Fantastic Fantasy Stories

These stories will leave you with a message to never forget…

Sequestered daughters, underworld schools and forests that come alive are just a tiny selection of the fantastical fantasy worlds that Morpeth School have created with us this year.

The fortnightly after-school writing club for Years 8 and 9 – led by Writing Facilitator Linden McMahon – took place over two terms, with the young writers exploring different aspects of writing, such as character building, narrative arc and how to write compelling beginnings and satisfying endings.

The group then worked together to come up with a collective fantasy world, inventing characters to inhabit it, and spend a session playing a role-playing game. The project culminated in the writers creating their own story set in the collective world, featuring the character they created, which was then published as the anthology You Need to Have a Reason to Summon Me.

Amy Fletcher, Deputy Head of Morpeth English Department, said: “The imagination, creativity and inquisitiveness on display, when we gathered in W109 every fortnight, were wonderful to behold. The room became a space for writing (and lots of it!), sharing, pondering and thoughtful critique, and I loved witnessing how the group gained more and more confidence doing all of these things over the course of each term.“

She adds: “This anthology captures the messy, beautiful and complex hard thinking that all the students engaged in. All of the adults involved in the club were consistently astonished by the originality and imagination of the students, and the way in which they worked together, whether quiet and focused or rambunctious and shrieking with laughter. “

Download You Need to Have a Reason to Summon Me. (PDF)