Changing at Crewe: 2 years to go.

Crewe station, we've had times together you know...

Crewe station, we’ve had times together you know…

Today marks a year to the day since I meandered onto the Manchester Metropolitan University campus in Crewe, Cheshire. This friendly campus is a small place of green in Crewe with Valley Brook twisting past my office window and a soundscape of rustling trees, sparrowhawk bickering, and blackbird song. It’s the second year of my PhD study on the literary geographies of Rochdale. I still feel like there’s a lot to still be learned, however, I’ve picked up so much in the past year that it’s positively affected my creative practice somewhat; I’m a more confident in academic writing – a whole different beast to making stuff up or writing campaigning journalism – and I’m certainly a lot more confident when talking about my project. From an intensive three days of learning from a place writing workshop to presenting a paper with “Poo” in the title at the University of Idaho, it’s been a veritable whirlwind of a year! This year I’m hoping to learn about cartography and mapping literature (plus a little bit of coding while I’m at it), to being running those creative writing sessions mentioned in March and – all being well in getting prepared for it – get through that transfer process (that’s where you upgrade from MPhil to PhD level).

There’s still a lot of work to do in the next few months. So yes, I’m definitely changing at Crewe!