’” she said. “Our instructor told us, ‘OK, take out a pen and paper and I am going to give you 10 minutes to write a story, fiction, with [certain] words in it.’”

For the assignment, Frazier remembers how impressed she was by her young, talented classmates.

“The girl next to me, she was from Germany and she was like 20,” she said. “She could write the whole story in 10 minutes with such creativity, that I couldn’t believe the talent.”

The instructors for her classes were authors Julie Hearn, who has published seven books, and author of “The Chase,” Lorna Fergusson, a winner of the Ian St. James Award.

“They are very experienced professors,” Frazier said. “They know what they are talking about.”

For Fergusson’s Fine-Tune Your Fiction class, Frazier used her previously written story inspired by true events, titled “Brujería in South Texas,” and changed the narration from first-person plural to third-person limited.

“It is very, very hard to get A’s in creative writing,” Frazier said. “Very few people do.”

In her free time, Frazier enjoyed walking through the old streets of Oxford and drinking her favorite English breakfast tea.

“You don’t know until you taste it, but you wonder why they put milk in it, but then when you put the milk, you understand why,” she said. “It is not like our American tea, not even close.”

For more information about the program, email ipwriters@conted.ox.ac.uk or Frazier at amy.frazier@utrgv.edu.