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Postgraduate Creative Writing Menu

Barb Schoichet

I hold a B.A. in Journalism from Stephens College in Missouri and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College in New York, and I've explored writing from all angles professionally. This means I have taught journalism and creative writing at the college level, I have worked in publicity at Paramount Pictures, I have been a book editor for a publishing company, and I have been a literary agent.

Publications include a nonfiction book entitled The New Single Woman: Discovering a Life of Her Own, two children's workbooks, and numerous short stories.

I began my PhD in Creative Writing this January 2009 and my advisors are Dr. Graham Mort and Dr. Lee Horsley. My research work involves a comparison of Sylvia Plath's work and Virginia Woolf's work with my own in terms of how depression is a catalyst to writing. The difference is that they succumbed to their depression, and I have learned to thrive in spite of mine. My goal is to teach young people that they too can write their way out of less than favorable environments and states of depression, and be not only the happier for it, but also the wiser.

My creative work is a novel entitled Bug Juice, which is based on a 21-day motorcycle trek I took across the United States (from New York to Los Angeles) alone at the age of 50. It was my way of jump-starting my life after a series of falls -- loss of job, lover and mother all within a 6-month period. As it turns out, those "falls" have allowed me to rise to greater heights, and that's what my novel and PhD at Lancaster University will address.

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