Creative Writing at Peralta

I've been here for a few days now, but so busy that I haven't had time for anything but a very brief read of my emails.  Residential courses are a wonderful way to move your writing forward, but there's no time off for either students or tutors.

Once again - a lovely group of diverse people from Europe and the USA, all with very interesting stories to tell.  Somehow this week I've got to encourage them to tell those stories.  My fellow tutor, Mary-Rose Hayes, is a novelist and creative writing tutor from the US, so we both have quite different skills to share.   We do workshops in the morning, then meet individual students in the afternoon to talk about their work and then in the evening we meet in the bar and share pieces we want feedback on.  Then a wonderful Tuscan dinner with plenty of robust Tuscan wine - there's a fantastic local restaurant at Torcigliano after an invigorating walk through the woods.  It's all very intense, but in a good way.

The weather is also behaving itself - sunny during the day with thunderstorms at night.  Fingers crossed for the rest of the week!  I will have to go into rehab from the after-effects of all this wonderful food and wine.

And the big news is that  Neil and I have seen a property for rent, at a price we can afford, high up in the olive groves - a 'piccolo casolare'  - so, who knows, I may be spending another winter in Italy?