Hello all,
We have a really exciting announcement this week! 🌟
This summer, BookGo will be hosting its first residential writing workshop at Keble College, University of Oxford, from August 14th to 20th. That’s why this newsletter is dedicated to all the reasons why we think Oxford is the perfect place to spend a summer writing, working, and learning together. 🏛️
There are scholarships available to help cover the cost, including an incredible 100% full scholarship for an emerging author! So if the idea of spending your summer writing in one of the most historic and romantic cities in the world, read on for everything you need to know! 📖
Here’s what’s in store…
Announcement: Introducing the Oxford Writers Workshop — August 14–20, Keble College, University of Oxford — Scholarships available now!
Writer’s Toolkit: “Oxford Inspirations” by Nancy Merritt Bell
Poem of the Week: “Duns Scotus’s Oxford” by Gerard Manley Hopkins
Feature: “Why Oxford?” by Michael McKinley
Book Giveaway: Winners of the Come Up Big Book Giveaway Announced
This summer, BookGo is hosting its first-ever residential writing workshop at one of the most storied universities on earth. For seven days in August, a small group of writers will gather at Keble College, University of Oxford — to deepen their craft, develop their manuscripts, and find their stories in the surroundings that inspired Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Philip Pullman.
World-class mentorship
Study the art and craft of writing with our experienced team of authors, editors, and educators. Craft seminars each morning give you the tools to tell your story. One-on-one sessions in the afternoon cultivate your personal development as a writer.
An inspirational environment
The city of Oxford has more published authors per square mile than anywhere else in the world. Come and enrich your writing through an inspiring program of curated cultural excursions, including tours of Oxford’s iconic libraries, museums, and archives.
Ongoing writing support
Our pre-workshop advisory meeting matches you with a personalised mentor from our team of experts who will help you get the most out of your week at Oxford. After the programme, follow-up sessions at three and six months give you the guidance and accountability you need to complete your project.
🏛️ Exclusive accommodation in historic Keble College at the University of Oxford
🍽️ Breakfast & lunch in the college dining hall; dinner in the luxurious Senior Common Room reserved for university lecturers & fellows
✍️ Intensive seminars on the craft of writing taught by authors, book coaches, and creative writing professors
🍷 Nightly drinks, readings, and fellowship in the Keble college bar
🤝 One-on-one mentorship sessions giving tailored advice on your manuscript and publishing goals
🎭 Specially curated programme of events and cultural excursions throughout the city and University of Oxford
📈 Check-in sessions before and after the workshop to ensure ongoing progress
🎤 Guest lectures and talks from authors and industry professionals
At BookGo, we believe that talent should never be limited by circumstance. That’s why we are incredibly excited to be able to offer a small number of scholarships to support writers who might otherwise be unable to join us for the Oxford Writers Workshop.
We are incredibly excite to be able to offer one fully-funded scholarship to cover the cost of the entire program — a value of $7,000 — to one writer who is working on EITHER their first full-length book of any kind OR their first memoir.
All applicants for the BookGo Emerging Author Full Scholarship will also be automatically considered for a limited number of partial scholarships covering 10% of the costs of the program.
This $1000 scholarship will be awarded to one writer currently employed in education as a teacher, administrator, tutor, or in any other educational role.
This $1000 scholarship, generously sponsored by BookGo author Charles W.B. Wardell III, will be awarded to one writer who has served in the military.
BookGo will match up to $1750 in external funds raised by any attendee, provided those funds are both: (A) awarded by an institution of higher education or other official funding source, and B) awarded for the express purpose of attending the Oxford Writers Workshop.
Get in touch via email (info@bookgo.pub) or visit the Oxford Writers Workshop website to apply and book your place now!
By Nancy Merritt Bell
Once upon a time not so long ago in the city of Oxford, an English professor named J.R.R. Tolkien was grading college exam papers. Midway through the heaping pile of exams, he came across a totally blank sheet. Drawn to fill it, Tolkien wrote down the first thing that popped into his mind: “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” He had no idea what a hobbit was or why it lived underground, and in this one line he opened up a mystery which would take him four books to solve, and take the world’s imagination forever to Middle-Earth. Tolkien went on to also write two collections of poetry, and after he died, published two dozen more books!
Tolkien — though a very powerful author — did not transmit entire books from the grave, but had help from his son Christopher and others who were very much alive. Even so, being a posthumously prodigious writer seems like no fun to me, but facing a blank page is a definite thrill. Facing that blank page in Oxford is a dream come true! I’ll be living that very dream in Oxford this summer for a week from August 14th to 20th in the gorgeous redbrick enclave that is Keble College. I’ll be one of BookGo’s quartet of writing mentors along with Cory Knudson and Oxford graduates and authors Michael McKinley and Tom Elliott. We will be working alongside a merry band of workshop authors — both brand new and seasoned — to bring their books to life, or to the next level, or turn an initial concept into a story outline for a book.
As a development editor, I work with writers from the initial concept — and I’ve seen ideas penned on napkins — to the bestsellers list. There is nothing more exhilarating than taking the first steps of a story: helping a writer turn their idea into a story, and getting that one line on the blank page, followed by another line and another. Here, development editing is more like gemology; the writer has a gleam of an idea, which could just be a shiny shard of glass and might not go anywhere, or it could be a diamond in the rough. We work together, writer and I, to find the different facets of the gem, and to shape it so it takes on light and life, and it glows. And then, it seems to have a life of its own, and that life is a book.
You, as a writer, might join the workshop with a book to finish, or an idea to work on, or not just one idea, but a pile. Author and poet Thomas Hardy, who wrote about a stonemason in Oxford in his 1895 novel Jude the Obscure, collected ideas like stamps in a stamp book. Gathering local newspaper clippings — such as “Sale of Wife,” about a man who was actually selling his wife — gave Hardy the idea for his 1886 novel The Mayor of Casterbridge, in which a man, impoverished and drunk, sells his wife and daughter, only to later find success as a mayor becoming totally empty, while struggling with crushing guilt.
Vera Brittain, a field nurse in World War One and Oxford graduate, had always wanted to write for and about women, and looked to her own life for inspiration. She found it at her all-women’s Oxford college, Somerville. The Dark Tide, published 1923, created an enormous scandal with its scorching satire of Oxford dons, who were either sleeping in their tutorials or trying to sleep with their students.
Brittain’s next book arrived a decade later, and though less scandalous it was much more gripping. In Testament of Youth, Brittain looked again at her life for inspiration and found it in her years as a young field nurse in a man’s world as it exploded into bloody pieces in World War One. The power of this youthful, fictionalized memoir and its popularity among female readers encouraged Brittain to turn it into a trilogy, including Testament of Friendship (1940) and Testament of Experience (1957).
Or perhaps you’ll find inspiration for your book from other books. Sir Philip Pullman does just that and he has 33 books to his credit. A graduate of Oxford’s Exeter College and author of the famous Oxford-based trilogy His Dark Materials, Pullman has a lifelong love of stories and words, which culminated in an early study of the classics, including Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and Dante’s Inferno. Pullman’s own books range in forms from fables to fairytales to plays and sagas. While his works are considered YA and “kid lit”, I know there is an older readership for his works — because I am one of them — who enjoy his epic imagination, which tackles enormous themes of formalized religion, and also wonderfully ordinary ones, such as finding joy every day.
Maybe your ideas for a book have been collected in a notebook, as it was for Hardy, or are inspired by events in your own youth like Brittain, or even come from other books like Pullman. However your idea begins to shine in your imagination, at the Oxford Writers Workshop we will help you open that idea up into a story and fill blank pages as the wondrous mystery hidden within the idea unfolds and becomes a book, as it did for Tolkien, and now you. Join us at the Oxford Writers Workshop and the book you dream about will come true.
By Gerard Manley Hopkins
Ok, ok… So the eagle-eyed amongst you will have noticed that we had a poem from Gerard Manley Hopkins in our last newsletter! But come on – you surely can’t tell me that one is enough!
This week, we’re remembering Hopkins for an entirely different reason: as an alumnus of Oxford University, who attended Balliol College, just around the corner from Keble, from 1863 to 1867.
His poem, “Duns Scotus’s Oxford,” is particularly fitting because in it Hopkins himself is remembering and honoring an author from the archives of the ancient university: the Catholic priest John Duns Scotus, a medieval scholar and Franciscan Friar who stuied and lectured at the university in the early 1300s. Breathing the same air as Scotus among the “towery city,” Hopkins’ speaker invokes the soul of the man who, he says, “most sways my spirits to peace.”
We feel how inspiration lives on across the ages in this poem, and right now seems a more important time than ever to remember the dreams of peace that have been enshrined in the hallowed halls of learning that so many authors have called home.
It’s just another reason why we’re dreaming of returning there this summer…
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Towery city and branchy between towers; Cuckoo-echoing, bell-swarmèd, lark-charmèd, rook-racked, river-rounded; The dapple-eared lily below thee; that country and town did Once encounter in, here coped and poisèd powers; Thou hast a base and brickish skirt there, sours That neighbour-nature thy grey beauty is grounded Best in; graceless growth, thou hast confounded Rural rural keeping — folk, flocks, and flowers. Yet ah! this air I gather and I release He lived on; these weeds and waters, these walls are what He haunted who of all men most sways my spirits to peace; Of realty the rarest-veinèd unraveller; a not Rivalled insight, be rival Italy or Greece; Who fired France for Mary without spot.
By Michael McKinley
Why Oxford? That’s the question I first asked myself when I applied to study there. The answer was daunting: it was the best university in the world, with people from all over the world attending and teaching there, and it had been doing this for more than 800 years. Along the way, it even found time to send some of its team over to the Fens to found Cambridge. It seemed like the best place I could be.
When I was accepted, I was ecstatic. And pretty much remained that way through my time at Oxford, for I found things in myself that I did not know were there, and have since used to make my life matter. To me, at least.
It remained that way afterward because Oxford never leaves you. It is always part of your journey, and indeed, I was lucky to go back to direct an academic summer school at Oxford for nearly a decade. To meet so many wonderful students in such a place as Oxford made those summers the kind that you want never to end. So I knew that I had to find a way to go back.
One of those things that I learned at Oxford was how to write. Of course, I knew how to string a sentence together before I left for Oxford, but the rigors of the place, always delivered with a light touch, gave my writing a polish and a purpose. Thanks, in many ways to Oxford, I am now the author of many books, plus articles, TV shows, films, and pieces in this very BookGo newsletter.
Of course, the newsletter would not exist if BookGo did not exist, and since we launched our publishing company in November of 2025, we have won awards (The Glamour of Evil, which I wrote with Nancy Merritt Bell just won the Grand Prize at the Indie Gold Awards and it is a thriller novel inspired by Oxford), and we earned starred reviews from Kirkus. And so, with great enthusiasm, I have been able to return to Oxford, with thanks to my first time there. A friend who studied with me back then is now the Warden of Keble College, Dr. Sir Michael Jacobs, and he has welcomed us back to the City of Dreaming Spires.
So, this summer, we are able to offer our first writers workshop at Keble College. It’s a beautiful Victorian college, with lush gardens and wonderful food, and of course, excellent academic cred. Our workshop runs for a week, and I very much look forward to being back in Oxford, to meet a new crew of writers who want to come to this place which is unlike any other and to tell their stories to the world.
We have chosen to begin our workshop with ten writers, so that we can devote as much time to each one as possible. If you are one of our writers, you will-- in addition to experiencing all the wonderful classes and cultural events we have planned --be able to connect with you mentor, who will be one of our expert team.
Our aim with our workshop is to meet writers where they are. Maybe you are just beginning. Maybe you have finished an epic work of historical fiction. Maybe you have a memoir that has been kicking around in your head that you just haven’t found a way to express. Yet.
You will have a chance to express it and develop it and come out with galloping enthusiasm for your own story when our workshop concludes. We will also keep in touch with you afterward, as that’s the beauty of Oxford. Once you have been there to study, it never leaves you. Now will we.
So, please join us at our inaugural Oxford Writers Workshop this August. And because we are thrilled to work with writers of every experience, we have a full scholarship for a new writer, and other scholarships as well. You will, I know, be very glad that you did come to Oxford. It will change your life for the better.
We are thrilled to announce the winners of the Come Up Big giveaway!
Annmarie Weeks, Kayla Bollers, Marilyn Murrmann, Justin Ball, Sue Feinauer, Lori McNaught, Steph Elias, Nancy Payette, Susan Mahaffey & Nadine Stacy
All our winners received a free copy of Chuck Wardell’s incredible story of resilience, purpose, and the American century, as well as a year’s subscription to the newsletter. So in case you were wondering why you’re getting this email, there’s your answer!
Thank you to everyone who entered and stay tuned for more giveaways in the weeks and months to come.
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