What happens when you combine six students and one teacher with the Jack Grapes Method Writing (JGMW) programme? Magic! Jules Swales ran a summer refresher class, for the students who’d been studying JGMW with her for a couple of years. The students attended with the only intention of being better writers. The short stories in this book are examples of what’s possible when people use their superpower, write like you talk, combined with the JGMW exercises.

Over the five weeks each writer used the exact same method to come up with six unique pieces of writing. Jules Swales describes the method and the exercises at the beginning of each week so that you can see what the students were up to and be surprised by what showed up. Each piece is a profound and individual expression brought about through the straightforward techniques of JGMW. Whilst the authors have studied the Method Writing for around two years, every piece in this book was written in the five-week period of one summer refresher class.

The writers in this book speak as human beings, as all of us, caught in this thing we call life, a shimmering kind of experience between our being born and our passing away. These writers in this book are witnesses to, what William Faulkner called, the human heart in conflict with itself. If you’re hungry, this book will feed you and nourish your heart.

Jack Grapes, Author of Method Writing and Last of the Outsiders

The Authors

There are six authors involved in the creative pieces in this book. They hail from the United Kingdom, the USA, Canada and Panama. They met through online Method Writing classes taught by Jules Swales, who has contributed her expertise as a teacher to this book.