I’m sitting in a room that’s part of LOGIK, a unique centre in the University of Leeds where staff of all grades and job types can mix, read newspapers, have a brew, or watch tele during their breaks. Some snore. But not in this room.

We are part of a new creative writing course specifically designed for our lifelong learning. It’s 2011, and the course cost £100. I find myself wondering if any cleaners would have benefited from coming, aware that the cost is probably way over what they can afford. But I am delighted to be sharing this space with both women and men, some academics like me, some in admin posts, some with an outreach role, and others in staff development. We’re a mixed bag.

This is the first time I have put pen to paper, other than for academic writing, in years. Back in the 1970s, a couple of years after my first degree, I undertook a diploma in Dance, Theatre and Writing at Dartington College of Arts. I learned absolutely nothing in my writing classes, other than how to be a complete poser.

So this is a breath of fresh air. Our tutor is a working-class writer from West Yorkshire whose credits are impressive. He mostly writes non-fiction but in a very entertaining, readable way, and he slowly begins to mould us into the art of ‘show not tell’, as well as ditching the endless adverbs and adjectives. He listens carefully to one of the short stories I write, shortly after visiting my mum in March. In it, I describe the excruciatingly slow progress of an older person with limited mobility in the act of eating. When I look up, his eyes are moist. Softly, he asks, ‘That’s your Mam, isn’t it?’ I nod, embarrassed I’ve been found out.

That story made it into my first novel A Kind of Family, published in 2020 by Between the Lines Publishing. Several of the stories and characters I began playing with in those early days became woven into my first novel. I attended another similar course before a group of us, all women doing different jobs within the university, formed a writing group that we called the Scribblers. We were capable by then of identifying what we liked in each other’s writing, but we were still cautious about giving constructive criticism. One of our five members moved out of area, but the other four kept meeting weekly for four years, until I retired at the end of 2015. Only one is still working for the university, but we keep in touch, still supporting each other’s writing when we can. The last time we met was at one of the Scribblers’ wedding in 2022.

I never realised that a fun class at the Staff Centre would kick-start a whole new post-retirement identity for me. I didn’t stop there – I have attended other writing classes since, and joined other writing groups. I have now written three novels, a book-length memoir, and several much shorter stories, many of which have been published. But I will be eternally grateful to the Scribblers for that first important start.