Meet our tutors: jacq molloy
Jacq Molloy is an award-winning short story writer, performed playwright and freelanced for many years as an arts writer for magazines and newspapers. Her short stories have won competitions and been published in anthologies. She has been a creative writing tutor for many years. Working with Rosie Chard, she is now leading a new course – the 10-week Introduction to Creative Writing – run online, it starts in May.
You started your professional life as a theatre lighting designer before going the other side of the curtain as an arts critic writing about productions across a wide range of genres from the Royal Shakespeare Company to Michael Jackson. When do you first remember wanting to be a writer?
At school, early teens writing love poems – bad love poems! But loving the experience.
You have had short stories published in three anthologies. Tell us how that came about. The anthology publications came via different routes: by invitation after reading at Needlewriters in Lewes, as a result of being placed in the Brighton Prize and being invited to contribute to an Australian collection when they heard a short story of mine broadcast on radio.
What do you like about the short story as a medium? It’s intensity, intimacy and economy of words.
Could you ever see yourself writing more long-form fiction like a novel?I’m currently working on a creative non-fiction/auto fiction full length book and surprising myself by loving the process – but I’m structuring it in fragments so using my short story approach.
You have spent a large part of your life living in first Sydney and then Western Australia before moving to England. How do you think this different perspective impacted your writing? Hugely. I love a big landscape, endless roads and thinking about the shifting perspective of “home” and what anchors us to a place. Ideas I’m probing in my longer work project.
How does teaching creative writing impact your own creative process? Engaging closely with students and their writing energises me. The exchanges we have about the writing process, writing dreams and overcoming challenges, always feels fresh and reciprocal.
What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever been given about writing? “I only write when I feel inspired, fortunately I’m inspired every morning at 9am.” It’s been attributed to a few different writers including William Faulkner. I love how pragmatic it is.
What one book, fiction or non-fiction, would you take to a desert island, given that you already have the complete works of Shakespeare and religious text of your choice? Honeybees and Distant Thunder by Riku Onda – an uplifting novel about friendship and music
What are you reading at the moment? The Secret Wife by Mark Lamprell – a glorious novel set in 1960s Sydney.
What are you working on at the moment? A couple of short stories and my long form CNF/autofiction hybrid project.